D&D General No One Reads Conan Now -- So What Are They Reading?

[Dannyalcatraz]

Being a scientist does not make you immune to religious dogma I guess.

Mod Note:

First of all it’s a falsehood to say that religion and science are inherently anathema to each other. There are many key discoveries made by scientists who were also religious. Most people know Gregor Mendel was a friar. Albert Einstein was a practicing Jew, last I checked. Georges Lemaitre is the Catholic priest who first proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory. Physicist Max Planck (the founder of the quantum theory of physics) was also religious.

But you clearly didn’t mean anything like that. Instead, your rhetoric posits an innate incompatibility, as a kind of insult.

That’s a violation of the rules, so you win a prize: thread ejection.

 

[Enaknomolos]

Riffing on this post where Google's Ngram viewer seemed to show an increase in interest in Howard since about 2000, I thought I do a similar thing for some other classic authors: Leiber, Smith, and Vance.

I fed in a bunch of their stories and kept the best representative result for each. The same pattern seems to roughly hold for Smith and Vance, but not for Leiber.

Some notes:

• The Dying Earth does a lot better than the other Vance titles I tried, probably because it is also the name of the series. Other titles roughly follow the same pattern though. Even case-sensitive, "The Dying Earth" may also be a common enough string that some noise is boosting its results a little.
• Similarly, Xeethra does easily the best for Smith, but the shape is roughly the same for a load of his stories.
• A whole load of Leiber's stories follow roughly the same pattern as The Swords of Lankhmar, but at a lower level. I didn't find one that bucked the trend and was a unique enough string that I trusted it.

I'm not shocked at the apparent revival of interest in Howard and Smith, it fits what I've seen in the bubbling S&S revival. I'm slightly surprised by the level of the Vance revival, though. Leiber peaking in the 80's to 90's fits my memories, but the lack of any more recent revival across a whole bunch of titles was unexpected.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

When my doctor tells me her (adult) kids are reading a fantasy series, that's when I know it's penetrated beyond the geekosphere.

Definitively. And it's not just the fact that their kids are reading fantasy, but that your doctor felt comfortable bringing it up with you in the first place.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

I recently read the first chapter of Pride and Prejudice, where in Mr. and Mrs. Bennett have a conversation about their new neighbors. It is a masterpiece of dialog wherein the entire premise of the novel is laid out; as well as very clearly defining the characters of both of the Bennett parents. It is truly a masterpiece that I have to imagine would appeal to any gender - as long as you were open to fiction set in that time period focused on the concerns of that time period.

Wow, this post used "wherein" (or the misspelled where in) "masterpiece", and "time period" twice, each - "time period" twice in the same sentence . You'd think a poster who was posting about a post that was a response to another post that was referring to good writing would be a less poorly written post. Fortunately, my post in response to my original post is now going out post-haste!

 

[Eyes of Nine]

Definitively. And it's not just the fact that their kids are reading fantasy, but that your doctor felt comfortable bringing it up with you in the first place.

Fair; however I often have a book to read in doctor's waiting rooms, so they ask me what I'm reading, and when it turns out it's SF/F, sometimes we get to talking about the genre. Most however just go "oh interesting" and we move on.

 

[Clint_L]

At school, it seems like fantasy is more read by girls than boys these days, which is a sea change from when I was a kid. After spring break, I can ask our librarian about who is checking the books out. Certainly there is far more variety in the kinds of novels that are generally labelled as "fantasy." Another big change is that genre fiction is no longer separated in our library; now it's all just "fiction." This has pros and cons - on the one hand, I like that genre fiction is no longer being "ghettoized" and separated from "literary" (i.e. "superior") fiction and this encourages kids to try different stuff. On the other hand, there's more to sort through.

 

[Clint_L]

Ngram viewer, so appearances of the string in the google books corpus. I didn't add 'red nails' as I expected there would be more noise than signal with such a common string.

No idea why Queen of the Black Coast is so much higher than the others. Bêlit is a well-loved figure, though, and some do consider it one of the stronger stories, plus it is likely to be a major touchstone if someone is discussing Howard's racism.

1865 is noise - some other appearance of the string

Sorry...I still didn't understand exactly what this graph is supposed to be measuring. Sales? Mentions of a particular title in internet threads? Mentions in scholarly articles? I had no idea what this data is showing me - it seems to show a massive growth in the popularity of a particular Conan story in recent years, but that seems very implausible.

So I did some digging. The data presented as evidence of the rising popularity of REH stories is very misleading.

Here is a specific academic criticism to using Ngrams in the way attempted:

We therefore observe that the Google Books corpus encodes only a small-scale kind of popularity: how often n-grams appear in a library with all books given (in principle) equal importance and tied to their year of publication (new editions and reprints allow some books to appear more than once). The corpus is thus more akin to a lexicon for a collection of texts, rather than the collection itself. But problematically, because Google Books n-grams do have frequency of usage associated with them based on this small-scale popularity, the data set readily conveys an illusion of large-scale cultural popularity. An n-gram which declines in usage frequency over time may in fact become more often read by a particular demographic focused on a specific genre of books. For example, “Frodo” first appears in the second Google Books English Fiction corpus in the mid 1950s and declines thereafter in popularity with a few resurgent spikes [4].

and

Even if we are able to restrict our focus to popular works by appropriately filtering scientific terms, the library-like nature of the Google Books corpus will mean the resultant normalized frequencies of words cannot be a direct measure of the “true” cultural popularity of those words as they are read (again, Frodo). Secondarily, not only will there be a delay between changes in the public popularity of words and their appearance in print, normalized frequencies will also be affected by the prolificacy of the authors. In the case of Upton Sinclair’s Lanny Budd, a fictional character was vaulted to the upper echelons of words affecting divergence (even surpassing Hitler) by virtue of appearing as the protagonist in 11 novels between 1940 and 1953. Google Books is at best a limited proxy for social information after the fact. [emphasis added]

Characterizing the Google Books Corpus: Strong Limits to Inferences of Socio-Cultural and Linguistic Evolution - PMC

It is tempting to treat frequency trends from the Google Books data sets as indicators of the “true” popularity of various words and phrases. Doing so allows us to draw quantitatively strong conclusions about the evolution of cultural perception of ...

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Edit: to illustrate the issue, try typing in Gandalf, Frodo, and Gollum separately and compare your results. Or try putting in "Conan the Barbarian" and compare to Queen of the Black Coast. Apparently the former peaked in 1960 and the latter in 2020. That make sense to anyone?

I also note that Ngrams were not designed for, nor purport to measure the popularity of entire works of fiction in the way implied by the presented graphs. They are nonsense.

 

[Enaknomolos]

So I did some digging. The data presented as evidence of the rising popularity of REH stories is very misleading...

This is true to a point, but:

1. It's ten minutes of noodling for an internet forum, not an academic article; and that's why I said things like 'seems to show'. The correlation in pattern between a bunch of REH stories and between his stories and those of other authors is however suggestive that there is increasing literary interest in Conan.
2. In the era since 2000, there's plenty of other reasons to think there has been an uptick in literary interest:
   • There has been the Del Ray Conan
   • Penguin Classics has published a volume of Smith
   • A mainstream publisher has for the first-time in decades published an expressly S&S series (Howard Andrew Jones's Hannuvar)
   • For the first time in decades, S&S magazines have been self-sustaining (Tales from the Magician's Skull, New Edge, Old Moon).
   • There have been at least two literary movements - Sword & Soul and New Edge - that expressly draw on RE Howard while seeking to move on from his racism and other problematic elements.
   • Etc
3. Despite all that, this thread is titled 'No-one Reads Conan Now'; and, based on nothing more than anecdotes and vibes, people on almost every page declare the stories are 'irrelevant' or 'dated'. Obviously, a small dedicated literary scene is not 'no-one'. It's all that written S&S literature has ever really had behind it.
4. I suspect that what people actually mean by claims about 'relevancy' (it's never explained what 'relevant' means) is either 'I don't care for Conan' or 'I find aspect's of Howard's writing problematic enough that I don't even want to properly engage with his significance'. Both of these things, especially the latter given that Howard was extremely racist and that his racism is very present in his stories, are perfectly justifiable. Neither, however, is in any way the same thing as Howard being less relevant or popular than he was previously.
5. There is a 'living in a bubble' aspect to much of the discussion in this thread, on both sides. On one side there have been claims that Howard's racism isn't so striking (I think he's a great writer, but really?); but on the other side his racism is presented as though it is an insurmountable obstacle to his significance, as though brilliant black writers haven't been inspired by him while challenging his racism for decades at this point (no mention of Charles R Saunders or Milton Davis, really?). The graphs were intended as pinpricks for this bubble, not as formal proof of popularity.
6. Admittedly the pinprick is directed at the 'not relevant' side of that debate. That's because I have very little to say to the idea that Howard's racism isn't a huge detriment to his stories. It is.

 

[Bedrockgames]

1. Despite all that, this thread is titled 'No-one Reads Conan Now'; and, based on nothing more than anecdotes and vibes, people on almost every page declare the stories are 'irrelevant' or 'dated'. Obviously, a small dedicated literary scene is not 'no-one'. It's all that written S&S literature has ever really had behind it.

This is really the relevant point I think

 

[GobHag]

Yeah, basically my view is: How many times have I seen Conan mentioned in my web-surfing and how many fanart of him is made recently? Are there people going to Reddit and seeing no 'how can I make Conan or Queen Beryl?' threads ever pop up. No homebrew inspired by it.