Lovecraft made it to the awareness of people's consciousness, but with his stories only surfacing like the beslimed mountain peaks of a land long since swallowed by the vast and terrible ocean. CAS and so many others have remained treasures hidden for the most part in the dark depths of these oceans only the encrusted and pitted ruins of their palaces, temples and altars to forgottern Gods left fringed with trailings of weeds and decorated with barnacles, worn by the currents of time, left to tell of their glory.

Not suprising that you can live part of a lifetime and not discover them. 

Last edited by JasonZavoda (3/04/2014 6:30 pm)

For my own part, I was reading Tolkien and Howard at the same time, HPL later, and CAS not until I was in my thirties. I did read a lot of HPL-inspired authors, like Lumley and Ramsey Campbell. The beautiful thing that HPL did was inspire a sort of coopertive creative process (sound familiar, fellow gamers?) that resonates to today. So, yeah, there are some extremists who will speak in absolutes, and those who seek to collate HPL's work (Derleth, despite his fine efforts at preservation, is among the guilty), but for the most part I've seen writers take inspiration from HPL, and then go off to create their own thing. Call it derivation, if you like, but I think it's excellent. It resonates in many of Stephen King's works, in fact, and guys like Neil Gaiman, too. Really too many to list them off, some better than others. But the concept of shared creation is excellent, I think. 

Ghul wrote:

For my own part, I was reading Tolkien and Howard at the same time, HPL later, and CAS not until I was in my thirties.

This is pretty much where I fall. I read Tolkien in middle school, but also Howard and Wagner, so there was some balance and contrasting presentation of fantasy. Plus, our D&D games were usually limited to just a few players (1-3 players and a GM) and wound up feeling more like Howard than Tolkien as a result. We didn't ever really have the large-party-goes-on-an-epic-save-the-world-quest thing going on. Anyway, I like both presentations of fantasy. As for HPL, CAS, Vance... I didn't read those guys until fairly recently. It's been nice.
 

Hmmm, my first fantasy novel (unless you dismiss The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe that my 1st grade teacher read to us in class) was Conan of the Isles that my father (not a fantasy fan) had on his bookshelves. I read that when I was 9 and re-read it quite a bit. I was also reading Brian Daley's Han Solo trilogy and some of McIntyre's Star Trek novels. Also, a lot of Pyle's Arthur.I watched the Rankin/Bass Hobbit/RotK and the Last Unicorn. Whe Iw as 11 I discovered Dune and the Silmarillion; it would be a couple of more years before I read the Hobit and LotR.

High School, Dragonlance and teh Videssos cycle as well as Gary's Greyhawk novels. I would be 18-19 and in the Army before I dioscovered Elric and Lovecraft. 

So, I've had a weird experience with fantasy.

Morgan - I'm in the same boat.

The best part: It's all fresh and new to me so it's like Weird Tales is still being published, except I don't have to wait for the next issue...

Don

Its honestly good to know I'm not alone in the boat!  Thank-you sirs!

To me, Howard seems to have something almost postmodern with his portrayal of evil and especially social corruption. Yes, Conan can be seen as somwhat reactionary, a longing back to a time when men where still real men and might made right. But much of the conflict is human, with characters having flaws and frequently failing and making bad descisions.
Which is something that Tolkien seems to be entirely lacking. There are some really good ideas in the works about Middle-Earth, but it's still a world of an objective and pure power of Good, which is contrasted by irredeemable Evil. There are no questionable characters in the Hobbit and Lord of the rings. Only beautiful pure people, and corrupted ugly people. The only possible exception might be Boromir, but he still ends up seemingly with a pure heart who was blameless in his failings because an external Evil power took control over him.
Tolkiens world is a world of stark black and white, which simply isn't what the actual world is like. In the post-cold war world, it's now about seeing your friends and enemies as very diffirent and unique, and there is a need to understand different traditions and customs, and accepting that some people see things differently, but might not be any less justified in that than we are. In Tolkiens world, there is no room for understanding differences and accepting them. People are either on the side of good, or forever lost to Evil. And as a result it's conflicts do not relate to actual human conflicts.
In the last 30 years or so, narrative arts have shifted to a focus on the personal struggle with ambiguity and the rise of the anti-hero. You can't just kill the big bad villain and suddenly the whole world is perfect again. So what do you do in a world that is throughly corrupt and you can't change it? Maybe just try as good as you can.
And in that light, Conan, as well as Sword & Sorcery in general, actually seems to be more relevant than Middle-Earth these days.

I didn't really read Smith until my mid-thirties when I acquired a copy of "Zothique". It blew my socks off. So strange, so beautiful, so horrific. I can see a lot of Zothique in Talanian's Hyperborea setting.

A bit later, I acquired Smith's "Hyperborea" which most definitely had an influence on the setting of AS&SH.

I came to Smith last because as a general rule, apart from the odd anthologised tale, his work is still not as accessible as it should be whereas Tolkien's work is readily found in bookshops and has dedicated fanfiction sites.

Last edited by Rhebeqah (3/23/2020 3:17 am)