If you were to ask Conan fans who wrote the best Conan story after Robert E. Howard, a lot of people would point to John Hocking. Others might mention Karl Edward Wagner or a handful of other pastiche writers, but it is Hocking, above all, who consistently makes people's favorites list. He might be singled out because of his broad base of knowledge about sword and sorcery and pulp adventure fiction, but I think it's because he's a gifted writer who understands the inspiration behind Howard's voice and style. In his hands Conan is no cardboard cutout, but a complex and motivated character. And then there's the simple fact that Hocking's a great plotter and his prose is vibrant, powerful, and exciting. Hocking may well be one of the best hopes readers of sword and sorcery have today.

In January of 2005 John was kind enough to sit down with me and answer a few questions about Conan, writing, and sword and sorcery. I think you'll enjoy reading his answers as much as I did.

I've always loved Howard's work. It has a mythic, elemental fire that no other author can approach. I've got a degree in lit and I've worked with books for 19 years, so I've read an ungodly variety of stuff in my time, and there are precious few authors who have ever created a body of work as distinctive and unforgettable as Howard's. The fusion of a unique and gripping character with a unique and gripping prose style is so rare that the best comparisons fall outside the fantasy field. Howard's accomplishment is akin to that of Raymond Chandler or Patrick O'Brian.

I've read Conan since 1967 and found some of the pastiche material to be enjoyable, but by the early 1990's I was buying some Conan novels I could not finish reading. While I never expected greatness out of a modern Conan pastiche, I certainly expected readability at the very least. I felt frustrated enough to begin writing a Conan novel of my own. Initially I did it as more of a game than anything else, trying to put into the story all the things I thought were missing from Conan pastiche at that time. I knew I couldn't fashion a duplicate of Howard's style, but I thought that if I was careful I might be able to approximate some of his effects. It was much more demanding and absorbing than I anticipated, but three years later I had a complete novel and no clue as to if it could even be considered for publication. I was proud enough of CONAN & THE EMERALD LOTUS that I didn't want to just drop it into a drawer and write it off as therapy. So I sent out a handful of letters, and L. Sprague de Camp responded. He wrote that they saw many unsolicited Conan manuscripts and that virtually none of them were publishable, but that if I sent him my book he'd look it over. He liked it a lot and LOTUS was published in November, 1995.

The success of EMERALD LOTUS bowled me over, as I'm sure you can imagine. I began work on another pastiche immediately. CONAN & THE LIVING PLAGUE took two years to write, and I worked on it daily. I signed a contract with Conan Properties, who were sufficiently pleased with the book that they wanted to use it to attract a new publisher for Conan and try to break into hardcover. I got halfway through my third pastiche before de Camp and his wife passed away and it became clear that Conan was to be sold to a new owner. Paradox, the Swedish company that currently owns Conan, is focused on re-issuing beautiful restored editions of Howard's original stories and isn't authorizing any new Conan pastiche. It is hard, of course, to see so many years of work lying fallow, and many people have suggested that I rewrite my second and third Conan pastiche as fantasies about a character other than Conan. I can't do it. I worked like mad to fit the stories into Howard's Hyborian Age, and each book is saturated with references to the rest of the Conan saga and REH's work in general. To remove Conan from these books would be to reduce them to a shell.

I've been reading a great deal about the Vikings and about Anglo-Saxon England over the past five or six years. When I got the urge to write sword and sorcery fiction again it was only natural that I try to set it in this period. The Brand stories are my attempt to write strong, mythic sword and sorcery in a style a little different from that of my Conan novels. I wanted to write fiction with something of Howard's immediacy and intensity, but I felt I had to step away from anything close to pastiche. I have two short stories completed and two more in the works. The novel is to be the first of two, but it's a very ambitious project and I can't say when I might complete it.

While I have to put in a good word for Poul Anderson's Last Viking trilogy, and a shout out for Charles Barnitz's unjustly forgotten THE DEEPEST SEA,





the gold standard for Viking fiction must be THE LONG SHIPS by Frans G. Bengtsson. But as good as much modern Viking fiction gets I still derive the most pleasure from reading and re-reading the Icelandic Sagas. EGIL'S SAGA in particular offers a vivid picture of odd characters and desperate action in a strange, yet familiar, world. The Vikings are fun to read about because of their nature and their world. Their culture was barbaric, yet strikingly civilized in many ways, and it's fascinating to learn how these elements worked together. And the world they found before them was vast, unexplored, and full of wonders just waiting for a bold fellow with a longship to discover them.

I started on sword and sorcery when I was just a kid. Robert E. Howard made the most lasting impression, but I admire the work of Karl Edward Wagner, Fritz Leiber, Roger Zelazny and Michael Shea. While I'm a fan of J.R.R. Tolkien I find much less to enjoy in the work of the majority of his followers, many of who seem to confuse length for depth. I'm almost as fond of hard-boiled crime fiction as I am of sword and sorcery, so I tend to prefer a more terse, intense approach and shy away from both mammoth on-going series and humorous fantasy.

The virtues of Sword & Sorcery seem so obvious to me that I'm puzzled by how little of the stuff is currently available to read. I'm certain that the audience for it is huge and all around us. For instance, those who enjoy entertainment ranging from Tolkien's LORD OF THE RINGS to fantasy gaming novels, from supernatural adventure films like "Blade" or "Underworld," to on-line computer games like "EverQuest," are all enjoying material with strong elements of Sword & Sorcery. And they'd probably be amazed at how appealing they'd find the genre if it were made more easily available to them. The outstanding success of the re-issue of Robert E. Howard's restored Conan stories in affordable paperback editions shows that the good stuff never goes out of style.

But the fact remains that most modern publishers offer little in the way of actual Sword and Sorcery. Even the fantasy magazines can't seem to do it, which is why I'm pleased with the efforts of Pitch-Black Books. Their editor, Daniel Blackston, really appreciates sword and sorcery. His anthology, LORDS OF SWORDS, offers a solid cross-section of modern authors in the genre, including one of my tales of Brand the Viking. Their Web site is very promising as a potential center of information about the genre, as well as a source of new fiction.

Inspiration comes from all around- anything from a trip to a national park to walking to work to staring at the stars to playing with my kid. Time to write comes more dearly. I usually have to sacrifice sleep and stay up pretty late if I'm to get anything done.

I can only offer my opinion here, as I'm certain any number of authors do things differently. I think you have to burn things down to their essence and wring out any trace of modernity if you want your work to have the mythic resonance that sword and sorcery should have. You need a strong story to tell, a strong-boned plot with the power to seize a reader's attention. And you have to tell your story with as much drive and life as you possibly can. The appeal, and challenge, of writing this kind of stuff is that it is so elemental, so close to the core of pure storytelling. At its best sword and sorcery transcends fantasy, transcends genre fiction, transcends fiction entirely and takes on the raw magic of mythology. Looking at it this way, it's no surprise that sword and sorcery is a small genre, or that it is so very hard to write