Conan - Blood of the Serpent: The All-New Chronicles of the Worlds Greatest Barbarian Hero

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I like to mention that while I read this book I came across two b/w Savage Sword of Conan comics from the seventies, both have no ISBN numbers but where a heck lot of fun of the today political incorrectness is involved. Conan pastiches have always had this problem; some pastiche authors seem to “get” Conan better than others, and I’d like to think that Stirling probably does – but Titan damn sure does not.

A bit boring, and sometimes unnatural: a few times I got that creepy feeling that the world and interactions were too modern in style.The fight with the “dragon” that focuses on the threat of the natural world(and Conan’s understanding of it) made Sterling’s very different approach to a Conan story make sense. Where Howard’s Conan tends to express his reflections and feelings through his actions and remarks, Stirling gives him the degree of interiority that contemporary readers are accustomed to, complete with italicized thoughts. He's often a bit too personable, and sometimes concerns himself with things like bureaucracy, propriety, and military formality in ways that don't jibe with a character who bows to no man he considers his inferior.

The monotony of garrison life is shaken up, however, when he encounters a new addition to the band: Valeria. This guy is a totally different character who seems more at home cracking one-liners in the Marvel Cinematic Universe than in a novel bearing his name. The plotting, such as it is, is so pedestrian as to render it glacial, with extended periods of descriptive decrepitude completely alien to Howard's gift for narrative thrust and pacing. But these old style covers were meant for Conan fans who grew up on Playboy and were fun at the time.Blood of the Serpent is the semi-anticipated latest entry in the prose adventures of Conan of Cimmeria. Raw and powerful, it's also very much of its time–written almost a century ago, when our culture could be less socially aware and genre fiction in particular often exhibited rough edges some of today's readers may find jarring. Like Howard, Stirling has plundered actual history for inspiration, but again, with less, you know, racism. The past few years have shown a tentative few steps back in that direction with the 2019 publication of two novellas—one by John C.

In Howard’s grim and all too realistic view, the barbarians are always at the gate, and once a culture allows itself to grow soft, decadent or simply neglectful, it will be swept away by the primitive and ruthless.This will likely be the biggest turn off to anyone looking for a Howardian vision of the legendary warrior's early life. He is known to have been a thief, a mercenary, a soldier, a pirate, whatever warms the bed and fills the belly. The world and people are similar enough to me that the difference of writing style and even genre to an extent do not bother me whatsoever. Outside the novels the character has enjoyed extended adventures in comics, videogames, and an attempt by Hollywwod to re-boot the character with Jason Mamoa as Conan. He is and was the master of this genre, Red Nails in 100 pages feels like a completer tale than the 316 pages of Sword and the Serpent.