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Adventures of Conan
Conan of the Red Brotherhood
While the decadent Emperor Vildiz and his corrupt allies plot the destruction of the barbarian Amra the Lion, Conan carves out a pirate empire with the strength of his cutlass and dagger. Reissue.
- GenresFantasySword and Sorcery
288 pages, Paperback
First published February 15, 1993
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188 people want to read
About the author
Leonard Carpenter
51 books18 followersLeonard Paul Carpenter (born 1948) is an American technical writer and author of fantasy, historical and futurist fiction. He began by selling horror/fantasy tales and Conan the Barbarian sequels, eleven novels totaling a million words. This is more of the Conan saga than any other author living or dead, including Conan's inspired creator Robert E. Howard in the 1930's. Now Carpenter breaks out of sci-fantasy with his mainstream historical opus Lusitania Lost, a wartime epic of the sinking of the luxury liner in 1915 by a German U-boat, which ultimately caused the US to enter WWI. This is the first novelization of an event more dramatic and significant than the Titanic tragedy 3 years earlier. Carpenter has also written the screenplay adaptation of this book. Another novel of his, the future-history thriller Biohacker, is available on Amazon Kindle. Carpenter is the widowed survivor of a 50-year courtship and marriage, proud father of 3, and owner of a superstar Frisbee dog, Lizzie. He spends his time traveling and writing about a Cuban fantasy quest and real-life engagement in his just-published novel, Tropic of Cuba, now serialized on Kindle Vella at Amazon (first chapters free!)
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
July 7, 2022
Leonard Carpenter wrote eleven Conan novels, more than any other single author (yes, including Howard or de Camp or Jordan), and this was one of my favorites. Conan's character always meshed well with piracy, and Carpenter added a dimension of quirky steampunk flavor in a naval competition that runs parallel to the buccaneer storyline. There are also political machinations, zombies, dark sorceries, beautiful women, and plenty of action-packed adventure. (And a giant centipede that Ken Kelly should have used on the cover instead of zombies.) It wouldn't be mistaken for Howard's work, but it's a nice homage and pastiche.
April 10, 2021
En trevlig transportsträckebok utan några enorma fascinationspunkter. Försöken med ångdrivna båtar som beskrivs är lite roliga, men inte mer.
March 11, 2019
Conan is back to pirating, this time on the Vilayet Sea. The pirating business agrees with him, his biggest problems being women problems and other pirates. Conan has big plans for making the pirate base into a Pirate Nation with an organized fleet and some form of governmental structure. The other pirates are just into piracy and don't have his vision.
In Agraphur the Prince Yezdigerd announces a contest to improve the navy. We follow one man who has the silly idea of using steam to drive a ship. Other more practical ideas include man made wind power and zombies. Conan's piracy adversely affects one of the contestants, and King Yildiz's money along with some pirate treachery adversely affect Conan.
It's a good book with two converging storylines instead of the usual quest or Conan on the warpath thing. Conan would just as soon leave Agriphur alone, he is serious about his Pirate Nation plan. Aleph, the navy contestant, hardly even knows Conan exists. The two are going about their business until circumstances bring them together. The book has some pretty good naval battles, Conan engages in a lot more strategy than normal, there is necromancy and water demons and Conan fights a centipede.
In Agraphur the Prince Yezdigerd announces a contest to improve the navy. We follow one man who has the silly idea of using steam to drive a ship. Other more practical ideas include man made wind power and zombies. Conan's piracy adversely affects one of the contestants, and King Yildiz's money along with some pirate treachery adversely affect Conan.
It's a good book with two converging storylines instead of the usual quest or Conan on the warpath thing. Conan would just as soon leave Agriphur alone, he is serious about his Pirate Nation plan. Aleph, the navy contestant, hardly even knows Conan exists. The two are going about their business until circumstances bring them together. The book has some pretty good naval battles, Conan engages in a lot more strategy than normal, there is necromancy and water demons and Conan fights a centipede.
March 16, 2022
Conan is having a jolly old time with his band of seadogs raping and pillaging his way across the Vilayet. This draws the ire of the Turanian empire, who want no distractions from their battle for naval dominance with... Hyrkania. Yeah, Carpenter's interpretation of Hyborian geopolitics is a bit leftfield. Anyhow, a prince of Turan sponsors a naval competition, inviting the best minds of the land to devise a naval machine that can best Conan. In short, none do.
A fun read, with saucy pirates, giant centipedes, and a whiff of steampunk. Only downside is that you quickly forget you're reading a Conan novel, because the protagonist could easily be replaced with any fantasy hero and the book would work just as well.
A fun read, with saucy pirates, giant centipedes, and a whiff of steampunk. Only downside is that you quickly forget you're reading a Conan novel, because the protagonist could easily be replaced with any fantasy hero and the book would work just as well.
March 15, 2025
Surprise, surprise. Another excruciatingly terrible pastiche by Leonard Carpenter, an author who seems determined to write the absolute worst Conan books imaginable with every sentence.
Spoilers incoming...
First of all, Conan is once again only in half the book at the most... and when he is present, he's a pale shadow of Howard's Conan. He's extremely inept, easily overpowered, and often needs saving by others during battle scenes. This is seen on multiple occasions. First, when Conan is battling the giant centipede about halfway through the book, he can't land a single effective blow. Then, when the creature is on top of him and about to kill him, Conan gets saved at the last second by other pirates who slay it from behind. Then, when Conan is later fighting the pirate Knulf, he is also barely holding his own until Knulf is slain from behind by one of Conan's love interests. There seems to be a pattern here... Hell, there's even a part where Conan struggles fighting and wrestling a female pirate half his size. And that's not to mention Conan freely taking insults and beatings during captivity without biting back in any way. In this novel, Conan is a subdued, weak-willed, and entirely neutered version of Howard's character, which is typical for pretty much all of Carpenter's Conan books after his first two.
To add to this, Conan's methods and character are constantly questioned, challenged, and belittled by all those around him in this book. Since it's obvious Carpenter doesn't actually like writing Conan at this point and is solely doing so to pay the bills, it's very clear that this is actually Carpenter himself trying to question and belittle Howard's character... which is hilarious, considering Carpenter isn't a hundredth of the writer Howard was, and all his own characters are childishly two-dimensional and extremely uninteresting at best.
Anyway, like I say, Conan is only in maybe half of this book. There are many, many long stretches in which he doesn't appear, and all of the Conan-less sections of this novel are nothing more than time-wasting filler. Sometimes this filler takes the form of tedious chapter-long descriptions painfully describing every single unimportant detail of extremely boring manmade contraptions. Other times the filler is in the form of Carpenter dragging out every single piece of dialogue ten times longer than needed to reach some kind of predetermined word count (this includes characters constantly having paragraph-long monologues and pages-long exchanges even in the middle of combat, which completely saps the book dry of any excitement or momentum). This results in every character speaking in the most obnoxious, long-winded, pompous way imaginable, removing any unique tone of voice for any of them and making every character sound the exact same (like a grating poor man's Shapespeare vomiting a thesaurus) whether they're an emperor or a peasant pirate. And, at other times, the filler comes in the form of Carpenter desperately trying to cram as much dull naval terminology into the book as possible, for no apparent reason other than to show off that he knows this terminology, flow be damned. Example...
"Captain Santhindrissa angled her spare, supple frame across the steering-bench to lean on the bireme's rail. One lank arm rested, through evident habit, across the star-board sweep, whose thick helve was steadied in place by tackles strung from the rail to the high, overhanging stern post."
And this is just the first example I could find flicking back through the book. There are many, many sections worse than this - sometimes over a dozen pages long - in which literally nothing happens except for Carpenter forcefully cramming as much naval terminology into the book as he can, agonisingly describing completely inconsequential things that are of no interest to the reader and no relevance to the story, with all the finesse of a warhammer to the crotch. His writing resembles a teenage student who has written an essay, only do discover they've only reached 30% of the word count, so they go back through the entire thing and fluff up every single sentence to laughable proportions just to get the essay to the length it needs to be... and it's absolutely excruciating to read.
This is reflected in Conan's speech too. He's the only character in the whole book with a remotely unique tone of voice - and even then, he sounds nothing like Howard's Conan. Instead, he sounds like a Captain Jack Sparrow knock-off with half his dialogue, once again showing that Carpenter doesn't really want to be writing Conan but is simply using the disguise of a 'Conan pastiche' to peddle his own far inferior work.
All in all, this is just another typical example of Leonard Carpenter's Conan pastiches, which are always an equal blend of boring, frustrating, grating, baffling, and downright laughable. At this point, I honestly feel like all my reviews of Carpenter's Conan pastiches are the same, but that's because he just repeats the same flaws over and over again. Even the elements that should be interesting (undead pirates, centipede demons, etc.) fall completely flat because of the amount of tripe the reader has to endure to get to them - and even then, these elements are written as weakly and anti-climatically as possible. In fact, by the time the end climax began, I had already mentally checked out long ago and was only skim-reading the remaining pages to get this book ticked off my Conan reading list.
For all these reasons, this book gets a single star from me, and probably cements Leonard Carpenter as my least favourite author - not just of Conan pastiches, but of anything I've ever read, period.
Spoilers incoming...
First of all, Conan is once again only in half the book at the most... and when he is present, he's a pale shadow of Howard's Conan. He's extremely inept, easily overpowered, and often needs saving by others during battle scenes. This is seen on multiple occasions. First, when Conan is battling the giant centipede about halfway through the book, he can't land a single effective blow. Then, when the creature is on top of him and about to kill him, Conan gets saved at the last second by other pirates who slay it from behind. Then, when Conan is later fighting the pirate Knulf, he is also barely holding his own until Knulf is slain from behind by one of Conan's love interests. There seems to be a pattern here... Hell, there's even a part where Conan struggles fighting and wrestling a female pirate half his size. And that's not to mention Conan freely taking insults and beatings during captivity without biting back in any way. In this novel, Conan is a subdued, weak-willed, and entirely neutered version of Howard's character, which is typical for pretty much all of Carpenter's Conan books after his first two.
To add to this, Conan's methods and character are constantly questioned, challenged, and belittled by all those around him in this book. Since it's obvious Carpenter doesn't actually like writing Conan at this point and is solely doing so to pay the bills, it's very clear that this is actually Carpenter himself trying to question and belittle Howard's character... which is hilarious, considering Carpenter isn't a hundredth of the writer Howard was, and all his own characters are childishly two-dimensional and extremely uninteresting at best.
Anyway, like I say, Conan is only in maybe half of this book. There are many, many long stretches in which he doesn't appear, and all of the Conan-less sections of this novel are nothing more than time-wasting filler. Sometimes this filler takes the form of tedious chapter-long descriptions painfully describing every single unimportant detail of extremely boring manmade contraptions. Other times the filler is in the form of Carpenter dragging out every single piece of dialogue ten times longer than needed to reach some kind of predetermined word count (this includes characters constantly having paragraph-long monologues and pages-long exchanges even in the middle of combat, which completely saps the book dry of any excitement or momentum). This results in every character speaking in the most obnoxious, long-winded, pompous way imaginable, removing any unique tone of voice for any of them and making every character sound the exact same (like a grating poor man's Shapespeare vomiting a thesaurus) whether they're an emperor or a peasant pirate. And, at other times, the filler comes in the form of Carpenter desperately trying to cram as much dull naval terminology into the book as possible, for no apparent reason other than to show off that he knows this terminology, flow be damned. Example...
"Captain Santhindrissa angled her spare, supple frame across the steering-bench to lean on the bireme's rail. One lank arm rested, through evident habit, across the star-board sweep, whose thick helve was steadied in place by tackles strung from the rail to the high, overhanging stern post."
And this is just the first example I could find flicking back through the book. There are many, many sections worse than this - sometimes over a dozen pages long - in which literally nothing happens except for Carpenter forcefully cramming as much naval terminology into the book as he can, agonisingly describing completely inconsequential things that are of no interest to the reader and no relevance to the story, with all the finesse of a warhammer to the crotch. His writing resembles a teenage student who has written an essay, only do discover they've only reached 30% of the word count, so they go back through the entire thing and fluff up every single sentence to laughable proportions just to get the essay to the length it needs to be... and it's absolutely excruciating to read.
This is reflected in Conan's speech too. He's the only character in the whole book with a remotely unique tone of voice - and even then, he sounds nothing like Howard's Conan. Instead, he sounds like a Captain Jack Sparrow knock-off with half his dialogue, once again showing that Carpenter doesn't really want to be writing Conan but is simply using the disguise of a 'Conan pastiche' to peddle his own far inferior work.
All in all, this is just another typical example of Leonard Carpenter's Conan pastiches, which are always an equal blend of boring, frustrating, grating, baffling, and downright laughable. At this point, I honestly feel like all my reviews of Carpenter's Conan pastiches are the same, but that's because he just repeats the same flaws over and over again. Even the elements that should be interesting (undead pirates, centipede demons, etc.) fall completely flat because of the amount of tripe the reader has to endure to get to them - and even then, these elements are written as weakly and anti-climatically as possible. In fact, by the time the end climax began, I had already mentally checked out long ago and was only skim-reading the remaining pages to get this book ticked off my Conan reading list.
For all these reasons, this book gets a single star from me, and probably cements Leonard Carpenter as my least favourite author - not just of Conan pastiches, but of anything I've ever read, period.
February 7, 2026
This one had a few good moments but the ending was just a boring boat battle that was hard for me to follow, and I stopped caring. Skip.
January 4, 2009
Conan pastiche
June 22, 2011
A GREAT PIRATICAL ADVENTURE ON THE VILAYET SEA. ONCE AGAIN, LEONARD CARPENTER DELIVERS THE GOODS!
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews