Conan the Free-Lance

By Steve Perry

Tor, 1990

Reviewed by Ryan Harvey

Dimma the Mist Mage needs a talisman called "The Seed" to restore his body to its solid form, so he sends his shape-shifting servants to fetch it from the Tree Folk. Conan, while on his way to Shadizar, befriends the Tree Folk and joins them in their quest to rescue the Seed from Dimma's thieves. More than the Mist Mage and his followers stand in their way, however. The Pili, a reptilian race with horrid appetites, have their eyes on grabbing the magic talisman as well. And their queen, the beautiful and lecherous Thayla, has her snake-eyes on Conan for reasons she would rather her husband the king not find out about. The chase will take the combatants deep into Dimma's realm, a castle floating on a sea of Sargasso defended by hideous beasts.

Comments

Steve Perry has a reputation among Conan readers for silliness and overkill, and this novel won't change anybody's mind. Steve Perry loves high fantasy. Perhaps he loves it too much. His Conan novels burst at the seams with fantastic monsters, strange races, and weird magic…and not in an ideal way. Although Perry has a large imagination, it gets away from him and creates a world that has almost no resemblance to the Hyborian Age. Conan the Free Lance occurs in an overt wonderland akin to high fantasy that feels nothing like the historically-based settings of Howard and most of his imitators. Perry's world has more in common with an R. A. Salvatore "Lost Realms" novel than a Conan book.

Where Perry most obviously jumps the rails of the Hyborian Age is in his assault of multiple humanoid races and a slew of creatures with odd names (Kralix, skreeches, vrunds, Pilis). These creations push the narrative into territory that will make many Conan readers feel uneasy. They might wonder if Conan stepped through a magical portal that transported him to a planet from a space opera. Considering that Perry wrote the bestselling Star Wars novel Shadows of the Empire, some of the similarities to the Star Wars universe feel a bit suspicious: the Tree Folk have an 'Ewokian' patina to them, and a desert pit-beast recalls the Sarlaac from Return of the Jedi. Even if you can accept the non-Hyborian tone of the creatures, Perry does them a disservice with his detailing: neither the selkies nor the Pili come alive as cultures or biologies. The selkies in particular feel underdeveloped and under-described. Perry also has an annoying non-Hyborian approach to the gods. Conan meeting Crom in a dream seems unlikely, and Crom doesn't match our expectations of him: he acts like a laughing prankster, not the grim lord up on his mountain whose attention you really don't want to draw.

The story fits into the earliest days of Conan's career, before he reaches the civilized kingdoms. Perry wrote a few novels taking place in this 'gap' in the chronology and makes a few references to them (it's rare for any pastiche to mention another). It's crowded places like this in the old chronology that make you see why CPI decided to start with a clean slate for the "Hyborian Adventures" series. Most of the authors who wrote stories taking place early in Conan's career never tried for realistic character development for the young Cimmerian. You won't find the brutish, superstitious youth of "The God in the Bowl" or "The Tower of the Elephant" here (or even the character from de Camp and Carter's "The Thing in the Crypt" or "The Legions of the Dead"); Conan acts no differently here than he does in the prime of his career, which wastes good character opportunities.

Making the situation worse is that Conan has hardly any reason to be in the story. Early on he wants to rescue the boy Hok, but once he achieves that he has no motivation to help the Tree Folk recover the Seed. He even wonders a few times why he should care. The villainous Thayla attempts to slay Conan just so her husband won't find out about her sexual dalliance with the barbarian, but Thayla acts more powerful than her dull husband so you can't imagine she would worry about upsetting him. Kleg's attempt to escape from the Kralix feels out of place since Dimma has no particular reason to sic his monster on Kleg in the first place. Far too much of the book hangs on tenuous threads and it teeters on the verge of story collapse. In fact, I would wager that the author crafted the whole plot around a four-way plot collision for the finale, but even that climax flounders, reading like a Keystone Kops routine filled with knee-slapping 'irony.' After that, the resolution comes as a complete deus ex machina cheat.

One of the few elements of the novel that Perry manages to nail down is the evil wizard Dimma and the curse that keeps him in a disembodied mist form. Dimma's tragedy is a good dramatic device; the passages about his torment when he briefly regains solidity, only to revert to mist again, contain some of the best writing in the novel. Perry also tosses in a more sexual content than normal with Thayla of the Pili desiring human males for their larger phalluses. Perry has a predilection for kinky couplings in his books. Previously, in Conan the Defiant, the Cimmerian bedded a zombie woman. Here he does stud service for a reptile queen. What can I say except that it's…well…different.

Most of the book reads smoothly, but Perry often stumbles over cumbersome phrases and metaphors that sound unnatural. He also slips in modernisms that jar with the setting. For example: "Not here. Hmmm. Musta dropped it somewheres. Ah, well, no help for it. Probably not worth anything anyways." Sorry, not in my Hyborian Age, Steve. Nobody thinks or talks like that 'round here. Perhaps Perry thinks these asides are funny, but they distract from the tone. He also structures his novel so that each chapter jumps from subplot to subplot, like a series of fast-cuts in a movie. Since the subplots don't immediately relate to each other, this device is just an artificial way to speed up the pace. It fails in that regard and instead keeps the story disjointed and difficult to concentrate on. Perry should let each of the plots unfold in its own chapter before moving to another plot with the next chapter (the style the other authors frequently use, and the one that Howard used in The Hour of the Dragon, which features masterful use of parallel construction). It hurts further that the sections about Dimma's servant Kleg and his plight are uninteresting; Kleg doesn't qualify as a hero character and his struggles won't interest anyone. The lengthy tangle of events in the town of Karatas goes on far too long to very little point; it seems like the story just takes a pit stop here.

Despite all these deficiencies, Conan the Free Lance does excel in one arena. It's short. Perry does far better in his earlier Conan works, Conan the Fearless and Conan the Defiant, and this novel just goes to prove that even a wagon-load of imagination can't save bad plotting and inconsistent world-building.