Is Conan the Barbarian Actually Good?
A Cimmerian strides through my brain between my retina and my frontal lobe, boasting “I live, I love, I slay, and am content!” This is not good literature. &, yet, somehow… it is. Why Conan the Barbarian haunts us readers: what makes a pulp hero immortal is not the author’s prose—it’s the readers, who spin the gold of the Shadow Canon from straw…
Here we have, by Crom!:
Naomi Kanakia: This pulp fiction journal had sleazy covers and a low circulation. But it still produced an iconic character <www.woman-of-letters.com/p/this-pu…>: ‘This pulp fiction journal had sleazy covers and a low circulation. But it still produced an iconic character Conan is good…. Conan is awesome…. He is a naked power fantasy, and…these kinds of fantasies are very fun…. Conan is like James Bond, and he is good for precisely the same reason: the continuous juxtaposition of sex, danger, and decadence…
And a little nuance:
Naomi Kanakia: This pulp fiction journal had sleazy covers and a low circulation. But it still produced an iconic character <https://www.woman-of-letters.com/p/this-pulp-fiction-journal-had-a-low>: ‘We still read Conan today because he resonated…. I also feel a desire to explain how and why they’re good. Because… these stories are not good. That’s because the writing is quite overwrought and full of cliches…. Dashiell Hammett [and many others]… made the jump… [to] Penguin Classics… Library of America… professionalized literary attention. Robert E. Howard never did… is part of… “the shadow canon”… really old, continuously in print, highly-beloved, but which are generally not taught… or discussed by academics….
Conan is a beast… always dead certain… always wins, always gets the girl. It’s really very stimulating. And for this kind of tale, the writing also needs to have zero doubt… [be] filled with a fanatical sense of conviction… that this story is deadly important and needs to be taken seriously…. And… that’s why Conan is good….
Three Conans…. King Conan… middle-aged, more cautious… weary of war… anxious… his citizenry is happy… clearly… King Theodoric, the Ostrogoth…. Best… is “The Phoenix on the Sword”, where Conan struggles haplessly against… rebellious undercurrent[s]…. War-leader… classic Conan—strong… confident… brash, anxious for war and conquest… always defeating other chieftain and captains and pirate kings… classic barbarian stuff…. Best… is “A Witch Shall Be Born”…. Conan the thief… more hapless, more confused. The best of these is “The God in the Bowl”…. Some[times]… eldritch foe…. Best… was “The Slithering Shadow”….
[And] the racial politics of Conan are not good…
I want to say yes.
And I want to say no.
The Conan stories are, really, not good. The plots are pedestrian. By Crom’s Blood, the prose is limping and halt! And the action scenes have little of spectacle about them, and are not spectacular. No, if there is anything that is good about Conan, it is not the black squiggles on the page.
If there is anything that is good about Conan, it is, rather, what is between the ears of the reader. The real magic of the Conan stories is to be found in the imaginative work performed by those who pick up the tales: the reader, not the author, is much more the true architect of the experience. Conan, then, is not so much a literary achievement, as a shared cultural hallucination, a collaborative act of myth-making that draws on the reader’s own stock of images, desires, and half-remembered legends.
Moreoever, to love Conan, the reader first has to turn their brain into the brain of a Conan-lover. This is not a trivial transformation. It requires a willingness to suspend disbelief, to accept—if only provisionally—the logic of a world in which brute force and animal cunning are the highest virtues, and where the “barbarian” is always more vital, more authentic, more alive than the decadent civilization he periodically demolishes.
For some, this act of imaginative empathy is as easy as breathing;.
For others, it is an insurmountable barrier.
For all, it is, in a sense, an exercise in voluntary regression, a return to the adolescent or pre-adolescent pleasures of unreflective power fantasy. It is definitely not adulting.
I understand that many people—most people—perhaps all thoroughly sane and well-grounded people—may really not want to do, or be able to do, this. At all. Not everyone is equipped—psychologically, temperamentally, or ideologically—to embrace the worldview implicit in Conan. The gender politics, the racial essentialism, the celebration of violence as the ultimate arbiter of worth—all these are, to put it mildly, out of step with contemporary sensibilities. There is a reason, after all, that the Conan stories have never made the leap into the “Penguin Classics” or the “Library of America.” They remain, as Naomi Kanakia puts it, part of the “shadow canon”—beloved, but definitely not respectable, or capable of being an un-guilty pleasure.
But lots of people do turn themselves into enthusiastic Conan lovers.
I know, because I do.
There is, I think, a kind of guilty pleasure in surrendering to the mythos, in letting one’s critical faculties take a backseat for a few hours while the id runs wild across the Hyborian Age. The enduring popularity of Conan—across novels, comics, films, and video games—testifies to the resilience of this particular fantasy. It is, perhaps, a testament to the power of archetype: Conan is the ur-barbarian, the template from which so many subsequent heroes have been stamped. If one can make the leap, the rewards are not inconsiderable: a sense of primal energy, of unmediated action, of a world stripped down to its most basic elements.
The questions are: How? And why? Out of all the possible naked power fantasies, why focus on this one? The answer, I suspect, lies in the peculiar alchemy of pulp fiction and modernity. Conan is not just a fantasy of strength; he is a fantasy of agency in a world that so often denies it. In the early twentieth century, when Howard was writing, the world was becoming ever more complex, bureaucratic, and impersonal. Conan’s world, by contrast, is one in which the individual matters—where a single man, by virtue of his will and his sword-arm, can reshape the world. In this sense, Conan is not merely escapism: he is a protest against the iron cage of modernity, a wish-fulfillment fantasy for every reader who has ever felt powerless. That, I think, is why Conan endures—why, despite the manifest shortcomings of the prose, the character continues to leap from mind to mind, gathering energy as he goes.
Apropos of this, we have, by Crom’s Black Beard!:
Lilian Stewart Carl: Through Darkest Adolescence with Lois McMaster Bujold or Thank You, But I Already Have a Life <https://archive.org/details/vorkosigancompan00/page/n4/mode/1up>: ‘Lois [was] enthusing over a new television program… Star Trek. I fell for it too. Spock made intelligence classy…. Kirk, who was incessantly Available. And there were women on the Enterprise. They wore miniskirts and said, “Hailing frequencies open,” and “Captain, I’m scared,” but they were female nonetheless…. I wish we still had the tape which immortalized her mother’s voice saying, “You girls are going to be so embarrassed when you grow up and remember how you acted over this program…”
And by Crom’s Burning Forge!:
Lois McMaster Bujold: The Unsung Collaborator <https://fanac.org/fanzines/Lans_Lantern/lan_s_lantern_31_laskowski_1989-08.pdf>: ‘This sheaf of inked paper with the gaudy cover glued to the spine is not the book. The book… is an event 1n the reader’s mind… a process through which an idea in my mind triggers an idea, more-or-less corresponding, in yours….. The book, therefore, is only finished when somebody reads it…. The book, if you like, is not the story but merely the blueprint of the story, like the architect’s drawings of a house. The reader, then, is the contractor, the guy who does the actual sweatwork of building the dwelling. From the materials in his or her head, the ideas, the images, the previous knowledge, each one actively re-constructs the story-experience – each according to his measure, knowledge, gifts. And charity…
That line of thought leads to:
Lois McMaster Bujold: A Conversation with Lois McMaster Bujold <https://archive.org/details/vorkosigancompan00/page/n4/mode/1up>: ‘Reading is… active and elusive…. Every reader… will have a slightly different reading experience…. One can never, therefore, talk about the quality of a book separately from the quality of the mind that is creating it by reading it, in the only place books live, in the secret mind. The real reason discussions of the quality of literature get emotionally hot very rapidly is that they inescapably entail a covert judgment being passed on the private and invisible mind of another human being…. Writers can control what they write. Full stop. Everything that happens after is some class of unintended consequence or chaotic emergent property…
And then Lois McMaster Bujold takes a further step into mystery, by Crom’s Unblinking Eye!:
Lois McMaster Bujold: The Unsung Collaborator <https://fanac.org/fanzines/Lans_Lantern/lan_s_lantern_31_laskowski_1989-08.pdf>: ‘Sometimes the reader doesn’t stop with your provided blueprint. Sometimes they continue building. Add a gazebo, a garage. The characters go on talking in their heads even after the book’s covers are closed; the universe continues to build around the edges. This is a creative event I’ve never heard discussed in any literature class. And yet it seems to be a common factor in all the great, truly beloved literature of the world…. Idea-people… [get] real existence… because someone gives them brain-room, feeds them with their personal psychic energy. And so they grow, leaping from mind to mind…. One of the prime examples… is Sherlock Holmes…. Conan Doyle… thought… the Holmes on the written page, was all there was…. He failed to see how much energy was pouring into his creation from the reader’s side of the page, and so underestimated Holme’s power…
The ratio between what the author has put in, in the way of successful literary story-crafting work, and what the reader has taken out…
Spock, James T. Kirk, Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Phillip Marlowe, Sam Spade—all seem to have a very high value of reader between-the-ears to writer black-squiggles-on-the-page value…
But Conan the Cimmerian, by Crom’s Toenail Clippings!, surely has, if not the highest, one of the highest ratios of, we might as well call it fan activity—both community and individual, both fancon and fanfic—of any literary work ever.
I think that there is a huge amount of work to be done here:
First, J.R.R. Tolkien’s has a theory of sub-creation, originally articulated in his essay “On Fairy-Stories.” He claims that the fantasy writer is a “sub-creator,” fashioning secondary worlds as an act of imaginative participation in the divine act of creation. What he does not say is that the act of sub-creation does not end with the author. Fan communities and individual readers have increasingly taken up the role of sub-creators themselves—the creation of meaning is not a one-way process but a dynamic, communal act, where the mythopoeic impulse Tolkien described is distributed across a network of engaged, imaginative readers.
Second, there is reader-response criticism: Reader-response criticism tried to fundamentally reorient the study of literature by placing the reader’s experience at the center of meaning-making. Rather than viewing a text as a fixed artifact whose significance is determined solely by the author’s intent or the words on the page, reader-response theory asserted that literary works are completed through the active engagement of readers. As each person brought their own emotions, memories, cultural background, and expectations to the act of reading, interpretation becomes a dynamic and individualized process.
The text thus served as a blueprint or set of cues, but it was the reader who constructs the narrative’s emotional resonance, thematic relevance, and even its basic coherence. Literature thus became a collaborative performance, shaped as much by the reader’s imaginative investment and psychological response as by the original composition. And then that line of thought more or less petered out.
Third, someone should write up some Investigative case studies of fanfiction as world-building, showing how readers not only interpret but expand, transform, and sometimes challenge the original narrative universe. Nor is this phenomenon limited to modern fandoms. The Arthurian legends themselves are, in a sense, medieval fanfic: Chrétien de Troyes, Thomas Malory, T.H. White—all took the bare bones of the Matter of Britain and layered on new quests, new characters, new anxieties. In every case, the world-building of fanfiction is not mere homage; it is an assertion of agency, a declaration that the reader’s imagination is not a passive receptacle but an active engine of creation. And, of course, Aeneid.
Fourth, and of course, people should examine the psychological mechanisms behind reader engagement and imaginative participation—how readers “inhabit” fictional worlds and why some texts inspire more active sub-creation than others. Here, the cognitive sciences and literary theory converge on a fascinating point: narrative transportation. When a story is sufficiently immersive, readers experience what psychologists call “deep narrative engagement”—a state in which the boundary between self and fiction blurs, and the reader’s own memories, emotions, and desires are recruited to flesh out the world on the page. This is why Tolkien’s Middle-earth or Le Guin’s Earthsea can feel more vivid than the actual world outside your window. But not all texts are equally generative. Works that leave narrative gaps—deliberate ambiguities, unexplored corners, characters with undefined motivations—invite readers to fill in the blanks, to “play” in the interstices.
Last and fifth, reflect on the limits and risks of sub-creation—when does reader-driven world-building enrich a text, and when might it distort, dilute, or even undermine the original work’s themes or intentions? Here, we must acknowledge that the democratization of authorship, so exhilarating in its creative potential, is not without its hazards. There is a risk that the centrifugal force of a thousand headcanons and “fix-it” fictions can unmoor a text from any coherent meaning, turning a work of art into a Rorschach blot for the anxieties and fixations of its audience. Consider the fate of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes: the detective has been so thoroughly reinterpreted—hero, antihero, romantic interest, queer icon, even supernatural sleuth—that the original Victorian rationalist vanishes beneath the sediment. It can also, if unchecked, dissolve the very identity of the work it seeks to honor.
References:
Bujold, Lois McMaster. 1989. “The Unsung Collaborator”. Lan’s Lantern. 31 (August), pp. 88-90. <https://fanac.org/fanzines/Lans_Lantern/lan_s_lantern_31_laskowski_1989-08.pdf>.
Carl, Lillian Stewart. 2008. “Through Darkest Adolescence with Lois McMaster Bujold, or Thank You, I Already Have a Life”. In Lillian Stewart Carl & John Helfers, eds. The Vorkosigan Companion. New York: Baen Books. <https://archive.org/details/vorkosigancompan00/page/n4/mode/1up>.
Carl, Lillian Stewart, & Lois McMaster Bujold. 2008. “A Conversation with Lois McMaster Bujold”. In Lillian Stewart Carl & John Helfers, eds. The Vorkosigan Companion. New York: Baen Books. <https://archive.org/details/vorkosigancompan00/page/n4/mode/1up>.
Conan Doyle, Arthur. 1892–1927. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes [and subsequent collections]. London: George Newnes. www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/16…
de Troyes, Chrétien. ca. 1170–1190. Arthurian Romances. Translated by William W. Kibler. London: Penguin Classics, 1991. archive.org/details/a…
Howard, Robert E. 1932. “The God in the Bowl.” Gutenberg Australia edition. <https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks15/1501131h.html>.
Howard, Robert E. 1932. “Phoenix on the Sword.” Gutenberg Australia edition. <https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0600811h.html>.
Howard, Robert E. 1933. “The Slithering Shadow.” Gutenberg Australia edition. <https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0601051h.html>.
Howard, Robert E. 1934. “A Witch Shall Be Born.” Gutenberg Australia edition. <https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0600921h.html>.
Kanakia, Naomi. 2025. “This pulp fiction journal had sleazy covers and a low circulation. But it still produced an iconic character”. Woman of Letters. July 29. <https://www.woman-of-letters.com/p/this-pulp-fiction-journal-had-a-low>.
Le Guin, Ursula K. 1968. A Wizard of Earthsea. New York: Parnassus Press. <https://archive.org/details/wizardofearthsea00legu>.
Mallory, Thomas. 1485. Le Morte d’Arthur. London: William Caxton. <https://archive.org/details/lemortedarthurby00malluoft>.
Rosenblatt, Louise M. 1938. Literature as Exploration. New York: D. Appleton-Century Company. <https://archive.org/details/literatureasexpl00rose>.
Smith, Noah, J. Bradford DeLong, & Cory Doctorow. 2021. “Mandated Interoperability Is Not Going to Work.” Hexapodia Podcast, XIII, May 4. <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/podcast-hexapodia-xiii-mandated-interoperability>.
T.H. White. 1958. The Once and Future King. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. <https://archive.org/details/oncefutureking00whit>.
Tolkien, J.R.R. 1947. “On Fairy-Stories.” In Essays Presented to Charles Williams, edited by C.S. Lewis, 38–89. Oxford: Oxford University Press. <https://coolcalvary.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/on-fairy-stories1.pdf>.
Virgil. ca. -19. The Aeneid. Translated by Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin Books, 2006. https://archive.org/details/aeneid00virg_0>.