I sat back and watched as the pastiche issue was raised and
haven't really commented much, but in REHupa, "Member X"
(name changed by request) has indicated that the Conan pastiches
are what is keeping Howard's Conan alive. Yes and no. The
pastiches keep Conan alive, but they have done nothing to
keep Howard's own work in print.
Nothing. Zero. And I can prove it.
1) The Ace editions featuring all of Howard's original Conan
stories are out of print! Try ordering them through any
bookstore. If the Conan pastiches had accomplished anything
positive at all, it would have been to maintain interest in the
stories which started it all. They haven't. Ergo the pastiches
have done nothing to promote the work of Robert E. Howard. The Tor
Conan pastiches don't give so much as one line of credit to Robert
E. Howard!
2) The Baen editions of Howard have all been issued and those 7
books, once they finish selling through, will be gone. Conan
Properties not only doesn't want to renew or extend the agreement,
they actively tried to block it in spite of Baen Books having a
valid contract. These editions have the only complete versions of
the original Solomon Kane stories as well as featuring Kull fully
cleansed of the Lin Carter revisions. Hopefully Kull will at least
get a new edition when the movie is released in late August, but I
haven't seen any ads to that effect.
3) Even with the Baen editions in print, that only amounts to
about one-sixth of Howard's total output of fiction. Once the Baen
books go out of print there will be no Robert E. Howard books
in print at all, from any U.S. publisher!
4) The pastiches have accomplished only one thing
- giving
people their Conan fix in absence of the comic book series. The only
pastiches which ever did anything positive were the comic books
which introduced readers to the character and made them aware of
the fact that the comic books were inspired by the original
stories of Robert E. Howard. Many issues of the B&W magazine
SAVAGE SWORD OF CONAN even featured articles about Howard and his
works.
5) In spite of the fact that Tor Books had been publishing the
Conan pastiches regularly for several years, no new volumes have
been announced for the remainder of 1997. So it cannot even be
argued that the pastiches are maintaining interest in Conan since
the absence of new volumes will eventually have these readers (who
don't even know that Conan was spawned by Robert E. Howard) pick
up some other series which is producing new stories. Robert
Jordan's non-Conan books have received a bigger boost from the
Conan pastiches he wrote than Robert E. Howard's works have in the
1990s. Tor even reprinted and repackaged some of Jordan's Conan
books in an omnibus volume which also failed to credit Robert E.
Howard anywhere in its pages.
To give you an idea of how enormous a failure the pastiches
have been at bringing new readers to the works of Robert E.
Howard, the following is a list of the Howard books which were
once in print but not any more! I also list the publishers who
previously issued these volumes. In some cases they had editions
in the 1970s & 1980s from three successive publishers.
1)
ALMURIC (Ace/Berkley)
2)
BLACK CANAAN (Berkley)
3)
BLACK VULMEA'S VENGEANCE (Zebra/Berkley/Ace)
4)
CONAN (Ace/Lancer)
5)
CONAN THE ADVENTURER (Lancer/Ace)
6)
CONAN OF CIMMERIA (Lancer/Ace)
7)
CONAN THE CONQUEROR (Lancer/Ace)
8)
CONAN THE WARRIOR (Lancer/Ace)
9)
CONAN THE FREEBOOTER (Lancer/Ace)
10)
CONAN THE USURPER (Lancer/Ace)
11)
CONAN THE WANDERER (Lancer/Ace)
12)
THE DARK MAN AND OTHERS (Lancer)
13)
A GENT FROM BEAR CREEK (Zebra)
14)
THE GODS OF BAL-SAGOTH (Ace)
15)
ECHOES OF VALOR #1 (Tor, only complete version of the
Conan story "The Black Stranger") editor: Karl Edward
Wagner
16)
HAWKS OF OUTREMER (Grant; no paperback edition ever
published!)
17)
HEROES OF BEAR CREEK (Ace) (also contains A GENT FROM
BEAR CREEK)
18)
THE INCREDIBLE ADVENTURES OF DENNIS DORGAN (Zebra)
19)
THE IRON MAN (Zebra) (Ace edition combines both boxing
titles)
20)
THE LAST RIDE (Berkley 1978; the only edition ever
published!)
21)
THE LOST VALLEY OF ISKANDER (Zebra/Berkley/Ace)
22)
MARCHERS OF VALHALLA (Berkley 1978; only paperback edition
ever published!)
23)
PIGEONS FROM HELL (Zebra/Ace)
24)
THE ROAD OF AZRAEL (Bantam 1980; the only paperback
edition ever published!)
25)
THE SHE-DEVIL (Ace 1983; only edition ever published!)
26)
SKULL-FACE (Berkley)
27)
SON OF THE WHITE WOLF (Berkley/Ace)
28)
THE SOWERS OF THE THUNDER (Zebra/Ace)
29)
THE SWORD WOMAN (Zebra/Berkley/Ace)
30)
SWORDS OF SHAHRAZAR (Berkley/Ace)
31)
THREE-BLADED DOOM (Zebra/Ace)
32)
THE VULTURES OF WHAPETON (Zebra/Berkley)
33)
WOLFSHEAD (Lancer/Bantam)
34)
THE BOOK OF ROBERT E. HOWARD (Zebra/Berkley)
35)
THE SECOND BOOK OF ROBERT E. HOWARD (Zebra/Berkley)
36)
THE HOWARD COLLECTOR (Ace)
If we take into account that some of these stories are
contained in the 3 Baen Books collections EONS OF THE NIGHT,
TRAILS IN DARKNESS and BEYOND THE BORDERS (thereby omitting BLACK
CANAAN, THE DARK MAN and PIGEONS FROM HELL), that still means that
more than 30 previously published collections of the works of
Robert E. Howard remain out of print. The information is right
there in front of you. Check it out for yourself. This is not my
opinion. This is fact.
In some cases publishers have really dropped the ball. There
has never been a paperback edition of HAWKS OF OUTREMER
(unless one appeared in another country). While Don Grant and
others were issuing volume after volume of Howard's work in hard
cover, no one ever did hard cover editions of THE LAST RIDE,
SHE-DEVIL and SWORD WOMAN. In the case of SWORD WOMAN, the first
edition paperback by Zebra Books includes several beautiful
illustrations by Steve Fabian which would have been perfect in a
hardcover edition.
The pastiches have done nothing to keep the works of Robert E.
Howard in print. Unlike the Sherlock Holmes pastiches which are
read by fans who otherwise enjoy rereading the dozens of original
Doyle stories, the Conan pastiches have not helped Howard. I don't
think that Doyle's entire body of Sherlock Holmes stories have
been out of print at any time in the past 35 years. The Sherlock
Holmes pastiches thrive but the originals thrive even more so.
Howard has actually had a greater percentage of his total fiction
output in print in the past 30 years than Doyle has (Doyle wrote a
lot more than Sherlock Holmes, but like H.G. Wells, posterity
cares to remember only select volumes). But Doyle's select volumes
remain in print while Howard's have fallen into the province of
old book dealers.
Prove me wrong.
Prove that the pastiches have helped maintain interest in the
works of Robert E. Howard at any time in the past ten years. The
Howard boom was largely self-sustaining for some 20 years
beginning in 1966. The Howard boom spawned the sword & sorcery
boom which in turn brought new fans to Howard who wanted to read
what started it all. Publishers were paying big bucks for the
rights to print anything by Howard they could find in the 1970s.
But as the sword & sorcery boom faded in the 1980s, all that
remained when the smoke cleared was Conan. Instead of bad S&S
novels about colorless Conan clones, we got new S&S novels
about Conan, the quality of which ran wild and inconsistent. But
there must have been a market for them or they wouldn't have been
churned out in such quantities. But where is the fallout? It may
have benefited Robert Jordan, but the pastiches have done nothing
for Robert E. Howard.
The serious members of
REHupa have done more to focus attention
on the works of Robert E. Howard in the past 10 years than the Tor
Conan pastiches have. When Roy Thomas wrote the Conan comic books,
Robert E. Howard's name always appeared on the contents page.
Since this is not true of any other Conan spin-off item (as has
been discussed in past REHupas), this seems to be strictly the
decision of Roy Thomas and Marvel Comics.
The only pastiche which might help turn this around is the
upcoming Conan television series. In fact, unless publishers drop
the ball once again, someone should already be out there planning
new editions of the original Howard Conan stories, unless Ace
plans to finally reprint the titles for the first time in several
years. Because of the TV series TARZAN: THE EPIC ADVENTURES, Del
Rey Books has been reprinting and repackaging the Tarzan novels to
make sure they're out there for new fans to find. Will Conan fans
only have action figures to look for?
NOTE: I never did hear what "Member X", the high
priest of pastiche defenders, thought of my essay as he abruptly
dropped out of REHUPA right after this was published! Was it
something I said?
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