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| SFReader Forums > SFReader > Ask The Expert > Breaking new ground in S&S | Forum Quick Jump
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Kane
Neophyte
      
Date Joined Jan 2005
Total Posts : 57
| Posted 4/5/2008 2:13 PM (GMT -4) |   |
nathan said...
One of the semminal points in Conan's life that's never told is how as a 16 year old he climbed the walls of the Aquilonian outpost with a "milling blood mad mob" (or something) and slaughtered the garrison--forming a Goth/visigoth and Roman parralel as the world went from Imprerial Age to Dark Age. --so good point.
Okay, okay, I know I just inserted a thread hijack but it was a Conan one.
Several years ago Harry Turtledove was hired to write the story of a teenage Conan taking part in that raid. IIRC, the title was Conan of Venarium, and it was one of the worse pastiches ever written about Conan.
In essence Turtledove turned what could have been a rousing S&S story into a pale retelling of Gibson's Braveheart.
On top of that he completely ignored the material that Howard had laid out in the original stories. He ignored established locations, added elements that had no place in the Hyborian setting, and included a mother/son relationship that attempted to reflect the relationship that Howard had with his own mother.
This last part turned Conan from a child born of barbaric wilderness into a simpering momma's boy who turns to violence as a way of handling his mother's illness.
Over on conan.com not a single member who had read the book had anything good to say about it.
"I vanquished Law once, I'll conquer yet again--
And force upon Mankind the Freedom he fears--
And dead gods I will again defy…" | | Back to Top | | |
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cussedness
Adept
Date Joined Apr 2005
Total Posts : 840
| Posted 4/5/2008 1:28 PM (GMT -4) | | Uhm, I'm coming into this late, but actually there is no such thing as a barbarian. Cultures that are considered primitive by other cultures are no less complex than one regarding them with disdain. The Romans, in their way, were just as barbarous as the visigoths.
I'm currently working on a new Cullen Blackwood story, The Wolf in Moon's Clothing.
"Yah gotta be joking." Cullen Blackwood looked up, way up, to see their faces as two large Sharani guardsmyn seized his arms. Standing a bare five foot four inches, Cullen found his face practically jammed into their substantial breasts and, while it was not an unpleasant view, he would rather have gotten a better look at their expressions as he tried to figure out what was going on.
In Shaurone, the women outnumbered the men by roughly four to one. Their viragoes averaged well over six feet in height, muscular and broad-shouldered, and had no difficulty in manhandling the small lycan military courier. A leather patch covered his dead left eye and a day's growth of stubble on his weathered face lent him a general unsavoriness that failed to impress them.
"Getcher damned tits outta my face, ya bloody f**kwits. I ain't done nuthin'."
They hoisted him up between them, leaving his short legs dangling.
"Hey! Hey. Put me down."
It's S&S, it has the overall feel of a Western, and I like to think it's different.
Janrae Frank
I have no skeletons in my closet, they are all hanging from the yardarm.
Once there were three brothers, Brandrahoon the vampire, Isranon called the Dawnhand, speaker to spirits, and Waejonan the Accursed, first of sa’necari. Isranon defied his brothers and was destroyed, his descendants forced into the darkness.
The Shadowed Princes
www.fictionwise.com/eBooks/eBook64690.htm?cache
website
www.janraefrank.com
Darkzone
darkzone.yuku.com/ | | Back to Top | | |
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darkbow
Rabbit lord
Date Joined Oct 2005
Total Posts : 1647
| Posted 4/4/2008 11:41 PM (GMT -4) | | | | |
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erazmus
Master
Date Joined Jul 2005
Total Posts : 4503
| Posted 4/4/2008 11:18 PM (GMT -4) | | I'm not certain, but you may be right, Ty. My own recent conversations lead me to believe I might be one of the last generation to spend a great deal of time in the wilderness, even for recreation.
I once went camping for a summer-- seventy-three days with what I and two friends carried with us. We ate a lot of fish. We lived in the woods a two day walk from a road. We checked in with a live-in ranger at a near-by scout camp every few days, we weren't out of touch. I was fourteen.
My grandfather taught me to track, hunt and trap. Starting when I was three or four. I didn't exactly live in the woods, I was a city kid who liked the outdoors.
But I'm not one of those people who, when told that before the invention of the light bulb, most people slept ten hours a day, but since the invention people average only seven hours, go "why?". But this perspective on nature and man's place in it might be effectively gone in the english speaking USA of today. I can't speak for recent immigrants or migrants, but what soldiers do in the field is a little different, especially when the field is a city street. The idea of living a three day walk or one day horse-ride from your nearest neighbor, and trying to wrest a livelyhood from crops and animals is just about totally alien even to rural peoples these days. Yet it was almost normal in North America for a hundred years and more.
Even more important is the idea of individualism. This idea is under concerted attack in our educational system and in our urban culture-- though not in our entire culture. In order to be able to write classical style S&S in the howard vien, you have to embrace this or a similar point of view on the place of man in society, with the individual firmly on top of the relationship and the loner lionized at the epitome of achievement-- self reliant and admirable. Not a marginilized outcast.
For most people today, a man living in a house built by his own hands on land he owns and gets a living from is seen at best as a poor hermit in need of social services and at worse as a crazy crack-pot who should be lock up, his land taken for a nice development that will add to the tax base. People who think like this probably won't "get" S&S.
Mike
Michael D. Turner
"Psyched Up" in _Turn the other Chick_-ed. E. Friesner-Baen books
www.baen.com
"Dutchman Rescue"in Continuum SF #6
www.continuumsciencefiction.com/orders.htm
"An Incident at Black Tongue Tavern" in _Bash Down the Door and Slice Open the Badguy_ from Fantasist Enterprises:
www.fantasistent.com/books/anthologies/BASH.php
"Stains" in Tales of the Talisman 3-1 www.zianet.com/hadrosaur/index.html
"Morning Coffee" in Every Day Fiction
www.everydayfiction.com/morning-coffee-by-michael-d-turner/
"The Jewel Below" in Flashing Swords
flashingswords.sfreader.com/issues/issue8/vol2-iss8-05.htm
"Happy Landings" in Every Day Fiction
www.everydayfiction.com/happy-landings-by-michael-d-turner/
"Teller of Tales" in Every day Fiction
www.everydayfiction.com/teller-of-tales-by-michael-d-turner/
Read "Silver Shells" In Every Day Fiction
www.everydayfiction.com/silver-shells-by-michael-d-turner/ | | Back to Top | | |
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darkbow
Rabbit lord
Date Joined Oct 2005
Total Posts : 1647
| Posted 4/4/2008 10:40 PM (GMT -4) | | Just my opinion, but I'm not sure too many authors since Howard could write as strongly about the dichotomy between barbarism and civilization. For one thing, I think Howard was a tad "out there" (not saying he was crazy, just eccentric). For another thing, at least for most modern American writers, I'm not sure there's that emotional link to a more barbaric world (and I'm not meaning "barbaric" in a negative way, just saying what it is). Sure, lots of guys think they're cowboys, but most (keep in mind I said "most") are at best urban cowboys. Goin' huntin' a couple times a year and drivin' a pick-up isn't anywhere near what Howard would consider rustic, let alone barbaric.
I think, basically, most of us are too ingrained in a civilized world. There are obviously some Westerners/Americans with experience in what might be considered uncivilized regions (U.S. soldiers overseas, for example, maybe even a handful of people in certain small regions of the U.S., some immigrants' experiences), but my instinct is that that's not the norm, or at least not the expected norm, for most modern writers and readers.
"Steven Spielberg and The Magic Box" upcoming at The Ranfurly Review.
"Peter Piker the Pankin Man" upcoming at Big Pulp
"Walking Between the Rain" at Every Day Fiction
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nathan
Sage
Date Joined Mar 2006
Total Posts : 2113
| Posted 4/4/2008 7:18 PM (GMT -4) | |
Rober E Howard said...Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph. Robert E Howard wrote the first S&S story it's generally admitted. He wrote something whose trappings have been done over and over to various effects. But when he was writing S&S he was also writing to a certain theme.
That theme--summed up above--was intricate to the framework he put Conan against. But that theme itself was not that commonly reproduced or pastiched. I don't think it was taken up with much vigor by any one other than REH in fact, off the top of my head.
Do the rest of you think this is a theme that might seem exotic if applied to high fantasy or fantasy stories of today and is it so underreported as a component of S&S that a return to this most pivitoal of Things Howard would constitute a "fresh" attempt in the direction of fantasy and not just S&S?
Or has barbarism become linked not to vikings (pick iconic image of choice)in the collective mind but to car bombs in market places and say, Somalia-esque failed states to try and write from a "noble savage" viewpoint?
VIEW IMAGE"Writing the wet dreams of teenage boys" - Lindsey Llyod, Tangent Reviews
Tarantino himself has been forward and unapologetic about his influences. In a 1994 interview with Empire magazine, he said, "I steal from every single movie ever made. If people don't like that, then tough tills, don't go and see it, all right? I steal from everything. Great artists steal, they don't do homages." | | Back to Top | | |
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