Conan
by Robert E. Howard · first published 1967
7mentions
2recommended by
6HN commenters
2010–2026first – last mentioned
33% recommend67% neutral
Conan is a 1967 collection of seven fantasy short stories and associated pieces written by Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter featuring Howard's seminal sword and sorcery hero Conan the Barbarian. Most of the stories were originally published in various pulp magazines.
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Well, this worked for me: head over to http://www.feedbooks.com/author/245 (that's the Robert E. Howard of Conan fame). Pick up any one of the stories tagged "Western". They're almost all humorous stories about a larger-than-life-yet-naive frontier-man who bashes his enemies plentifully, is in turn knocked about…
on “I miss Steve Yegge” ↗Check out Robert E. Howard's Conan short stories. These are very well written and are in public domain.
on “Harper Lee has died” ↗Standard Ebooks (courtesy of @acabal) has Gatsby up and available: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/f-scott-fitzgerald/the-gre... For my part, I added two newly available non-Conan Robert E. Howard stories to our shorts compilation: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/robert-e-howard/short-fict...
on “What’s Entering Public Domain in 2021: The Great Gatsby, Music by Duke Ellington” ↗…much. One of my favourite quotes: "Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing." - Robert E. Howard (Conan) The lack of any physical response may make people even ruder with one another. Though it will cut down on office affairs and the like.
on “Ask HN: Office politics while working from home” ↗Oftentimes, intentionally using superfluous words, particularly obscure words, is important in building mood. Lovecraft for instance. And Robert Howard (author of Conan). And, the granddaddy of all: Thomas Carlyle whose “French Revolution” is packed with metaphor, simile, superfluous words, and convoluted sentences... indeed, he made fun of the way he writes in “Sartur…
on “‘Eliminate Every Superfluous Word’” ↗…filtered through a paperback rack at a truck stop circa 1967. Make it gritty, efficient, and darkly comedic. Don't shy away from suggesting more elegant words or syntax. (For instance, Robert Howard -- Conan -- and H.P. Lovecraft were definitely pulp, but they had a sophisticated vocabulary.) I really want some purple prose and overwrought metaphors." Occasionally you'll get some gems. Claude is much better…
on “Why AI writing is so generic, boring, and dangerous: Semantic ablation” ↗A friend recently related the life of Robert E. Howard in a really fascinating way, and one of the points he made about how he got into writing Conan really stuck with me. Howard started out writing historical fiction, but the research was pretty grueling and the outcomes mediocre, so he switched to a sort of adventurous self-insert character in historical…
on “Science Fiction Is Dying. Long Live Post Sci-Fi?” ↗