47 Books Like The Complete Chronicles of Conan

I first encountered Douglas Adams when I caught The Hitchhiker’s Guide on late-night radio, and I was hooked. The novel is slightly different, with Adams giving a bit more consideration to plot and logic, but it has the same wonderful, rapid-fire dialogue style, which has seldom been replicated.

I absolutely love Arthur Dent’s ludicrous accidental odyssey, meeting characters like Zaphod Beeblebrox and the wonderfully named Slartibartfast. The Guide sits in the background, popping up to provide superbly funny explanations of the history of the universe, humanity’s obsession with money, and a lot more.

For me, the thing that sets this apart from a lot of SFF humor is its ‘Britishness’—there’s a distinct feel of the surreal comic legacy of, for example, Monty Python and The Goon Show.

I love this book because although it seems at a casual glance to be written in the mold of 50s and 60s science fiction, with earthmen fighting bug-eyed aliens, it’s, in fact, a profound exploration of the morality of war, of chances, lost and motives misunderstood and of the ruthless use of children as combatants.

The training regimen of the children is gripping, as is the climactic space battle, but it’s the ending of the novel that gives the story its deep spiritual resonance.

My dad gave me these books too. For the same reason—he had loved them.

What child wouldn’t?—A baby, lost in the jungle, is threatened by a tiger. A wolf pack rescues and raises him. His school-teacher is a bear and his mentor a black panther, Bagheera. (I loved Bagheera.)

Today, Kipling is often called "racist." I can’t totally defend him, but—he could easily have made Mowgli a white English lord, as Burroughs did Tarzan. Instead, Kipling made Mowgli the child of poor Indian villagers—and also handsome, athletic, courageous, strong, honourable, and fiercely intelligent. Racist?

Not all the stories are about Mowgli. "Rikki-tikki-tavi," a favourite, is about a mongoose. Another is "Quiquern," set in the Arctic. Classics.

One of the lesser-known books by the acclaimed author of The Tarzan and the Princess of Mars books, this book is a more feasible adventure of a young man exploring an Asian jungle. He finds himself hopelessly lost at death’s door and nursed back to health by escaped slaves hiding from two rival kingdoms.

His survival against all odds and rise to power within those two kingdoms, isolated and oblivious to the modern world, as well as his conduct throughout, were inspiring examples to me as a young man of how to act. As unlikely as it sounds, it is one of the books to which I attribute my success in life.  

My dad had a comic collection of Conan for as long as I can remember. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I discovered that the comics were loosely adapted from a series of novels by a pulp fiction author. I thought this was interesting because pulp fiction was known for being short and action-packed, whereas we are all familiar with the contemporary, more decompressed storytelling of fantasy novels.

I’d also heard about the connection between Robert E. Howard and HP Lovecraft, and when I picked up Conan of Cimera, I could see it immediately. Horrific fantasy abounds throughout the book!

This is a short story featuring Conan, and one of, if not, my favourite (it has tough competition from Red Nails and Wolves Beyond the Border). Simple, straight-up, sword and sorcery action. Howard’s Conan was the first real fantasy I fell in love with (before discovering Lord of the Rings). Epic character, but straightforward stories. The opposite of the sprawling epic. One of my books is a collection of sword and sorcery stories, and the first story is heavily influenced by The Tower of the Elephant. The otherworldly aspect, magic, (but not all-encompassing magic), a quest, and ultimately a choice between good and evil. I can’t not recommend a Conan story when talking about fantasy.

Best known for creating Conan The Barbarian, Howard fathered the weird western genre with his seminal 1932 short story "The Horror From The Mound," collected here along with "The Thunder-Rider" and "Old Garfield’s Heart." Reading these early genre mashup stories of conquistador vampires, reincarnation, and Native American magic in high school was like tasting peanut butter and chocolate for the first time. They made new notions bloom like a field in my mind. You could take the gritty frontier of Lonesome Dove and introduce an element of the magical fantastic, and if you respected both genres, come up with something entirely new. I especially appreciated the culture clash of the frontier.

It’s something I explore a lot in my own work; that disparate peoples meet, mix, and come away changed by the encounter. This is an idea that Howard, who adored research and folklore, represents pretty well in "Old Garfield’s… show more.

Howard's style is compelling, dragging you through the story with an inescapable inevitability. His characters possess stark, almost brutal qualities, sure of their place in the world they inhabit, even when facing the unknown. With mighty warriors such as Conan, we know they cannot lose but when it comes to Howard's horror stories, success is not so certain.

This was the first book compiled by Cathy and Arnie Fenner on the art of grandmaster fantasy artist Frank Frazetta. My first thought was to choose the Ballantine collection of his work because of its nostalgic quality (I was fifteen when I bought it), but this much later Underwood collection went way beyond a simple collection of art due to the care and love put into the production by the Fenner’s, who knew frank personally and admired his art. It's a big art book and the images fill the pages. If I have one gripe about art books in general it’s that the images are nearly always too small, not so here, this is a beautiful showcase that I have treasured and re-read hundreds of times.

If Fagunwa offered us Africa-steeped proto-fantasy tales, then Charles Saunders brought said tales into the global mainstream of contemporary fantasy with his novels of the titular Imaro.

Saunders’ work was more in the mold of Conan the Barbarian than Lord of the Rings, but it drew on various empires of the African continent (particularly the western and southern regions) in a way that was rich and seminal for its time.

I recommend Imaro because what Saunders, as the first black author in the sword-and-sorcery genre, did back in the 1980s is what I’m trying to do for our current times: reach beyond simplistic representations of the African self in the fantastic and offer something nuanced, complex and ultimately satisfying.