… anyway …

Hmm, Ok, so I wasn't unqualifiedly in love with the movie, but Bob "Movie Bob" Chipman, whose opinions I normally chime with, says here: "Nobody really seems to give a damn about Conan the Barbarian" which would be a terrible thing to be true. It would be the death of a lot of potential fantasy films in potentia that might be quite the hit — I was especially thinking about the John Carter of Mars adaptation that keeps getting talked about on and off, but that seems to had a burst of speed and got as far as a trailer that has some nice-looking scenes, and so cross fingers for that. (1)

What surprises me about the Conan business is that the current fantasy literature is about as far on the H‑axis of the Howard-Tolkien scale (2) as it has been for decades — there is a lot of gritty, swords-and-sorcery stuff out there, riffing strongly on writers like Howard and Lieber, and it is extremely good — Abercrombie and Scott Lynch are instant examples — and even the modern grand epics of fantasy, like Erikson and Martin (3) focus a lot more on that kind of personal-scale drama whilst telling world-scale stories. The film world just doesn't seem to be in the same place, though, and that's a shame.

Oh, and going off on a complete tangent, but congratulations to Scott Lynch, whose The Lies of Locke Lamora is one of the first 10 Gollancz classics, out in the old-style yellow covers that gave me a weird kid-in-library flashback when I went into Waterstones on Friday. Lynch is rubbing shoulders with writers like Herbert and Wolfe, and well deserved, because it is a beautiful and elegant book.

(1) And yes, I too lose count of the number of good trailers that have showcased bad movies.

(2) which I just invented and which has no objective meaning or reality.

(3) I had intended some sort of self-serving footnote inserting myself into that august company, but I don't honestly have the chutzpah.