The Unknown Author.

For this posting, I'd like to discuss an peculiar literary phenomenon: an almost completely unknown author whose work is famous - specifically, Robert E. Howard.

Born in the small Texas town of Peaster on January 22, 1906, Howard wrote primarily in the niche markets of Western stories and "weird" fantasy tales, where he enjoyed a certain degree of success. His literary creations included Bran Mak Morn, the dour ruler of the Picts during the time of the Roman rule over Briton; the equally dour Elizabethan hero Solomon Kane; the villainous Skull-Face; the bumbling, battling Western strongman Breckenridge Elkins, and many others.

Howard's writing career might have transcended his pulp magazine roots, given time. However, this was not to be. On June 11th, 1936, in a fit of depression over the death of his mother earlier the same day, he took his own life with a .380 Colt automatic.

Now, tragic though Howard's short life appears, at this point I can almost hear the non-fans in the audience saying "So?" Ah, but if I'd started the biography by saying "Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan the Barbarian..."

The route by which Howard's raven-haired, grim-faced Cimmerian hero was separated from his creator is an odd one. During his writing career, Howard completed 20 short stories that featured Conan as their protagonist, along with one novel-length piece called The Hour of the Dragon, which originally appeared as a 5-part serial in Weird Tales from December 1935 to April 1936.

Following his death, Howard's work might well have sunk into obscurity. However, the enormously successful United States paperback publication of The Lord of the Rings by Ballantine Books in 1965* created a marketplace for fantasy material, one which publishers were eager to satisfy by releasing fantasy stories from any source available.

Perhaps too eager - the twelve Lancer/Ace** editions of the Conan stories, as "edited" by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter, represent a bizarre combination of content. In addition to including Howard's original Conan tales, de Camp and Carter completed unfinished pieces, wrote new stories based on outlines found in Howard's papers, and took existing Howard stories with other characters and rewrote them as Conan stories. (To illustrate this, imagine someone rewriting Dickens' Great Expectations with Ebeneezer Scrooge as the main character simply because A Christmas Carol has better sales in bookstores.)

The strange thing is that both de Camp and Carter were relatively successful with their own material, and as such one would expect that professional courtesy would make them reluctant to take such enormous liberties with another author's legacy. What's even worse is that the de Camp/Carter stories don't measure up to Howard's flair for sword and sorcery. I first read the collections in the mid-70's, and even at the age of 14 I was aware that some of the material lacked the same energy and excitement that distinguished the original work.

However odd these blends of original creation and poor imitation may have been, the Lancer/Ace Conans proved to be popular, and made fantasy artist Frank Frazetta famous for the cover paintings that he produced for the series. Based on this success, in 1970 Marvel Comics writer Roy Thomas convinced his reluctant employers to depart from their usual superhero model and try a comic based on the character of Conan. To Marvel's surprise, Conan The Barbarian proved to be a hit, and spawned another title, The Savage Sword of Conan, along with a daily newspaper strip.

The various comic versions helped to make Conan even more a part of popular culture. Finally, Dino di Laurentiis' movie adaptations, Conan the Barbarian in 1982 and Conan the Destroyer in 1984, made Conan the Barbarian a household name - but not Robert E. Howard.

At the current point in time, Robert E. Howard's name has almost ceased to be connected to his creation. There are over 50 Conan novels written by authors other than Howard on bookstore shelves, comic book fans associate the name Conan with Roy Thomas, and the character is almost a joke to most of the world, thanks to Governor Schwarzenegger's portrayal of Conan in the movie versions.

And what do I think Robert E. Howard's reaction would be, faced with a small army of opportunists making a living off his original idea? To quote the man himself:

"I am aware of an almost overpowering desire to spring from my chair and kick someone violently in the pants."

- Sid

* I'm going to ignore any possible influence from the unauthorized, no-royalities-paid US publication of The Lord of the Rings by Ace Books earlier in the same year, which Tolkien successfully urged his fans to boycott. The Ace editor responsible for this pirated version was Donald A. Wollheim, who was himself a science fiction author and should have known better.

** Lancer Books went bankrupt before the publication of the 12th collection. Subsequently Prestige took over the series, publishing the 12th collection and reprinting the others, but since Prestige was distributed by Ace Books, they're commonly referred to as the Lancer/Ace editions. Well, perhaps not "commonly", but you get the idea.



UPDATE:  MARCH 2013
I've closed comments for this posting, due to an recent attack of spam comments that's been dumping 40 or 50 garbage e-mails into my account every day for most of this month.

Please pull on the other leg, there's a bell on that one.

And so, an hour later, Sam was the happy possessor of a Philips time machine, as good as new.

"What I can't understand," he said to Deleu, "is that I don't see where your profit is. I mean: what's the use of granting me credit if you only get your money in about nine hundred years?"

Deleu laughed boyishly. "I'm going to get it immediately." He pointed to his private time machine.

"Oh," Sam said stupidly, and "Oh," again a few seconds later, when he understood.

Paul van Herck, Where Were You Last Pluterday?

Sunday night, hopping around on the Internet - why would anyone think this was like surfing? - when what to our wondering eyes did appear, but a banner ad for time travel. Now, you might not have been tempted, but I feel an almost professional interest in things like this.

So, a quick click on the link, and there it is - "VOYAGE IN TIME - ONLY 4 SIMPLE STEPS".

Step 1. Invest $18 in time travel fund and receive official certificate;
Step 2. Your fund grows extensively until the time machine is invented;
Step 3. Your investments finance your ticket on the time machine;
Step 4. Dreams become reality — Travel in Time!

Ah, and it doesn't even matter if you die before the time machine is invented, because they'll just return to before you died to pick you up. Sorry, but this has to be a scam - because logically, if this was legitimate, wouldn't the time travellers already be here, shuttling people around?

But let's try to be fair, you may be one of those people who is okay with travelling back in time and creating new timelines as a result or some such Star Trek silliness, even so, the concept may be flawed financially

Okay, let's say that you bravely fork over $18 for a time travel certificate, and that $18 is invested at 3% compounded annually. In 500 years that money will be worth $47,193,790.22. (Well, $47,193,790.2154417, but I rounded it up.) The bad news? If the inflation rate stayed at a constant 2% annually, that money would be worth $2,364.82 in 2509 dollars, which really doesn't sound like a lot. But then, we're talking 500 years - who knows, maybe you'd be able to pick up a nice used time machine for under a grand if you looked on Craigslist, and going back in time and taking people on sightseeing trips might be like driving cab on the weekend, just something that people do for extra money.

As much as I would love for any of this to be feasible, it's pretty obvious that this web site is based on a different time-related phenomenon: the fact that there's a sucker born every minute...which means that 48 possible buyers of time travel certificates entered the world during the time it took me to put together this posting.

- Sid

The Goblin Market

I know how a novel will end before I begin to write it - and before I write it these days, I sell it. I realize that sounds backwards, but it's true. I make a summary, and my New York literary agent shows it around, and if a publisher offers a contract for it, then I go ahead and write the novel. I have any number of summaries that no editor wanted, so those novels have never been written.

- Piers Anthony

Until you have your following established, you have to meet the expectations of the market, which judges suitability based on how you categorize your book, on how it matches the conventions.

- Annie Wong

Life is full of little coincidences, and that's what provides most of the impetus for the creation of these postings. As a case in point, it turns out that one of my co-workers is planning to write a fantasy novel for the middle school age market, and her approach provides an interesting look at the creative process versus the practical aspects of actually being published.

Annie, who performs a variety of esoteric duties in area of shipping and receiving, has already completed the manuscript for a mainstream novel, but to her disappointment she has been unable to sell it, at least to date. Undaunted, she has found the inspiration for a fantasy series in a short story that she wrote as a gift for her 9-year old niece Emily, and now she is doing research before she starts work on it, or, as she says, "I have the clay, just wanting to have a better look at the mold before I throw the clay on the spinning table, that's all."

My initial assumption was that she was doing research in the same fashion that someone would do research for any project. For example, if you were going to write a novel about gunrunners in 60's Africa, logically you would want to make sure that your knowledge of Lewis guns and Sierra Leone was accurate, but that's not why Annie has lined up a year's worth of fantasy reading.

Her actual reasoning is much more pragmatic than any desire to bring herself up to speed on orcs, dragons, jabberwockies and marshwiggles. Annie feels that her first novel didn't succeed because she failed to write it for a specific market. She is obviously proud of that first effort, but equally obviously doesn't want to tear her creation apart in order to make it more marketable.

My concern would be that after a 12-month regimen of reading fantasy, mixed in with middle grade classics such as Tom Sawyer and Black Beauty, it would be difficult to avoid being influenced, but Annie isn't worried about that. She feels that "it is easier to write your own story than someone else's," and hopefully this will prove to be the case. What she is looking for from her research are the conventions that define any subgenre of literature: darker versus lighter plot elements, the inclusion of romance versus actual sex, and so on.*

I have to admit that my first thought was that Annie's approach would take all the fun out of writing a novel, but I suspect that her previous experience with the system makes her a much better judge of things. After all, Annie has already written a novel for "fun" - which is to say without concern as to a marketplace or an audience - and her current plan does not in any way restrict her creativity, only the mold, as she calls it, into which she needs to pour that creativity.

However, I will be curious to see how her plan to use a fantasy novel as a stepping stone to the successful release of her erotic chick-lit novel works out. If J. K. Rowling released the British version of Sex in the City, would her fame successfully transfer to a new audience?

- Sid

* I haven't read all the Harry Potter books, but my impression is that as the series progresses, the plot elements become progressively darker and more mature. Given the ten year gap between the publication of the first and the last books in the series, this approach would nicely address the changes in a maturing audience. (Of course, this approach fails to address future generations of readers who, with access to the entire series at once, may not be content to read one book every 17.14 months of their young lives...)