The Tower Of The Elephant
By Robert E. Howard; Read by Jason McMullan
2 MP3 Files – Approx. 91 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Podcaster: Athena Audio Theater
Podcast: April – May 2013
A strange, blood-freezing story of an idol that wept on its throne, and a valorius barbarian from the fringes of an elder civilization. First published in Weird Tales, March 1933.
Podcast feed: http://www.athenatheater.org/book-show/rss.xml
Posted by Jesse Willis
I’m still of the opinion, many many years after first reading it, that The Queen Of The Black Coast is Robert E. Howard’s very best story. It’s an epic fantasy romance adventure tragedy.
I love it. How can you not love a passage like this:
Belit shuddered. “Life, bad as it is, is better than such a destiny.
What do you believe, Conan?”He shrugged his shoulders. “I have known many gods. He who denies them
is as blind as he who trusts them too deeply. I seek not beyond death.
It may be the blackness averred by the Nemedian skeptics, or Crom’s
realm of ice and cloud, or the snowy plains and vaulted halls of the
Nordheimer’s Valhalla. I know not, nor do I care. Let me live deep
while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging
wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation
of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content.
Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of
reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no
less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live,
I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.”
We’ve done two podcasts of it:
One was the audiobook, HERE. And one the other was the audio drama, HERE.
But the story, as I first encountered it, was a different adaptation, a serialized and expanded comics version published from the mid to late 1970s. Indeed, Marvel Comics’ Roy Thomas thought there must have been good material in there as he played out that story, expanding upon this paragraph:
The Tigress ranged the sea, and the black villages shuddered. Tomtoms
beat in the night, with a tale that the she-devil of the sea had found
a mate, an iron man whose wrath was as that of a wounded lion. And
survivors of butchered Stygian ships named Belit with curses, and a
white warrior with fierce blue eyes; so the Stygian princes remembered
this man long and long, and their memory was a bitter tree which bore
crimson fruit in the years to come.
And it ran for three years and 40 issues – from issue #58 (January, 1976) to issue #100 (July, 1979) and in those years Belit and Conan adventured.*
I spent much of the 1980s finding, collecting, and reading those back issues. After years I had a complete run of the comic. But only this week, approximately 30 years later, did I find this, an oversized two-page map chronicling the travels of Conan and Belit in those comics!
Behold, and click through to see the 1979 map published only in the Marvel Treasury Edition #23 (words by Roy Thomas, cartography by Mark Rogan):
[*still available in Volumes 8 – 12 of Dark Horse’s The Chronicles of Conan]
Posted by Jesse Willis
Here is Donald A. Wollheim’s introductions to A Witch Shall Be Born, as published in Avon Fantasy Reader, #10:
Robert E. Howard’s stories of the wanderings of Conan the Cimmerian through the realms of the pre-Glacial era were based upon a carefully structed “history” of those ages devised by Howard before starting his series. It is, we think, this careful groundwork which makes these tales so colorfully realistic, so vivid, so varied in background. We sense that he has woven into his literary tapestry not merely varicolored threads but clothes of different textures, so that his prehistoric kingdoms are national not merely because he calls them by different names but because he has thought of them as different in culture, approach, tradition. This is no mean feat for a purely imaginary world and it is one of the things that have made Robert Howard’s stories so much more memorable than attempts at similar construction by more commercially slanted writers.
A Witch Shall Be Born
By Robert E. Howard; Read by Phil Chenevert
6 Zipped MP3 Files or Podcast – Approx. 2 Hours 5 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: June 17, 2013
The kingdom of Khauran is admittedly small, but blessed with an abundance of rich soil, hard working inhabitants and much gold but most of all by a sweet young queen who is as wise and beneficent as she is beautiful. But then a horrible witch (her evil twin sister) secretly replaces her and introduces devil worship, human sacrifice and other things too repulsive to mention. Conan, who was the captain of her guard is captured and crucified in the desert. First published in Weird Tales, December 1934.
Podcast feed: http://librivox.org/rss/7946
iTunes 1-Click |SUBSCRIBE|
And here’s a |PDF| of A Witch Shall Be Born as scanned from Avon Fantasy Reader #10.
[Thanks also to Britannia and Phil]
Posted by Jesse Willis
The SFFaudio Podcast #212 – Jesse, Mirko and Mr. Jim Moon discuss The Willows by Algernon Blackwood.
Talked about on today’s show:
Algernon Blackwood’s television show, “the ghost man”, the expansion of consciousness, the extension of human personality, ghosts, Saturday Night Story, H.P. Lovecraft’s essay Supernatural Horror In Literature, almost nothing happens, “ghoulish work”, cosmic horror, Mr. Jim Moon outlines of the story, the nameless Swede, travelogue, the Danube, a lonesome expanse, an elemental presence, the rising spirits, the shunned place, the man’s body (or the black otter), “never human in the first place”, overlapping dimensions, The House On The Borderland by William Hope Hodgson, The Black Stone by Robert E. Howard, why is it set in Europe?, The Wendigo, Blackwood actually canoed on the Danube, Marcus Aurelius, the Black Forest, Blackwood attended school in the area, hard guys, Famous Fantastic Mysteries, “the soul chilling fury of Nature’s terrible dethroned gods”, the joke becomes unfunny, Romania, Transylvania, “looks fantastic but no-one lives there!”, evidence of human habitation, we have to keep going farther and farther to find the borderlands, their thoughts are manifested, telepathy, With Morning Comes Mistfall by George R.R. Martin, a review of Bright Messenger by Algernon Blackwood from Fantasy & science Fiction, the “Diva”, nature spirits, sprites, fairies, planetary entities, nature’s policemen, WWI, haunted tree?, occult and paranormal writing, occultist jargon, the chain of being, neo-Platonism, intermediary spirits, what did these two dudes do wrong?, sacred groves, druids, devilish places, The Children Of The Stones, the stolid Swede, red Indians, the noble savage, Guy de Maupassant’s The Horla, the drowned peasant, the conical holes, Chupacabra?, alien sampling?, footprints?, fingerprints?, Jaws, the hidden monster, “having rid himself of the morsel”, empty planet, “the sounds a planet must make driving along through space”, J.R.R. Tolkien, Old Man Willow, the Withywindle, the evil trees, Tolkien was familiar with Blackwood, Tom Bombadil is a nature spirit, Goldberry is a river spirit, “he’s got a bloody song for everything”, the Wikipedia entry for willow, the bronze skinned figures, fairy mischief, fairies fuck with you, what’s with the paddles?, a sacrifice, man where was your editor?, you didn’t really do anything wrong but show up, canoeing ghost stories, Voyageurs, a deal with the devil on Christmas Eve, La Chasse-Galerie (aka “The Bewitched Canoe” aka “The Flying Canoe“), Deliverance, leisure travel vs. work travel, the drones, the last gasp of the Grand Tour, Alien vs. Evil Dead, the punishment of the idle, reckless youth, Cabin In The Woods, The Complete Weird Fiction Of Algernon Blackwood, short stories are best enjoyed in short doses.
Posted by Jesse Willis
Though Robert E. Howard had originally titled this Conan adventure “Iron Shadows In The Moon” it was actually first published under the title Shadows In The Moonlight. Current publications, and adaptations, tend to favour Howard’s original title. But either way the novelette, featuring a shipload of pirates, a shapely maiden, and a giant ape, makes for some very good reading.
Shadows In The Moonlight
By Robert E. Howard; Read by Phil Chenevert
4 Zipped MP3 Files or Podcast – Approx. 1 Hour 31 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: April 17, 2013
First published in Weird Tales, April 1934.
Podcast feed: http://librivox.org/rss/7755
iTunes 1-Click |SUBSCRIBE|
Posted by Jesse Willis
In this well-regarded CONAN novella our hero, now a chieftain in the Hyborian equivalent of Pakistan, tangles with a beautiful young queen bent on revenge. Her plot will have Conan fighting an evil sorcerer who, by will alone, can rip a man’s heart out of his chest!
And giant snakes.
The People Of The Black Circle
By Robert E. Howard; Read by Mark Nelson
1 |M4B|, 10 Zipped MP3 Files, or podcast – Approx. 3 Hours 38 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox
Published: April 1, 2013
“A stupendous story of Conan the barbarian soldier of fortune, and a tremendous adventure in the castle of the Black Seers.” First published in Weird Tales, September, October, and November 1934.
Podcast feed: http://librivox.org/rss/7692
iTunes 1-Click |SUBSCRIBE|
And here’s an illustrated |PDF| made from the republication in Fantastic, January 1967 (the illustrations, by Hugh Rankin, are from the original serialization in Weird Tales).
[Thanks also to: DaveC, Ann Boulais, and Jack!]
Posted by Jesse Willis