Hyborian Age World Building by Bill Ward Robert E. Howard, pioneer of sword & sorcery fiction, creator of Conan and Solomon Kane, author of scores of stories across half a dozen genres or more, is rightly praised as a master of pacing, a crafter of visceral action, and a writer of vivid and poetic prose. What often goes unremarked, even among his ardent fans, is Howard’s impressive achievement as a world-builder, namely in the form of his setting for the Conan stories, the Hyborian Age. That this “age undreamed of” doesn’t stand out in the way that, say, Middle Earth does, is in fact a testament to its effectiveness—because it was never supposed to draw attention to itself in the first place. While many modern secondary world fantasies are designed to create interesting hooks or puzzles about the worlds themselves, and thus engage the reader’s curiosity to learn more about the strange and exotic workings of such settings, Howard’s intentions were just the opposite, and for good reason. There is an enormous difference between the amount of background material one can insert into a novel versus a short story. Modern fantasy’s multi-volume epics are a far cry from the lightning fast stories of the pulps. From a purely practical point of view, pulp magazine fiction can’t indulge in such worlds unless their uniqueness is the entire point of the story, something which simply won’t work for an ongoing series delivered in small, sporadic, and standalone installments. Howard’s writing desk Series fiction of this kind has to stand on its own with every story. Just as a character like Conan can’t rely on some complicated backstory or a reader’s foreknowledge of his prior adventures to be comprehensible, neither can any other aspect of a series story. But there is a kind of foreknowledge readily available in fiction, something not reliant on the author’s previous work or invented world, and that is the reader’s own knowledge of story. In the case of characters, this foreknowledge is in the form of character archetypes. For things like magic swords, dwarven hoards, and perilous quests, we have tropes. But for a story’s setting, it is the history, culture, and geography of our own world that a writer calls upon in order to communicate more with less. Howard certainly was not the first or only writer to use real or archaic place names, or those that sound similar, when creating imaginary worlds. And, in a time before the secondary world was the firmly established trope of fantastic fiction that is now almost a sub-genre unto itself, many others set their fantasies in a never-never land that was just over the next horizon, or in some tiny, overlooked corner of the map. Much of what we might today regard as the genre of historical adventure happily played fast and lose with actual events, people, and places, so much so that even a locale firmly established as part of the real world may have more to do with the author’s imagination than any research he might have done. Not so Howard. A lover of historical adventure, Howard was also more importantly a lover of history, and he cared about getting history right. And he did a good job of doing just that in the historical fiction he did craft. But here is where he ran into several limitations. Firstly, for a writer of pulp fiction for whom productivity was absolutely necessary if he was to have any kind of career, research took time away from writing. A lot of time. Secondly, and perhaps even more significantly, Howard was living in a very small town in rural Texas...