Amazon Review
Before achieving solo fame with his "Wheel of Time" series, Robert Jordan wrote seven 1980s fantasy potboilers about Canon the Cimmerian, that legendary barbarian hero created by Robert E. Howard in the 1930s. Other hands have now written far more Conan fiction than Howard ever did. Jordan's first three are collected in The Conan Chronicles 1. This companion omnibus contains Conan the Magnificent, Conan the Triumphant and Conan the Destroyer (though not the final Conan the Victorious). An extra bonus item is "Conan the Indestructible", L. Sprague de Camp's 34-page essay explaining the Conan timeline--which de Camp and Lin Carter first created from Howard's disconnected stories--and how Jordan's novels fit into it. The tales themselves follow the routine formula of Conanesque sword and sorcery, with some new, flamboyant super-villain wheeled on for each episode and eventually defeated after a satisfying extravaganza of magical and/or military special effects. Here the successive baddies are a horde of religious fanatics whose charismatic leader is backed up by a dragon's firepower; a beautiful, uppity, power-hungry princess and priestess who uses human sacrifice to raise a formidably unpleasant god; and another, closely similar, wicked lady who initially confuses Conan by hiring him as a professional thief. Jordan reliably delivers the mixture as before, with the prescribed amount of colourful slaughter. --David Langford