Everything New is Old Again: On 70 Years of Conan Pastiche

On April 16th, 2015, I did something that I never thought that I would do. I stopped the class I was teaching to show the kids a new YouTube video. I was teaching a science fiction literature class to middle school students and with a glance at my iPhone realized I had about five texts asking some version of, "Did you see the video yet?" There was a new Star Wars movie trailer.

I stopped what the kids were doing, pulled up the trailer for the newly titled Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens and we all watched together. I'm not kidding you- a tear welled up in my eye as the fanfare blasted out of my sub-par public school computer speakers and the Millennium Falcon ripped through the sky once again. An 8th grader muttered "hoooly shit." I let it go.

I marked this moment with my students (hilariously, thinking about it now) with the same gravity that I had marked the Queen dying a few years ago. It seemed so far away from the night we all went to our local mall movie theaters and cheered wildly during the opening of The Revenge of the Sith, because, after all, that was supposed to be the last Star Wars movie. The second "long gap" was over and we were now primed to enjoy what was the true end to the Star Wars story... right?

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I wonder if sword-and-sorcery fans had that same feeling as they loped past their local book store in 1955 to see Tales of Conan, a brand new Conan the Cimmerian hardcover, sitting in the display window (I wasn't around in 1955, so I don't actually know if a Conan book would've ever made the display window. Pulp's always been pretty frowned upon, right?). They'd seen the posthumous publication of two old stories, sure, but a whole new book? Robert E. Howard had been dead for nearly twenty years, but somehow, like Xaltotun from the crypt, he had been resurrected to contribute to four new Conan stories.

​Well, not really.

After Howard's suicide in 1936, most of his unpublished stories and fragments sat in some for or another in a trunk that, in 1951, was shared with science fiction and fantasy writer L. Sprague de Camp. Trunk steward Marty Greenberg gave de Camp the manuscripts in '51 and two years later suggested that de Camp revise some of the stories to add Conan to them. de Camp has always maintained that it was an easy-enough job: change the names of the settings, a few of the characters, and add something supernatural. The stories in published in Tales of Conan are now 70 years old as of 2025, and they would certainly not be the last.

L. Sprague de Camp is wildly controversial amongst heroic fantasy readers; if you drop into any blog comment section or Reddit thread about him, you'll see the argument. And it gets heated from time to time. Some folks call him a vulture: a moderate talent who happened to strike gold just by being in the right place at the right time. They'll say he mined Howard's work for his own glory and benefit. The other side will say that he's an accomplished science fiction writer in his own right who stewarded Conan between Howard's death and his resurgence in the 1960s. Honestly, I think they're both kind of right. 

I would argue that the stories in Tales of Conan, "The Blood-Stained God," "Hawks Over Shem," "The Road of the Eagles," and "The Flame-Knife," are actually pretty good. "Eagles" and "Flame-Knife" especially are killer reads. They've got the adventuresome Howard flash that good Conan stories have. I know those statements are going to ruffle some feathers, but if you read those stories with only a focus on the text, they're pretty solid sword-and-sorcery tales. Of course, most of the credit for that probably goes to Howard himself, who wrote the meat of those tales.

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Just two years after Tales, those same readers might have been once again loping past their local bookshop only to have the misfortune of coming across The Return of Conan, the first wholly original pastiche starring Conan to be published. Of the more than 70 Conan prose stories I've read, it's one of the absolute worst. Swedish writer and Conan fan Bjorn Nyberg teamed with L. Sprague de Camp to produce some seriously inessential fantasy dreck. At its best, it just re-heats Howard's nachos. At worst, it fundamentally misunderstands what makes Conan good. Two books in and the batting average of the Conan pastiche ballclub was down to .500.

de Camp and his protégé Lin Carter returned throughout the sixties and seventies to continue adding their own spin on the Conan library. I honestly think a lot of them are good. "The Thing in the Crypt," Conan and the Spider God, "The Star of Khorala," and several more are definitely worth a try, at least.

Bantam Books published a few more (I'd say four of them are worth reading). Tor then tagged in to publish an eye-watering forty-three new Conan novels, very few of which feel much like Howard's world at all. I've read two of those, but they go down like seltzer waters: just not a lot of flavor of any kind. I've never blogged about them because, even worse than the Conan pastiches I hate (Conan the Liberator, all of the Conan of Aquilonia stories), they don't make me feel anything at all.

For the last three years, Titan Books has taken over and given the pen to exciting fantasy and sci-fi authors, publishing some really good short stories in ebook form and some pretty decent novels.

This is all completely ignoring fifty years of comics and movies, too. 

It seems like the best course of action with Conan pastiche today is to read some online reviews from reviewers you trust. You take some, you leave some.

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As I look at the media landscape, I can't help but feel like the spirit of Conan pastiche is all over the place in 2025. The Star Wars franchise finished that aforementioned trilogy, but the stuff keeps coming. They dragged Ewan McGregor back, they produced roughly one and a half good TV shows, and they seem to be really confused as to whether or not Daisy Ridley should return as Rey. Some way, somehow, they even got the grumpiest man in Hollywood and the biggest Han Solo hater of all time, Harrison Ford, to bring his growly voice back to a galaxy far, far away.

Elsewhere in Hollywood, the corpse of the Jurassic Park series continues to shamble through summer cinemas every couple of years, each one more pointless than the last. 

But weirdly enough, narrative in film and print are not the only places where it feels like those in charge of your media are "pulling a de Camp." Johnny Cash died over twenty years ago, but we've gotten a couple of polished, re-worked albums from out of his catalogue (I guess he was right- ain't no grave really can hold his body down). Producers have re-arranged his work to produce records like Songwriter, an almost-ghoulishly titled record in which Cash's vocals have been nestled into entirely new recordings written thirty years after the original sessions. Cash might be the songwriter, but he sure didn't get to have a say in anything else on the album. The Beatles did the same thing in 2023, using AI to isolate John Lennon's vocal parts to "Now and Then" to churn out a "new" Beatles song featuring performances by John and George, both dead for decades.

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You may have even noticed what hilarious Youtuber and musician Pat Finnerty has dubbed "The Fuckin' Songs," a collection of pop hits that absolutely refuse to die. The charts have been filled with interpolations of well-worn classics like "Isn't She Lovely?" and "Take Me Home, Country Roads" in soulless, cash-grabby bullshit.

I guess what I'm saying is that it's hard to not feel a little cynical as you look around and see that today's risk-averse media companies want to just endlessly recycle the old hits. They slap a quick coat of paint on them, be they your favorite childhood movies, the songs you liked it high school, or the books you read in the back of the library. It's happened enough times that it feels like we're just Weekend-At-Bernie's-ing our own youth.

With the way intellectual property rights work, it's probably only going to get worse. Creative industries, comics especially, do everything they can to make sure the rights to your favorite stories are owned by media conglomerates instead of their writers. 

Am I happy that we now have 70 years of additional stories featuring my favorite barbarian? Honestly? Yeah, I am. I'll go on as many adventures as I can with the big guy. Am I going to buy new Titan books and comic series? A bunch of them, most assuredly. I'm part of the problem.

But when I see that nearly all of the entertainment industry is following de Camp's model where they take what works and put it on the assembly line, I feel cynical. It makes me want to side with the de Camp naysayers: maybe Conan should've stayed in the Depression. I guess Conan pastiche would've happened by now if it hadn't started in 1955.

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L. Sprague de Camp and Conan pastiche aren't really unique, they just happened to get started early.