I’m thinking about getting the Conan books on Audible for a trip I have next week. The trouble is, it’s been years since I read them, and these books on audible seem to be compilations of multiple stories. What I’m after here is, can anyone make heads or tails of the order to listen to them in?
The audio book titles (in case the link doesn’t work) are (in the order I THINK they should be in):
The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian
The Conquering Sword of Conan
The Bloody Crown of Conan
Any help (even a best guess) would be appreciated.
Other than that, I can’t help you, but I just wanted to say that “The Bloody Crown of Conan” would have been a great title for Conan O’Brien’s new show.
Howard wrote the stories in no particular order, and it’s believed he wanted the series to come off in the manner of an old warrior recounting past experiences as they occurred to him. I’ve read the entire series, and think you can comfortably start off at anywhere, just as long as each set is self-contained.
I have the de Camp and Carter edited Lancer collections of the stories, which while published out of order were assigned numbers in order of Conan’s life. If you wish, I could list them, though I don’t know what is on the audio collections. Several of the Lancer ones were modified by de Camp, and some were stories with other characters changed to be about Conan.
When I was in college I read the series, but it was a recompilation done in order from when Conan was a kid until he was an old man. I suppose if they can be read in any order then I’ll just start with one of the audio books and work my way through.
Voyager, if you have the list handy that would be great, but don’t go to a lot of work on it. My flight leaves this afternoon and I will probably be running around a lot until tomorrow.
There is an entire Wiki page devoted to the chronology of the Conan stories, depending on who’s doing it and which stories (Howard, non-Howard, etc.) they are including:
That confused me–and I’ve been a fan of the series since 1972!
The two lists at the end are about the best you’re likely to get. I’d say pick one or the other (they’re very similar) and follow it.
de Camp and Carter used this chronology from old Conan fandom, so this is the way to go. Someone - possibly Miller, did a Conan biography which they quoted from in the Lancer books. Remember that when these came out Conan and Howard were fairly obscure, of interest to a small bit of fandom. No movies, comics or stained-glass windows back then.
I don’t understand this – the page gives several chronologies, generally including the de Camp stories. Since de Camp and Carter wrote or adapted most of the non-Howard stories in it, they took a tentative chronology dating to the fifties and created their own chronology for the stories they (and Bjorn Nyberg) added. Later on, when Ace started adding still more stories, the guy editing that did a chronology to embed the new books into the old series.
I wouldn’t say Conan was “obscure” when anything after the de Camp-Carter chronology came out – the books had been big sellers since the mid-sixties and the comic had been coming out since 1970 (along with Savage Tales/Savage Sword of Conan, also from Marvel), along with lots of posters. They may not have been as well known to the general public, but they were one of the biggest thing in SF/Fantasy. If you didn’t know who Conan and Howard were, you weren’t paying attention. Then the movies came out in the early 1980s, preceding the later chronologies on the list.