F/SF

Any avid Conan reader will be more than familiar with this phase of his life. Between his thieving and mercenary days Conan cuts a path of bloody swells across the Seas. de Camp is no Howard but still has a strong voice. ( )

Of all the non-Howard Conan stories, "Conan the Buccaneer" is my favourite.

First read this in my early teens & fell in love with Princess Chabella who's vividly described as a peerless sex goddess!

Read this a second time in my early twenties & a third (and probably last) time 15-20 years later.

Good points:

1) It's a fast-paced adventure story

2) Even though no author but Robert E. Howard paints a better Conan, the two writers here still have this great character for their hero of the piece

3) Princess Chabella. Yes, I'm still in love (or lust) with her!

Bad points:

Carter & de Camp are *competent* writers in terms of fashioning characters & plot, but technically & stylistically they're not *good* writers. They tell rather than show for much of the time. They're way overfond of adjectives, which leads to lots of clunky sentences. ( )

I used to own this, but I don't think I do now. The fact that I'm not inspired to go look indicates that while this book was inspired by the writings of R.E. Howard, this pastiche by De Camp and Lin Carter is accurate to the point of being as interesting to me as the real writings of REH. Something for a slow night, as "Amra" is roaming Zingaria, looking for a buried treasure. Harmless, especially if you find it fun. ( )

I probably should not comment on the introduction to this book because somebody has already done a really good job at tearing it apart, though I must admit that this particular person seemed to have a bee in his bonnet regarding the fact that de Camp and Carter have gone and made a bucket load of money off of somebody else's idea. Now, while that is true, the fact that Howard has been dead for a very long time, and that his Conan stories were very popular, taking the concept and working with it is probably not all that bad. Okay, Conan was not what I would call 'canned fiction' in the sense that the Hardy Boys were, but still, as Carter says in the introduction, Conan is pulp fiction, and was never intended to be anything more than pulp fiction.
Personally, I do not mind pulp fiction, as long as the story and the writing are good. There are thousands of books on the shelves of bookstores these days, and with the development of portable e-readers such as the Kindle, this is only going to increase a thousand fold. Take Goodreads for instance: there is a part of the site where people can produce their own stories for others to read (and you can also self-publish on Amazon). The fact that the publisher has now effectively been sidelined, anybody and everybody can publish content, and it does not need to be all that good. The challenge is, though, to be able to sift through all of the rubbish and find things that are worth reading. Remember, reading a book tends to take a lot more time than watching a movie, and while writing a book is a lot cheaper than making a movie, reading them tends to be a lot more time consuming.
Now, I bitterly disagree with Carter that Homer was little more than Ancient Greek pulp fiction. The fact that the Odyssey was used as the standardised text book to teach children simply raises it far above that. Teachers do not use pulp fiction to teach children these days, and many teachers will fly into a rage if you even thought of writing a book review on such works. However, we must also remember that what one person considers literature is not what somebody else might consider literature. In fact I have been tempted at times to go up to owners of bookshops to ask them how they determine what is literature and what is not.
This book was written in 1971, and while Howard can, to an extent (as there is no excuse for racism) can be excused for making his bad guys Negroes or Arabs, by the time Carter and de Camp came around, things had changed. However, I discovered as I made my way through this book that this was not the case. It appears that simply because Howard made the Negroes bad, does not mean that the later authors can do so either, however it appears that de Camp and Carter have done just that.
Now, this book is bad, very, very bad. There seems to be no consistent plot and the story itself was very hard to follow. While I find other books to be in the same category, there is an excuse. These other books were written hundreds of years ago which makes contextualisation difficult. This book, though, was written post civil rights movement, and as such there is no excuse for demonising Negroes, as has been done here.
The other problem that I found, other than bad writing that is, was that the book was hard to follow (which is probably a symptom of bad writing). I simply could not see a major plot which moved the book from the beginning to the end. This book simply seemed to be Conan going on a journey and encountering things along the way, only to end with him killing somebody that he did not particularly like. Also, the book was badly written (did I say that already, oh well, I guess I am making an important point). In a way I was looking forward to a full length Conan novel, however when I did get to reading this one I discovered that I was sorely let down. I simply could not wait to finish this book to move on to something better.
I think, thus, I will stick with my friend's opinion. If you want Conan, read the Howard originals and simply sideline the de Camp and Carter stories. There are much better books out there to read, so you don't need to read some book that has effectively been plagiarised by some later authors, as has happened here. ( )