When Dice Were Made of Flint #13

Writing about the Skytrex shop last week stirred another memory. On the way back, I wandered into the W.H. Smith at Victoria Station and discovered almost a whole shelf of Conan stories. This was A Big Deal.

Fantasy wasn’t treated as a genre in its own right back in the 1970s – at least, not in any bookshop I frequented. Fantasy and science fiction were mixed in together, and usually took up no more than one or two small shelves between them. Most of the fantasy titles available were Tolkien, which I had already read, and Moorcock, of which I had read as much as I wanted to. I knew about Conan, but Howard’s work was much harder to find – and when I did find it, it was imported copies of the Ace series at import prices. Until I found that shelf in Victoria station.

Sphere was publishing the series in Britain, at much lower prices. Alongside Conan were names I’d never heard before: Bran Mak Morn, King Kull, Solomon Kane, Cormac Mac Art, and El Borak. I knew none of these heroes, but I knew the name of Robert E. Howard.

I commuted in through Waterloo, but the W.H. Smith there had none of these. Nor did anywhere else I could reach in a lunch hour. Over the next several months I made several pay-day trips to Victoria, picking up as many titles from that wonderful selection as I could afford. That was the start of my fantasy fiction collection.

As the 70s continued, I saw more fantasy fiction appear, mostly American and much of it not to my taste. Stephen Donaldson’s doorstop Chronicles of Thomas Covenant were… well, okay, but not as muscular as Howard’s work and filled with obscure words as though the author was a little too proud of his vocabulary. “Argute with concentration”? “Hurled like a jerid”? What did that even mean?

Terry Brooks’ The Sword of Shannara, and the couple of sequels that I read, felt like a mash-up of Tolkien and Star Wars (there was only one film back then, and that was its title). Michael Moorcock’s Elric and Runestaff series were interesting, but I found that their studied decadence paled after a couple of books, especially in the post-punk London of 1978.

Then, the floodgates opened and fantasy of all kinds – and all levels of quality – poured across bookshops everywhere. I don’t know why it suddenly happened, though at the time I attributed it to the growing popularity of D&D. It was certainly true that much of the new fantasy read like someone’s write-ups of their D&D games. That was when my interests moved from fantasy to horror, and to ancestral fantasy like the Norse and Irish sagas.

The book trade obliged, as though at my command. Penguin and others published anthologies of Victorian horror by M.R. James, Lord Dunsany, and other writers. Penguin Classics had the adventures of Cu Chulainn and Egil the Strong as well as the Grail romances and the travelogues of Gerald of Wales, full of superstition and prejudice. I still have all of them.

I carried on reading Conan, though. New volumes appeared regularly, by a succession of authors. I liked some more than others, but at the end of the day, Conan is Conan.