Conan the Unconquered

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Conan the Unconquered
Conan the Unconquered.jpg
cover of Conan the Unconquered
Author Robert Jordan
Cover artist Kirk Reinert
Country United States
Language English
Series Conan the Barbarian
Genre Sword and sorcery Fantasy
Publisher Tor Books
Publication date
1983
Media type Print (Paperback)
Pages 286 pp
ISBN 0-523-48053-9

Conan the Unconquered is a fantasy novel written by Robert Jordan featuring Robert E. Howard's seminal sword and sorcery hero Conan the Barbarian. It was first published in paperback by Tor Books in April 1983, and reprinted on a number of occasions. The first British edition was published by Sphere Books in February 1988. The first trade paperback edition was published by Tor in 1991. It was later gathered together with Conan the Invincible and Conan the Defender into the omnibus collection The Conan Chronicles (Tor Books, 1995).[1]

Plot

An evil sorcerer Jhandar wishes to raise an army of deathless slaves, and his meddling with chaos brings him into conflict with Conan, who must battle his deadly ninja henchmen who can kill with a touch, and retrieve a weapon from a rent in reality created by the sorcerers earlier botched experiments. A whirlwind of action ensures.

Reception

Reviewer Ryan Harvey feels "[t]he book has a feeling of comfort food: neither challenging nor surprising, but providing decent sword-and-sorcery entertainment." He considers Jordan's writing style "like an over-imitation Howard," but "isn’t bad despite its flawed approach to evoking old pulp prose ... [and] it still moves forward steadily and takes the reader along with it." He identifies "[o]ne of the book’s biggest weaknesses [as] its women. They’re basically trivial."[2]

Reviewer Lagomorph Rex writes that this novel "felt as if it would have been a good story for maybe 100 pages, but when blown up to 280 it just was too drawn out." He feels it "[p]erhaps even should have been titled Conan the Uninteresting," as "[a]bsolutely nothing happened in this book of any serious consequence." He also notes that while Conan the Victorious "reminded me of the best aspects of [Jordan's] later Wheel of Time series, this volume reminded me of the worst aspects of it. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the entire, and much derided Perrin/Faile segment from books 8-10 is just an exceptionally blown up version of this novel."[3]

Notes

References

Preceded by Tor Conan series
(publication order)
Succeeded by
Conan the Triumphant
Preceded by Complete Conan Saga
(William Galen Gray chronology)
Succeeded by
"The Hand of Nergal"