Conan and the City of the Extremely Online

Thoughts on Conan, and also Xuthal of the Dusk

So I’ve been reading the original Conan stories. A friend pointed me to the excellent Del Rey editions, starting with The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian¹, which present Howard’s stories more or less in composition order—with great pulpy illustrations by Mark Schultz and archival essays about Robert E. Howard’s composition process & the timeline.

I expected many of these stories’ constituent elements, the thews and the sorcerers and the swords and the questionable wardrobe choices and so on—at one point a heroine disrobes altogether before going on a jungle run in the buff?² The line by line facts of Howard’s writing surprised me: how efficiently the stories unfold. The tide of battle turns from sentence to sentence, characters arise to be dispatched in the very next clause; the words evoke Conan’s raw and brutal motion. The writing has moments of deep poetry, a desperate lust for life. I hear Howard arguing to himself, through Conan, viciously and again and again, for the worth of living, of love, of joy and terror and struggle even in a world of ultimate futility. The writing has its thumbprints, like any—take a shot every time Conan is tigerlike or pantheresque, or rather, don’t, I won’t be held accountable for the results—but even those thumbprints, in context, charm.

As pre-television adventure fiction, these stories are a great source of storytelling technique that hasn’t been shaped by the particular affordances and limits of film and TV. As pulp stories from the 30s, they also have their moments, and sometimes pages, of yikes. But there’s one story I can’t stop chuckling about. It’s called Xuthal of the Dusk, and it’s basically Conan and the City of the Extremely Online.

I wouldn’t put Xuthal in the S tier of Conan stories I’ve read so far—Conan’s characterization slips into Conventional 1930s Stock Hero here and there, and poor Natala, our heroine, doesn’t have a tenth the narrative force or interest of Bêlit in Queen of the Black Coast or Olivia in Iron Shadows on the Moon. But, well, let me set it up for you.

Conan and Natala, his scantily-clad-young-woman-of-the-moment, are wandering through a desert, last survivors of a destroyed army.³ They’re out of water, no hope of rescue. Conan’s drawn his sword to kill Natala and spare her the bitter death from thirst.⁴ Fortunately, just as he raises his sword, he sees a city! Or it might be a mirage. “Look,” says Conan, “a city!” Natala doesn’t ask why he’s pointing with a drawn sword.

Anyway, Natala doesn’t have good shoes, for some reason, and for some reason this hasn’t come up in their last several days of almost dying in the desert. Not to worry, though: Conan (almost dead of thirst) picks her up and runs a few hours until they reach the gates.⁵ The city’s huge and beautiful and eerie and cyclopean and so on—and seems deserted. In they go, only to find: a guard!

The guard, however, seems to be dead. Not decayed, not skeletal—he looks fine, in fact, but he’s not breathing, has no heartbeat. Weird. Conan and Natala look for water, find a well—only to be attacked by the formerly-dead guard. Conan decapitates the dude, shrugs. Weird undead city, we get those all the time. The well, however, has no bucket. Conan is so annoyed by this that he throws the corpse into the well, which is the only source of fresh water they’ve seen in a week.⁶

They explore the city, and find a banquet laid out, but no one there to eat it. (They tuck in.) They see a man “dead,” like the guard, on a bed, in jewels and silk and so on, only some monstrous shadow falls over him and he disappears, leaving a drop of blood behind. They meet a dude wearing more jewels, who thinks they’re hallucinations, then when he realizes they’re not, runs away screaming and is eaten by something, off camera.⁷

Finally, after substantial eeriness, our heroes encounter Ms Exposition 1933, in this case a tall beautiful princess from prehistoric not-Egypt named Thalis. Conan asks what gives in this weird city. Thalis answers, well, here, I’ll type it out for you:

“Much of the time these people lie in sleep. Their dream-life is as important—and to them as real—as their waking life. You have heard of the black lotus? In certain pits of the city it grows. Through the ages they have cultivated it until, instead of death⁸, its juice induces dreams, gorgeous and fantastic. In these dreams they spend most of their time. Their lives are vague, erratic, and without plan. They dream, they wake, drink, love, eat, and dream again. They seldom finish anything they begin, but leave it half completed and sink back again into the slumber of the black lotus. That meal you found—doubtless one awoke, felt the urge of hunger, prepared the meal for himself, then forgot about it and wandered away to dream again.”

I’ll admit that “vague, erratic, and without plan” got me feeling… targeted with uncomfortable directness. But it was the bit where the guy heats up a meal, then wanders off to check his email, where I felt keenly that Howard was @ me across the decades.

“Where do they get their food?” interrupted Conan. …

“They manufacture their own food out of the primal elements. They are wonderful scientists, when they are not drugged with their dream-flower. Their ancestors were mental giants, who built this marvelous city in the desert, and though the race became slaves to their curious passions, some of their wonderful knowledge still remains… But much they have forgotten. They take little interest in waking life, choosing to lie most of the time in death-like sleep.”

The guard Conan and Natala ran into was too busy checking his phone to notice the barbarian wandering up to the gate. Conan asks Thalis how she came to be here, and it turns out that she was the last survivor of a not-Egyptian army destroyed in the desert⁹, and she stumbled into Xuthal, where she has been treated like a queen, since everyone who lives here is desperate to talk to someone who does not spend 90% of their time on Reddit.

Lest Conan and Natala feel altogether too relieved—sharing unlimited food with a bunch of internet junkies doesn’t seem like a terrible fate in the short term—there are two wrinkles. The first is a murderous shadow-demon-god-tentacle-monster thing named, I swear, Thag, who wanders the city. The locals don’t concern themselves about him, because they’re too busy arguing the respective merits of different Gundam villains. The second, well… The locals are, um.

“The people of Xuthal have forgotten more than the [sacred sex] priestesses of Derketo ever dreamed. They live only for sensual joys. Dreaming or waking, their lives are filled with exotic ecstasies beyond the ken of ordinary men.”

“Damned degenerates!” growled Conan.

“It is all in the point of view,” smiled Thalis lazily.

Thalis is down with all this because she grew up with the priestesses of Derketo etc., but constant exposure to untrammeled Internet has left the locals deep into some profoundly weird stuff, and Thalis suggests that Natala leave promptly.

The story rolls on from there, through a betrayal or two, several decapitations, some kink, and Conan’s protracted loincloth-clad wrestling match with the tentacle monster¹⁰, until Conan and Natala escape from The Internet back into, well, the desert of the real.

Maybe I’m internet-poisoned myself¹¹, but the echoes are so eerie and direct. Now, this sort of cultural panic around art, dream, fantasy, technological development does tend to rhyme across generations: you see cautions in 19th century newspapers, I believe, about the cultural decay attendant on novel-reading. I wonder if Howard was responding to something specific here: paperback books? Radio? Film strips? His own (apparently) strained relationship with commercial fantasy short fiction publishing? Worth further investigation. But for now: on with the thews!

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1. We were not, apparently, doing “Phrasing!” back in 2003.

2. The wardrobe stuff, I think, is part of the point—these characters are not supposed to be ‘relatable people,’ they’re not supposed to operate on 20th century logic, they’re supposed to be weirdos from before the dawn of history.

3. This happens a lot in Conan. Howard has an unerring knack for minimizing the critical “Time until Conan is completely and righteously screwed.” Often this time is actually negative: several of the best stories start with Conan’s entire army already destroyed, with Conan himself all-but in chains. On the one hand makes Conan’s eventual survival and triumph all the sweeter, a key element for power fantasy—but Conan is also profoundly othered from the reader in a way that makes it hard to class Conan as teenage farmboy wish fulfillment, and would take a longer essay to unpack.

4. Conan: not a nice guy! Certainly not nice in the Last Midnight sense.

5. Conan: really good at the fireman’s carry. Of all Conan’s physical feats, I find the miles upon miles that he sprints in these stories with a woman tucked under his arm the most impressive. How much do women weigh in Conan? Ten pounds?

6. Conan: impulse control, not his strong suit!

7. Well, out of sight. Conan: no cameras!

8. Or three mana of any color.

9. Like I said: this does happen a lot in Conan. Sometimes twice in the same story.

10. Yep.

11. I am.