Sword and Planet as Blood and Thunder: Robert E. Howard’s Almuric by Bill Ward “’Lead us to Yugga, Esau Ironhand!’ cried Than Swordswinger. ‘Lead us to Yagg, or lead us to Hell! We will stain the waters of Yogh with blood, and the Yagas will speak of us with shudders for ten thousand times a thousand years!’” —Almuric, Robert E. Howard Robert E. Howard is a member of that select group of authors whose very name has become adjectival – a Howardian story is violent, two-fisted adventure in which theme and forward motion are paramount, outsider heroes are fierce yet noble, and physical and mental toughness represent the highest virtues. Howard’s own stories are also rollicking good escapist fiction written with more ingenuity and care than much that was produced by his imitators, even when he, himself, was laboring in another’s shadow. Almuric, Howard’s posthumously published short planetary adventure novel, is a great example of this. Though it is clearly charging headlong down the well-trodden path of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars books, Almuric doesn’t read like Burroughs pastiche, indeed it goes beyond even the somewhat apt-but-too-pat ‘Conan on Barsoom’ tagline to stand apart as its own thing: Howardian sword-and-planet. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: extraordinarily capable loner misfit warrior fleeing certain destruction miraculously escapes to colorful planet of adventure and ascends to benign dominance by virtue of his prowess and essential decency. It’s of course A Princess of Mars and the dozens of science fantasy books that pay homage to it but, reshuffle or remove a few of the elements, say the radium pistols, the six-limbed Tharks, and the crimson-skinned beauties, and you’ve more-or-less got another Burroughs classic, Tarzan. But it’s even bigger than those, it’s the modern uber-myth of the nineteenth and twentieth century West, it’s everything from King Solomon’s Mines to T. E. Lawrence, Robinson Crusoe to Gordon of Khartoum. Until the zombie apocalypse replaced it, it was the dominant modern myth, and the baseline of much of adventure fiction – the capable modern man testing his mettle in a part of the world, or solar system, to which he was not native. “The average civilized man is never fully alive … Life flickers feebly in him; his senses are dull and torpid. In developing his intellect he has sacrificed far more than he...