What's really fun is reading "Solomon Kane" and getting sexism and racism all in one go. (Kane doesn't really make with sexytimes much, at least.)
Conan is pretty much not my bag on every level. Sword and Sorcery in general isn't my thing; I don't really like thews or mighty cleaving blows, and the genre seems to bring out the worst in authors in terms of (sometimes veiled, sometimes not) misogyny and racism. I'm also going to have to rag on ElecPal, because this story is about as far from sub/dom play as you can get. I don't like dominance play at all in my sex life, but I have no problem with people who want to enjoy it that way. However, this story had a big old actual rape in it, and the "It's just a story" defense doesn't really hold a lot of water. Yes, evil goddess, luring men to their death, not emblematic of all women. Yes, Conan doesn't usually go right for the rambunctious cuddling. And still. This is a story about a man who slaughters a bunch of dudes for ill-defined reasons and then gets really angry when he's unable to rape to his satisfaction. That's kind of unpleasant, and the lack of other perspectives rings pretty loudly in it.
I can understand and even appreciate to some extent the impact Robert E. Howard had on fantasy fiction, but I gotta say that in a lot of cases I kind of wish he hadn't. The bar got set awfully darned low back in the day, and we're still paying off the dividends of those adolescent power fantasies in terms of public perception of genre fiction and the role and status of female authors, editors, publishers, etc. Stuff like this has its rough edges worn away by the passage of time and the acknowledgement of its "classic" status, but I'd honestly be okay with jettisoning this baggage for good if someone were to propose such a thing. I don't think it's good for genre fiction that so many of our old masters and founding fathers have to have their work prefaced with, "Now, you have to remember the time and place when this was written," or "Really, there wasn't that much of this sort of thing, considering." If I go to an art museum, there aren't any curators standing around giving apologia for all the rape, racism, and casual violence in the mainstream body of work.
Imagine if this story had been published without Conan in it, without the gleam of Howard's name behind it, without the patina of decades passing. Imagine some newbie author dropped this into the Podcastle slush box, unchanged except for the names. What would our collective reaction have been? (Other than, "Man, this guy's ripping off Robert E. Howard.")
Heh. I just recently read some Solomon Kane stories and couldn't believe some of the incredibly racist overtones in one of them. That said, this is not a genre issue. It's a literature issue - I've seen it a lot in American Literature in particular - not only with race, but gender issues.
Regarding this story - again, this is a really great discussion, and I'm anxious to comment on it for fear of becoming a threadkiller. So please don't let that happen
When we picked this story, yes, we discussed this scene in particular, and what was happening in it. It's not nice. It's not fun. It is totally uncomfortable. But I kind of think that's the point - at least, for me. Something akin to a siren bewitches men across the icy wastelands for her brothers to slaughter. Except, instead of just some guy, she lured Conan, and since he's Conan, he keeps going where all the other poor bastards were cut down. He kills her brothers, and comes at her, and she can't turn the enchantment off. So Conan nearly rapes her. (I think it's worth mentioning nobody was raped in this story. Intent was there, but it would've been a different story if that had happened, and that's not the story we ran.) I suspect if Conan hadn't been out of his mind with whatever enchanments she threw at him, he would've just killed her after killing her brothers.
Some people have suggested it doesn't end, or ends too soon, but again - for me - the ending's pretty perfect. Two very strong characters - the last man standing on a battlefield and a goddess - get thrown completely off their game, and have to grapple with what happened, and what they've done. It's uncomfortable. I think it's supposed to be, and that's one of the reasons we ran it.
Regarding whether this story would've been published if some newb author had sent it in - this trick's been tried before, I think? Not that long ago, an author submitted a Jane Austen book (
link), and held it up on the internets as LOOK! THEY'RE EVEN REJECTING JANE AUSTEN. Well, duh. We love Jane Austen because she
was Jane Austen, not somebody ripping off Jane Austen. She wrote what she wrote when she wrote it, and we're
still being impacted by her stories. Howard is similar. Part of what makes his work iconic is when he wrote it, and the impact it had after that. (Heh. Some of that derivative conversation from the other thread is bleeding into my mind here...)
Now, if somebody writes some ass-kicking sword and sorcery, makes it their own, takes into consideration where we are now in literature, and sends it to us (or in the case of Garth Nix, lets us solicit it), we're all for that. Unfortunately, not many people do
