Curious storytelling
I’ve been playing Funcom’s Age of Conan recently (yes, another MMO). The game world itself is based off of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories, written for Weird Tales in the 1930s. Because I feel like I get a lot more enjoyment out of a licensed game when I know the universe and its characters, I picked up the first compilation of Howard’s stories for my Kindle a few weeks ago. It’s basically pulp fantasy, but with a much darker tone than what I’m used to reading.
What intrigues me the most is that there’s no chronological order to these stories; one might have Conan reigning as king of Aquilonia, while another goes back to his youth adventuring as a corsair on the high seas. Howard himself had this to say when asked about why he chose to tell his tales in such a fashion:
“In writing these yarns I’ve always felt less as creating them than as if I were simply chronicling his adventures as he told them to me. That’s why they skip about so much, without following a regular order. The average adventurer, telling tales of a wild life at random, seldom follows any ordered plan, but narrates episodes widely separated by space and years, as they occur to him.”
I’ll have a review of the game up when I’ve experienced more of the content. So far, it’s looking pretty good!