My novel Conan: Spawn of the Serpent God comes out this Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2025. I had a blast writing this book, and I can’t wait to find out what readers think of it! My editor at Titan loves it, as do the folks at Heroic Signatures, who currently hold the license to produce Conan stories in comics and prose. But the real test of a novel is when people crack the spine, open the file on their e-reader, or hit PLAY on the audiobook, and start reading. (Yes, listening to audiobooks counts as reading, and I experience fiction quite often via audio.)
I first encountered
our favorite Cimmerian in Marvel Comics’ Conan the Barbarian #1 in that
ancient era known as 1970. I was six years old, and I was a monster fanatic. Superheroes
and adventure characters weren’t really on my radar, but the cover showed Conan
battling bat-winged humanoids, and I was sold. I kept that issue for years and
read it so much that eventually the cover fell off. I have no idea what
happened to it, but I still think back on it fondly. The very first story I
submitted for publication (when I was eighteen) was “As Good as a Rest,” and it
featured a Conan-like barbarian named Grod who was tired of being a warrior in
a fantasy realm and went to the Office of Archetype Management to see if he
could be reassigned to a different milieu. It was, of course, rejected numerous
times and never saw print. I eventually rewrote the story (with the character now
female), and the new version, still titled “As Good As a Rest,” appeared in Warrior
Fantastic published by DAW Books in 2000. (If any of you want to read the
story, email me at twaggon1@msn.com, and
I’ll send you the Word file.)
So you
think I’d have been thrilled to get the chance to write a Conan novel. But when
I had an opportunity to do so for Titan Books, I passed. I was only a casual
Conan fan, and so I was intimidated by the depth and complexity of the milieu that
Robert E. Howard created for his barbarian adventurer. I felt I wouldn’t be
able to learn enough about the Hyborian Age and its most famous denizen to make
them come alive on the page, certainly not in time to meet the publisher’s
deadline. After a few weeks, I regretted saying no, but I figured that ship had
passed and there was nothing I could do about it – until Titan asked again, and
this time, I was smart enough to say yes, thank Crom. So what was it like for
me to write an adventure featuring one of the most iconic characters in literature?
Read on!
First, I wrote a couple of different pitches for Conan adventures and sent them to my editor at Titan and the folks at Heroic Signatures. My book was supposed to tie into The Scourge of the Serpent comic series, but all I had to do was include the snake-god Set and Serpent-Men in the story, so I didn’t need to reference specific events or characters from the comics. Eventually, my editor and Heroic decided we should combine elements of the two pitches, and once that was settled, it was time to do my research. The following are various things I did or learned during that process.
Speaking of audiobooks… I
immersed myself in Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories, listening to them on audio
whenever I was driving, taking a shower, or doing chores around the house. When
I finished them, I started over. Eventually, I listened to stories of Howard’s
other famous characters – King Kull, Solomon Kane, and Bran Mak Morn. (I listened
to a few El Borak stories, too, but not all of them.) I also listened to Conan
tales by John C. Hocking (City of the Dead), S.M. Stirling (Blood of
the Serpent), and L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter (the novelization of
the first Conan film). Up to that point, my exposure to Conan primarily had
been through Marvel Comics and the various films. I had a sense of Conan as a
pop culture character, but listening to these stories – especially Howard’s –
gave me a much stronger sense of Conan’s personality and of Hyboria as a world.
·
I
bought older Conan novels.
Books by Andrew J. Offutt (who, along with Mike Resnick, was one of the GOH’s
at the first SF con I attended in 1986), Robert Jordan, and L. Sprague de Camp
and Lin Carter. (I knew that the de Camp and Carter stories were considered controversial
among Howard fandom, but I still wanted to see how they handled the character.)
·
I
started reading the current Conan comics. These are published by Titan and Heroic Signatures,
and this version of Conan was the same one that would appear in my novel. I
highly recommend both the Conan the Barbarian and The Savage Sword of
Conan comics. (I got a chance to meet Jim Zub, Conan comics scribe, at San
Diego Comic Con last year.)
·
I
watched S&S movies and TV series. I
watched all the Conan films and other sword-and-sorcery films such as Red
Sonja, the Deathstalker series, and others. (I didn’t need to
rewatch Beastmaster since I’ve seen it so many times over the years.) I
did watch some episodes of the Beastmaster series, along with episodes
of The Outpost, Beowulf, Xena, Into the Badlands, etc. Overall,
I wanted to absorb as much of the feel of S&S as a genre as I could. (I
couldn’t get into the Conan TV series or the Conan the Adventurer cartoon,
though.)
·
I
searched for Internet resources. I
wanted sites that provided information about Conan’s timeline, the different
races and gods of Hyboria, period weapons and dress, Conan’s fighting style,
etc. Here are some sites I found useful:
Conan
Timelines
http://www.barbariankeep.com/galen.html
https://www.conanchronology.com/the-chronology.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_chronologies
Hyborian
Curses
https://forum.mongoosepublishing.com/threads/hyborian-age-curses.1644/
Hyborian
Name Generator
https://www.fantasynamegenerators.com/hyborian-names.php
Creatures
from the Hyborian Age
https://hyboria.xoth.net/bestiary/creatures.htm
Wikipedia
Hyborian Entry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyborian_Age
Arms and
Armor
https://hyboria.xoth.net/rules/arms_armor.htm
Hyborian
Races
https://conan.fandom.com/wiki/Index_of_Hyborian_People_and_Races
https://hyboria.xoth.net/races/human_races.htm
https://hyboria.xoth.net/gods/gods.htm
Zamora
https://hyboria.xoth.net/gazetteer/zamora.htm
https://conan.fandom.com/wiki/Zamora
https://conan.fandom.com/wiki/Zamora_(city)
Description of areas of the city.
https://conan.com/locations/zamora/
https://immersive-exiles.fandom.com/wiki/Zamorian
Yezud
City of
Thieves (also called Zamora or Arenjun)
https://conan.fandom.com/wiki/Zamora_(city)
·
I
joined REH and S&S discussion groups on Facebook to get a sense of what
readers and fans expected – or didn’t want – in a Conan story. Not that I
intended to pander to the audience, but when writing tie-in fiction about
beloved characters, I like to be aware of readers’ expectations so I can keep
them in mind (or subvert them) as I write. Some of the groups I follow are Swords,
Sorceries, and Barbarians: SlayerPosting, Swords & Sorceries: Tales of
Heroic Fantasy, The League of Swords and Sorcery, Contemporary Sword and
Sorcery, Sword & Sorcery Book Promotions, Barbarian Books Without Limits,
and The International Robert E. Howard Fan Association. I don’t post much,
though. I don’t want group members to avoid discussing my novel (and
criticizing it) due to my presence.
·
I
didn’t try to mimic Howard’s writing style. I’ve seen some REH fans bemoan that tie-in writers don’t
write like Howard, but if we tried to recreate his style, it would come across
as bad parody. Plus, we’re not writing solely for REH devotees but for anyone
who enjoys a Conan story. What readers get from a Conan tie-in is one writer’s
interpretation of Howard’s character and his world. I did my best to honor
Howard and his fiction while still writing my own book.
·
Howard
scholars and fans define “pastiche” differently. Throughout my life, I’d only ever
heard the word pastiche applied to characters and stories that are
slightly altered versions of the originals. For example, Philip José Farmer wrote
pastiches of Tarzan (Lord Grandith) and Doc Savage (Doc Caliban). Such
pastiches allow creators the freedom to alter popular characters or explore types
of stories that could never be told about them otherwise. (Farmer’s characters
appear in his Feast Unknown series, which contains more overt sexual
elements.) And both Homelander and Omniman are evil pastiches of Superman. But
REH fans call any Conan tie-in a pastiche. Wikipedia says pastiche “implies a
lack of originality or coherence, an imitative jumble, but with the advent of
postmodernism, pastiche has become positively construed as a deliberate, witty
homage or playful imitation.” Until I became familiar with REH fandom, I’d
thought pastiche was only defined as the second part of the previous sentence.
Now I realize that some REH fans use the first half to express a negative
attitude about non-Howard Conan tales. Which is why…
·
I’m
ready for die-hard Howard fans to savage my novel (but I hope they’ll like it).
From what I’ve
seen, the best I can hope for from REH fans is “It was a decent book, but of
course, it wasn’t REH” or “It was an okay fantasy novel, but not a true
Conan story.” The worst I can expect is for my book to be excoriated as a desecration
to REH’s sacred memory and to have each mistake I made hauled out like evidence
to be presented to a hanging judge. But knowing this has (hopefully) prepared
me for these types of potential reactions.
·
Things
I learned about Conan from Howard’s stories that I didn’t know (or didn’t
realize) before. 1)
Conan has a chivalrous streak, likely due more to pulp fiction’s
conventions in the 1920’s than specific characterization on Howard’s part.
Conan often finds himself coming to the aid of a woman (a beautiful and sexy
one, of course), but he doesn’t make any kind of move on her. The women aren’t
always helpless, pretty things, though. They often have a core of steel in
them, and of course, Howard created two of the best warrior women characters in
S&S, BĂȘlit and Valeria, the former who is Conan’s lover and the latter who
is a respected colleague. Fairly progressive for Howard’s time. 2) There was
racism in the stories to various degrees, but it was only blatant in a couple of
tales. More often, Conan was the object of racism because so-called civilized
Hyborian citizens often viewed him as a semi-intelligent brute because he came
from Cimmeria. 3) Conan got drunk often and was kidnapped/imprisoned while
inebriated. I suppose this was Howard’s way of giving his character a weakness,
ala Superman’s kryptonite. 4) Conan isn’t a hero. He’s an adventurer, and above
all, a survivor, with a huge appetite for life. His motivations are usually
selfish, but he lives in a world where altruism can get you killed. I prefer to
think of him as self-focused. He does have his own moral code, however, which
basically boils down to “Don’t fuck with me, and I won’t fuck with you.” It
doesn’t take a lot to get him to tackle a threat to others, though, especially
if that threat pisses him off in some way. 5) Conan isn’t as dour as he’s often
portrayed in tie-in novels, comics, and film. Howard famously describes him as a
man of “gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth.” 6) Conan wears clothes and
armor more than in the comics, where he’s always portrayed as running around only
in a fur loincloth and fur boots. 7) Conan has a talent for picking up languages.
8) Conan is more fearful of magic than he seems to be in non-REH Conan stories.
·
Hyboria
is as much a character in Conan stories as the Cimmerian. Once I understood this, I had the
key to writing Conan fiction (at least, the key I needed). This is why, in my
opinion, the tales of REH’s other famous adventure characters – while enjoyable
– are inferior to Conan’s stories. He lives in a richer, more developed milieu.
Literary writers often say that a setting should be as much a character in a
story as the people. In Conan tales, Hyboria is a character of equal importance
to the Cimmerian. It’s what he lives to explore and enjoy, as well as being his
main adversary, the thing he must battle to prove himself worthy of survival. In
a way, it’s his one true love and his most implacable foe.
·
Conan was in the Avengers? In 1978, I read Marvel’s What If?
#13: “What if Conan the Barbarian Walked the Earth Today?” written by Conan comics
scribe Roy Thomas. In the story, Conan is magically transported to 1978, has an
adventure, and eventually returns to his own time. I liked the story well
enough, but without Hyboria, it just wasn’t the same. Decades later, Conan ended
up in modern times once more and joined the Avengers for a time. I wasn’t
reading comics then, but I kept tabs on what was happening in the industry, and
I thought this was a fun idea, but Conan was too much of a loner to join a team
for long, and without Hyboria, I doubted his character would be very effective.
But what do I know? Like I said, I didn’t read those comics.
·
Whenever
I write fiction about an established character or world, I like to address the
why of things, and I did in this book. Why does Conan have wanderlust when the rest of his
people don’t seem to? Why does he wear his hair long? Why is he clean-shaven
until later in his life when he becomes King of Aquilonia? Why does he go about
shirtless and wearing only a loincloth so often? If he’s truly an amoral
warrior out for his own pleasure, why doesn’t he rape women? Why is he so afraid
of magic? What happened to the Tower that fell in “The Tower of the Elephant”?
Why is there less magic in the world during Conan’s time than there was in King
Kull’s? Which is it – Zamora or Arenjun? I addressed all these questions – and more
– in my book. I figured my editor and the folks at Heroic Signatures would ask
me to take out any details I created that they thought didn’t work, but I got
to keep them all!
·
Why
did I depict Set as female in my novel? Because the comic book folks were referring to Set as
female in their The Scourge of the Serpent series, and they asked me to
do the same in my story. But they wanted me to mention that gods can appear in
different aspects, including different genders, for readers who prefer Father
Set to Mother Set.
·
Is
my story canon? It’s
best not to worry about stuff like “canon” when reading stories about a
long-running character like Conan. Think of it as my story based on Howard’s
work. It does feature connections to a number of different REH stories, though.
·
I
love writing S&S. I
originally started out wanting to be a fantasy novelist, although I wrote short
stories in various genres. I wrote some novels for Wizards of the Coast, and I
published an original fantasy novel called Godfire with Five Star Press
some years ago. (They published it as two volumes: Godfire: The Orchard of
Dreams and Godfire: Heart’s Wound…and they forgot to mention that the
first book was only part one of a longer story, which confused the hell out of
readers.) I enjoy writing both fantasy and action, and S&S is the perfect
fusion of the two. I hope to start writing original S&S, at the short story
level if nothing else, as soon as I can carve out some time in my writing schedule.
·
Conan
is (almost) in the public domain. The
Conan stories are in the public domain in Europe. In the U.S., only the first
published Conan story, “The Hour of the Dragon,” is. The rest of the stories
will be in the public domain in a few more years. Right now, you can write
fiction based only on those elements that appear in “The Hour of the Dragon.” And
because of trademark issues, you can’t use the name Conan on the cover
of your book. The one self-published Conan novel I own is titled The Scions
of Ymir, written by David L. Irick. Expect to see more self-published Conan
books over the course of the next several years. Who knows? Maybe you’ll write
one yourself.
·
Would
I write more Conan stories? Funny
you should ask…After I finished my novel, my editor at Titan asked if I’d be
interested in writing a short story featuring an REH character for their ebook-only
Heroic Legends series. I did another Conan story, which comes out on
Jan. 27th, and is currently available for preorder at Amazon and
B&N. You can find more details about it below. Would I write another Conan
novel? If Titan offers me another contract to do so, I’ll jump at it.
That’s
the low-down on writing Conan: Spawn of the Serpent God. It was a
wonderful experience creatively, and it left me with a greater appreciation for
REH and his work, as well as Sword and Sorcery in general – especially that
written by modern authors. Even if you don’t think of yourself as a Conan fan,
I hope you’ll give Spawn of the Serpent God a try and that you’ll enjoy
reading it as much as I did writing it!
DEPARTMENT
OF SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION
Conan:
Spawn of the Serpent God is
Out This Week
My Conan
the Barbarian novel, Spawn of the Serpent God, comes out this Tuesday,
October 28th. The novel ties into the comic book event Scourge of
the Serpent Men. You won’t have to read the comics to understand my book,
and vice versa. I had a blast writing it, and I can’t wait for people to read
it!
You can
find various preorder links – hardcover, ebook, and audio – for my novel at the
Titan Books site: https://titanbooks.com/72365-conan-spawn-of-the-serpent-god/
Synopsis
In
Zamora, the city of thieves, Conan meets Valja, a thrill-seeking thief. She
entices him to join
her on a
heist, where they steal a golden statuette of Ishtar, said to contain the
goddess herself.
After
killing a dozen guards and failing to escape, the pair are saved by priestesses
of Mitra. But
Conan
knows that nothing is free.
The
priestesses have need of their skills. They have waged war against Set, god of
chaos and
serpents,
who demands constant sacrifice from his subjects and massacred thousands of his
followers.
Yet they are no match for Uzzeran, a powerful sorcerer, who has been performing
unspeakable
experiments on humans in the name of Set. To defeat Uzzeran, they will need a
legendary
warrior on their side. They need Conan the Barbarian.
Conan:
Marked for Death
Available for Preorder
Titan
also publishes an ebook-only series of short stories starring various Robert E.
Howard characters called The Heroic Legends Series. I got to write Conan again,
although this time at much shorter length. But since most of the Cimmerian’s
original appearances were in short form, writing this tale felt more like what
writing adventure fiction in the classic days of the pulp magazines must have
been like.
Marked
for Death will be
released on January 27th, 2026, for only $1.99 at both Amazon and
Barnes and Noble.
Synopsis
Wounded,
thirsty, and stranded in the desert after a job gone bad, Conan is desperate.
To make it out alive, he bands together with his fellow surviving mercenaries.
Conan
trusts none of them, and the feeling is mutual. Fine. Everyone knows where they
stand. But when a cursed treasure is discovered, distrust turns to suspicion.
Conan knows enough about dark magic to leave well enough alone, but will greed
get the better of his new “friends”?
Kindle: https://tinyurl.com/c8mt6krj
Barnes
and Noble ebook: https://tinyurl.com/2wyxtpz8
SCHEDULED
APPEARANCES
2026
Superstars
Writing Seminar. Feb. 4-5. Colorado Springs, Colorado.
Akron
Book Fest. March 7. Akron, Ohio.
StokerCon.
June 4-7. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Into the
Springs Writers Workshop. August 7-9. Yellow Springs, Ohio.
WHERE
TO FIND ME ONLINE
Want
to follow me on social media? Here’s where you can find me:
Website:
www.timwaggoner.com
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