Conan, Carter And Others

Wind and rain in Lancaster. 

A copy of SM Stirling's Conan: Blood Of The Serpent has arrived by post, an "earlier" instalment of the Conan series than Poul Anderson's Conan The Rebel.

I grew up on John Carter (sword and science), not on Conan (sword and sorcery). Everyone knows of Carter and he is occasionally referenced, at least once by Anderson, but no one has added to his series yet.

In my reading experience, the comic strip characters, Dan Dare and Jet Ace Logan, preceded Anderson's Nicholas van Rijn, David Falkayn and Dominic Flandry.

Reading Stirling's Conan will be yet another interruption to rereading Anderson's Rogue Sword and Larry Niven's The Smoke Ring. In Rogue Sword, we, editorially speaking, have reached CHAPTER V which summarizes complicated military and imperial conflicts of the fourteenth century. Difficult reading but necessary background.