Andrew J. Offutt (1934–2013)

I am not sure anyone can be more surprised than I, but I have to judge this novel from 1973 the best Sword&Sorcery novel I have read.

I have set out to read the genre after a lag of many decades. I had immersed myself in high fantasy, and science fiction, and Literature, too — must keep that capitalized, you know — in my first decade or so of reading. Somehow I had skipped S&S, for the most part. Oh, I had read Vance, and tried Fritz Leiber (the Fafhrd/Grey Mouser stories being the only show more things of his I cared for), and done some basic duty with ERB. But Lin Carter was merely an enthusiast-cum-critic for me, Robert E. Howard a famous suicide, and de Camp the author of one terrific humorous poem, also from 1973, “The Ameba.”

But I have professional reasons to dip into the genre now. And I have, in this cause, finally read a few Carter adventures, Poul Anderson ventures, and taken a refresher course in ERB. It has all been very instructive.

I confess, however: this is the first of the S&S fictions to garner from me a highly positive appraisal.

I hadn’t read Offut before, not even, I think, in short form. And his reputation as a “pornographer” was . . . intriguing. I mean, as a Jack Woodford fan and James Branch Cabell devotee, I could hardly let rumor dissuade me.

I am glad I did not. This is an extremely clever book. It is meta-Sword&Sorcery. Sf/parodic, sure, but well written and the adventure is neither distracting nor poorly integrated into the story. It has twists. It is a twist — and with that in mind, perhaps that very word, “twist,” we can find justification for the serpentine cover illustration by (apparently? obviously?) Frank Frazetta.

Oh, and the fact that Frazetta is name-dropped early in the book.

And, as in Woodford and Cabell, not even the occasional frank sex talk, and a description of rape, strikes me as in the least bit pornographic.

It is all very "meta." I understand why most readers might not appreciate this. I did. show less

I first read this one as a teenager, encountering it as number 3 in the Bantam Conan pastiche novel series. It features a 17-year-old Conan (a while after the events in Robert E. Howard's "The Tower of the Elephant") who nevertheless has a very complicated immediate backstory, evidently a product of the two previous novels in a Conan trilogy written by Offutt in the 1970s. (The earlier volumes were not published in the Bantam series, though, and I have not read them.) Although the titular show more Sword of Skelos is rivaled in importance by the Eye of Erlik in this story, the Eye was common to all three Offutt books. The setting is in the desert kingdoms between Stygia and Tauran, with the cities of Arenjun and Zamboula as foci.

The narrative voice varies throughout, although always in an omniscient third person. Some chapters begin with raw description and presume no prior exposition; they might stand on their own as short stories. Others are clearly oriented toward the larger structure of the novel and/or trilogy, and pick up with a presumed reader knowledge of prior developments. Characterizations are fairly vivid, and the pace of the action is fast. Conan does a lot of killing.

Not even in the somewhat skeevy Robert Jordan Conan novels does Conan feature as a rapist. Yet in this book, while Conan insists that he is not a rapist, his competitor thief and eventual ally Isparana contradicts him, but when he insists that his assault of her "was not rape," she then looks "away in silent admission of the truth" (137). Still, the incident in question is quite clearly rape as described: an act of sexual violence with its non-consensuality demonstrated by the fact that Isparana had just tried to murder Conan (84-5). The narration also refers to their assailants in the desert as "would-be rapists" (98), as contrasted with the accomplished rapist who is the story's hero, I suppose. And all of this business is sandwiched in with passages emphasizing Conan's personal honor.

Actually, I would not be surprised to find out that Jordan's Conan stories had been consciously modeled on those of Offutt. There are both cosmetic and structural similarities, and in narrative chronology Jordan picks up (with the youngest Conan of his novels, in Conan the Magnificent) immediately after the finale of The Sword of Skelos. So perhaps I should set Offutt at the headspring of the latter-day Conan style perpetrated by Robert Jordan and Roland Green. Offutt's book does not suffer from the abrupt endings common to Jordan's later efforts, though.

As with the other books in this Bantam series, there are interior line art and a wonderful map by Tim Kirk. show less

Andrew Offutt seems to think that Edgar Rice Burroughs was a prude. For myself, I'm pretty confident that ERB consciously devised the myriads of implied sexual scenarios in his John Carter and Tarzan stories alike. He's the one who insisted that everyone on Mars be naked after all. In any case, come 1973, Offutt is ready to shuck the chivalric approach and let the barbarians barbarize.

Rather than simply telling his own more explicit riff on Barsoom and its savage excitements (as John Norman show more did in his Gor stories at roughly five times the total length of Burroughs' original series) Offutt tells us about telling it, in the chattily sardonic voice of his grad student protagonist. Hank Ardor -- oh, yes, the title is a pun -- has read Burroughs and does not fail to compare and contrast his adventures with those of John Carter each step of the way. Readers well-versed in the planetary romance sub-genre will find plenty of amusing allusions throughout.

One of the too-clever-by-half touches Offutt adds is to subject his protagonist to situs inversus as a function of his transport to Aros: he is anatomically reversed, left-to-right. My recent reading in Bateson's Mind and Nature highlights a problem with this detail, though: How would he know? As it happens, "left" and "right" are only definable relative to circumstance, and if his entire circumstance (including his physical body) has been changed, there would be no way of detecting the reversal. If he picked up a normal English book, it might seem printed backwards -- but he has no such cues for his orientation.

The title of the final chapter is "The answer that was true -- but STILL didn't satisfy," and while I'm not convinced of the "true" part (even within the hypothetical construct of the fiction), a little dissatisfaction seems to be a central theme of this book, which is a pretty quick piece of light entertainment, and one of the less profound items of metafiction you're likely to encounter.

P.S. This book (the Dell paperback and I think only edition) has what must be the ugliest, most irrelevant cover ever painted by Frank Frazetta! show less

This free-standing sword-and-planet novel is fun enough, although its greatest virtue may have been to provoke its Boris Vallejo cover art. The far future historical frame has no conscious relationship to ancestral earth, and the interplanetary civilization that forms the setting is just surfacing from a medieval dark age. There is a post-apocalyptic theme of the rediscovery of ancient technologies. The barbarian of the title is a newly-crowned warlord of one of the "Six Worlds," and the show more tale concerns imperial intrigue touched off by the prospect of his possible betrothal to the daughter of the Emperor.

Although the setting and action are very much in line with Edgar Rice Burroughs, the running commentary on "barbarism" makes for a more interesting comparison to Robert E. Howard. Both emphasize the heroic virtues of men who succeed in conditions of barbarism. Offutt's protagonist Valeron is rather embarrassed to be considered a barbarian, which Howard's Conan never was. (Conan would simply take advantage of the way in which it would cause civilized folks to underestimate him.)

There are some consistent verbal affectations: "it seemed not deep," "Maybe Darcus could have done defeat on the Sungoli," etc. But the prose is fast-paced nevertheless, as is the sequence of events. The end of the story is abundantly foreshadowed, but not hopelessly predictable. show less