Talk:Conan the Hunter

Chronological Order vs Publication Order

Placing the books in "chronological order" using Infobox Book will be misleading to those who want to read the original Howard stories.

On other Conan book pages, they include a navigation at the bottom which displays an assumed chronological order.

Please use publication order for the Conan stories. Tng88 (talk) 20:07, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

Also, non-chronological ordering was the intended reading order Robert E. Howard intended for ALL of his stories. Tng88 (talk) 20:11, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

These arguments are not really valid, except for the first. Regarding the first, I would agree that the limited number of original Howard stories should really only link to each other, since they form the basic "canon." I would also, however, contend that anything but chronological links among the rest would mislead many more readers, since there's no other way to make any sense of the vast number of non-Howardian Conan stories.

Regarding your second argument, the bottom navigation has not been extended to all the Conan stories, and so in many instances does not provided a viable alternative. Plus, Having one scheme in the infobox and another at the bottom of the page is likely to prove more confusing to readers.

Regarding your third statement, that is not an argument for using publication order, but a request to comply with a scheme there appears little justification for adopting. You should not expect it to be agreed to without better arguments than you have advanced.

Regarding your fourth statement, that is also not an argument, but an assertion, backed up by nothing. It has not been demonstrated in what order Howard intended his stories to be read; the fact that they were written and published in random order provides no indication of how he might have organized the material had he lived to shepherd them through book publication. And even if he did intend them to be read non-chronologically, so what? That would apply only to the stories he wrote himself. The later stories by other hands were all written with reference to an assumed chronology of Conan's life. The Gnome and Ace/Lancer series in particular were each designed to be read as a chronological sequence, even though not published in chronological order. And for the Tor series, which actually seems to be the main focus of your insistence that publication order be used, publication order would be completely artificial. Tor itself never listed its books that way, but in alphabetical order by title! Unless we are to adopt that ridiculous scheme, the only order that would be of any use to a reader is a chronological one. Any other order simply links the reader willy-nilly, without apparent rhyme or reason, to books bearing no intrinsic relationship to the one that is the subject of the article.

I would also note that your attempts to provide publication-order links in the infoboxes actually made a hash of the actual publication order, most egregiously by linking to the books original published by Bantam before the Tor series even started in the order of their later reprinting by Tor. I also find it difficult to see how you could justify your incorporation of Tor's omnibus editions of books it had previously published as single volumes into a single "publication order" scheme with the single volumes.

Frankly, having no links to other books in the infobox would be more sensible than to provide links in publication order!

Sometime in the next day or so I'll go through and fix these articles again -- probably by removing the infobox links entirely, in the absence of agreement on a proper order. Removing them which would be infinitely better than continuing to mess them up. Thereafter, perhaps, the bottom-of-the-page chronological linking that you do not appear to find objectionable can at some point be extended to the Conan story articles that do not presently have them. BPK (talk) 21:22, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

Whoops. I made a few mistakes but I did correct them.

My "forth argument" being an assertion being backed up by nothing, is false. Howard wrote a reply to a fan's letter saying something along the lines of "In writing these yarns I’ve always felt less as creating them than as if I were simply chronicling his adventures as he told them to me. That’s why they skip about so much, without following a regular order. The average adventurer, telling tales of a wild life at random, seldom follows any ordered plan, but narrates episodes widely separated by space and years, as they occur to him." That can be found within the first few pages of The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, one of the few instances were Howard's Conan stories were published as they "occurred" to him.

I could write more but... Tng88 (talk) 22:12, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

Yes, I've noticed your corrections. Good for you. Your follow-up on your fourth statement does not negate anything I wrote about it. Howard's reply is about the writing. It really does say nothing about how he might ultimately have decided to arrange his collected Conan writings, had he lived. We really can't infer anything as to what his thoughts might have been in that regard. BPK (talk) 02:58, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

It does say something about the reading order. There is no reading order. Wouldn't inferring a chronology of any sort go against what Howard said? No what if's this time.Tng88 (talk) 03:34, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

There is no authorially definitive reading order. Some sort of reading order in unavoidable for anyone who reads more than one story.

As for the question of whether inferring a chronology goes against what Howard said, no it doesn't. As per your words, there are no what ifs about it. He plainly inferred a chronology himself, even if hazily, and never set out precisely. There is plenty of evidence for this in the stories themselves. Howard shows us Conan at different ages, and remembering the events of some stories in others; the character carried his history with him from story to story even as the stories skipped backward and forward within that history. Howard did not not reinvent the character anew as a blank slate in each story. The chronological clues are of course scattered, and in some tales lacking, rendering some easy to place in relationship to each other chronologically and others a matter of judgment that may vary depending on who is judging. But that Howard had some notion of how the events of Conan's life all fit together is undeniable. He applauded Miller and Clark's effort to put the stories in chronological order as "surprisingly accurate," noting "Your outline follows his career as I have visualized it pretty closely. The differences are minor." These quotes are from the same Howard letter you quote. He then, in the same letter, went on to provide more details of Conan's life as he envisioned it. So there is no problem with inferring a chronology. While people can argue endlessly (and have) about exactly what exact arrangement of the stories would best reflect Howard's chronological vision, the vision itself certainly existed. BPK (talk) 14:21, 18 July 2012 (UTC)