Howard and his truths
It’s hard to add much about RE Howard to what’s been said here, but I’ll try.
Howard is easy to compliment on his prose style, his ringing battles so evocative that the blood almost sticks to your hands as you turn the pages. His characters were primal archetypes, quick to take to and want more from. His worldbuilding allowed you to smell the exotic spices in the market street air and hear the shadowy footpads in the alleys — his masterwork Hyborea teemed with life and detail. His sense of rhythm in the telling of Conan’s latest exploit or explosive westerns leavened with physical humor prove him a master yarn-spinner.
But there’s more to him than just technique.
I get writing from amateurs every now and then that about lives up to Howard, even if it’s just aping his style. The stories just seem strangely lifeless for all the careful detail, cacophonous action, and pulpish word-choice. I usually tell these writers to “tell me one of your truths.”
Howard put what he knew to be true in his stories. He was an opinionated man, read Novalyne Price Ellis’s memoir One Who Walked Alone for plenty of examples. He knew the power of entropy, he’d seen it growing up in Texas as the oil men came and went. Cross Plains experienced it in the bust of the Great Depression. Howard’s stories are filled with the frailty of civilization, yet even when all that is dross falls away and the hollow gongs go silent there’s still the rough code of someone like Conan to protect a defenseless woman or Solomon Kane’s relentless resolve to avenge a murder even unto the lawless coasts of the New World. The whole world may have fallen or been left behind, but these characters will still see justice prevail.
Howard was a great reader of history and spoke endlessly of corruption. The rotten old order gives way to the new, not always easily, then the new eventually goes sclerotic and itself is preyed on by another generation of barbarians. The same truth applied to Rome applied to Howard’s Aquilonia and fallen Stygia.
Yes, by all means give R.E. Howard his hard-earned props as a technical master. But he also wrote from his brain, his heart, and his guts about what was important about life, as he saw it. Conan’s broadsword spoke many of Howard’s truths.
To write something on the occasion of Robert E. Howard’s birthday is a bit, well, intimidating. As imposing a presence as the Texan was in life, his reputation a century on has approached the status of myth. Not only that, but his work is the subject of formidable scholarship of the sort seen over at 
A year ago I would have said that if you didn’t live in the Midwest (and basically that means Chicago to me) you really don’t understand the true meaning of the word “cold.” 
Thanks to The Shining, we all know what happens if you don’t have meaningful mental stimulation during the dark months of winter. Therefore, as we hunker down by the fire with our favorite form of entertainment, we scavenge for cool and unusual things to get our sluggish blood moving. 
One of the things I most enjoy about 
Right now, as I type this and most likely as you read it, a movie titled John Carter of Mars, based on the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel A Princess of Mars, is in production. Not in development. Not in pre-production. Not in meetings. It is in front of cameras. Andrew Stanton, director of the brilliant CGI Pixar films Finding Nemo and WALL·E, is shooting John Carter of Mars from a script by Stanton, Michael Chabon, and Mark Andrews, in London this very minute, in this dimension, and it will reach theaters in 2012, in time for the novel’s one hundreth birthday.
Every year, uberreviewer Rich Horton sets out to summarize the year in genre short fiction at his newsgroup on SFFNet.
The new Realms of Fantasy coincides with the relaunch (as of December 11, 2009) of an actually informative