What it is that makes Howard so much more compelling than his many imitators? To the untrained eye, it may be hard to see differences, since his faults are sometimes more readily apparent than his virtues, though he has plenty of both. Some might try to 'salvage him' from his pulp origins, but despite all his literary aspirations, I'm happy to call him a pulp author, and one of the best.

I have a great deal of praise for this edition in particular, volume one of a three-part series which collects for the first time Howard's Conan stories as he originally wrote them, without the meddling of either magazine editors or De Camp (who shamelessly rewrote Howard's unfinished stories to match his own views, and released them as 'originals'). It is also first to publish them in pure chronological order, eschewing all and sundry attempts to produce an official 'internal chronology'.

Howard meant the order to be somewhat ambiguous, mimicking the epics and histories that inspired the names and events of his stories. Our delightful editor plays the old Lit Crit game of connecting all the dots from the Conan tales to their origins in Plutarch, Bullfinch's Mythology, Lovecraft, or Bierce. I'm indebted to her for helping me to see Conan with new eyes by lending me the perspective of the Howard scholar.

Seeing the way his world sprang up from notes, sketches, and maps is fascinating, and the critical essays try to get a little more mileage out of Lovecraft's misunderstanding of Howard's pseudo-historical names. They are meant to be evocative of a world that, while familiar, still holds surprises. We can recognize a type, a historic conflict, terrain, and temperament without being tied down to the specificity of true historical fiction.

Howard did not want so narrow a view, and was never a stickler for small details, as evidenced by the singular madness his chronologers develop trying to account for the appearance and disappearance of Conan's red cloak and horned helm throughout the stories. Howard liked an underpinning of consistency, but excitement and story always took precedence, which is why, despite drawing names and plots from history (much as Shakespeare did), he never let them bog down his stories, always aiming, above all, to entertain.

When I say that we get Howard without editorial meddling, we must still understand that he was writing for an audience, and that much of the excitement and titillation in his tales was a sugaring of his pill for the lower denominator. Yet for all that, much of his psychology and sexual politics is deceptively complex. It is easy to dismiss him as a cliche strong man with an endless following of swooning women, but there is something more subtle at work.

Firstly, each story that shows Conan in a relationship is written from the point of view of the woman. Often, Conan does not even appear until after her character and situation are already developed. We rarely get an emotional insight into Conan, into his plans or emotions, but we do see into his heroines, which is the reverse of most fantasy romances.

In addition, Conan is often painted as the object of desire. The author's vision rests equally on the desirability of Conan and of the women, showing how and why feeling might develop between them. Conan, having been raised outside of civil society, cannot charm the women, bargain with them for favors, or fool them. His appeal is not that he has wealth, prestige, or grooming, but that he is attractive, confident, physically powerful, guileless, and does not mingle his desires with ulterior motive. He is part 'bad boy', but he is also attractive because he lies outside the arena of sexual politics.

The women are often the victims of civilization; that is to say, they have been carefully bred to be beautiful, desirable, and controlled. They rarely have power in their own cultures, often finding themselves at the whims of powerful men, and so it makes sense that they would seek out Conan, who is not a part of this unbalanced social system, and who has the physical and mental strength to extricate them from their perilous powerlessness.

On the surface, "The Vale of Lost Women" is the story which most condemns Howard as a chauvinist (and racist), but there is a subtle subversion within the tale that shows Howard as a much more canny student of the human condition than most give him credit for. The premise of the story doesn't do Howard any favors, and certainly hasn't aged well: a well-bred white woman has been captured by a barbaric pseudo-African tribe by whom Conan has found himself employed.

He finds the woman accidentally, during a revel, chained up in a tent, and she begs him to release her, saying that surely not even a barbarian like him would leave a white woman in the hands of the cruel black chief. It's hard to read without feeling a lump of political correctness rise in our throats--but socially and historically, it's neither and absurd statement, nor an insulting one.

'Odalisques' or white, virgin girls were the most valuable in trade for Barbary pirates to Moorish harems. Even today, Black women get fewer responses in online dating than any other race/sex group. Just because it's unpleasant doesn't mean that it isn't socially true, and just because it is a social fact doesn't mean that it is an ultimate truth.

We can say it is a social fact that women have been controlled and judged by the slut/virgin dichotomy, but that doesn't mean that they desire to be controlled, or to be sluts or virgins. It also doesn't mean that stories which portray this unfortunate dynamic necessarily support it. Machiavelli wrote about the way the world was, not the way he thought it ought to be.

Let me say that again: just because a writer says that white women are more culturally valuable doesn't mean that they are any more attractive, intelligent, or worthwhile than any other person. Cultural values are funny things, and don't necessarily align with real values. Just because someone is willing to pay $500 for a rare Beanie Baby doesn't mean that a Beanie Baby is somehow better than a comparatively cheaper encyclopedia or road atlas.

It's easy to get hung up on what the author is specifically saying, and hard to step beyond it and look at how and why it's being said. A character's statement is different from an author's, and Howard is surprisingly careful to keep social observations in the mouths of characters, not the narrative voice. After her appeal to racial loyalty, the woman offers herself to Conan in exchange for being freed from the tribe, aghast at the lengths to which she must go. But Conan laughs.

He laughs and tells her that she is sadly mistaken if she assumes that she can merely trade sex for favors, as she has been taught to do in civilized society. It's this simple observation that shows that both Howard and Conan are better students of the human condition than they get credit for. For Conan, sex does not have this connotation of a social trade, it is an act engaged in out of desire, not coercion. This separation is the same conclusion Angela Carter makes about De Sade in her incomparable Sadeian Woman , that the trade value of sex must be unveiled and demystified in order to approach any kind of sexual equality.

We must recall that this understanding of sex is enforced on both sides, and that if women have an artificially increased value in sexual social trade, it will eclipse any other value they have, or that they might wish to have, and few will consider them as anything else.

But Conan, being outside of that system, values women differently. After his moment of insight, he shocks us back with his barbarism, saying he really couldn't leave a white girl like her in the hands of the chief, and that he's tired of 'black sluts', which is unpleasant and unsympathetic enough to clamp our minds shut again, though whether it might be true to the world or character, I leave up to you. After all, it is rare that a person raised under one set of signifiers for attractiveness learns in later life how to appreciate a completely different idea of beauty.

He does decide to save her, but not in trade for sexual favor, which once again separates Howard from the thud and blunder writers who followed him. Again and again, if we look at Conan's scattered romantic relationships, we see that he is only interested in the fulfillment of mutual desire, and that the woman's side of the relationship is often the side Howard chooses to explore. Conan rejects the notion of coercing women, let alone forcing them, as beneath him.

He doesn't pressure women, or conquer them, or trade for sex, and the women are constantly surprised at his lack of overture, his refusal to make a game out of the whole thing, or a schoolboy's lovesick obsession. But then, Conan is less interested in an 'erotic victory' than in mutually beneficial pleasure, even if that pleasure is not socially condoned, and is, instead transgressively focused on female desire. Conan's outsider status as a barbarian allows him to approach women on more-or-less equal terms, giving them an opportunity to reject the values which bind them and to choose for themselves. Sure, the relationships and their consummation can be idealized and romantic, they're still pulp, but the way they develop psychologically is not always so simple.

Howard's language is also remarkable: high-energy, evocative, and well-paced. He takes generously from his historical and literary influences, playing with vocabulary and style to evoke a far-off period without growing so distant that he risks losing the uninitiated, as an eccentric linguist like Eddison is liable to do.

One thing the reader must come to terms with in order to enjoy him is Howard's repetition. He has favored words, phrases, and descriptions that come up again and again throughout the stories, and sometimes they feel like crutches. Part of it is that these were to be consumed as single stories, so some repetition would not likely have been noticed--but it happens even within a story.

At these points, I am tempted to compare Howard to the deliberate repetition of the epic tradition of the 'Homeric Epithet', an oft-repeated poetic phrase that becomes part of the rhythm of the text, such as "wine dark sea" or "long-haired Acheans". Howard knows that there is power in phrases, and by repeating them, he creates motifs, identities, and connections. But, as usual for Howard, it's a combination of highs and lows: we get glimpses of his powerful, poetic language intermixed with his less effective, florid attempts.

But more than even his most effective prose (and occasional, surprisingly unoffending poetry), what sets Howard apart is his pure storytelling. His sense of pacing is admirable, often cutting out unnecessary scenes that other writers would not have realized were redundant. The stories flow along, drawing equally from the verisimilitude of historic tales and the archetypal form of the adventure story.

He moves fluidly through themes and styles, combining romance, war stories, supernatural horror, political thriller, and treasure hunting all in one story, maintaining a lilting, surprising pace without losing the story's center. His stories as a whole also work to build a grander world, much of it left for the reader to complete between hints and loose threads. There is a definite sense of historical discovery in this style, and the first three Howard stories give us Conan as a king, as an untried youth, and as a wary reaver.

Read a hundred pages of Conan and you will get a picture of a whole life, a man in different stages, changed by the world. We also get a glimpse of that world, and understanding of its places and ways without being explicitly told what they are. Compare this to almost any other fantasy writer, and they will come up short.

A hundred pages of Tolkien, Jordan, Goodkind, or Wolfe, and you haven't even left the protagonist's home. You won't get a view of the world, nor character growth. You might read a thousand pages of a fantasy series and see less growth than you would in a few Conan stories.

My question has always been: what do we gain from those thousands of extra pages? A more exciting story? A more complex world? A deeper character? Sadly, the answer is often no. Few authors seem to have taken Howard's lesson that saying more isn't as easy as simply writing more.

But then, Howard set the bar pretty high. There's nothing wrong with pulp, because pulp is written for an audience. Too often, these days, one seems to find authors obsessed with a kind of 'pure' writing that refuses to bow to any audience, editor, or sense of fun, and all you're really left with is pretension.

I think I'll stick with pulp for a while, and I'm eager to get the next two volumes of this collection, because, for all his flaws, it's still hard to find a fantasy writer who can better Howard.

My List of Suggested Fantasy Books