Conan
Conan is a 1967 collection of seven fantasy short stories and associated pieces written by Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter featuring Howard's seminal sword and sorcery hero Conan the Barbarian. Most of the stories were originally published in various pulp magazines.
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What Hacker News says
- Check out Robert E. Howard's Conan short stories. These are very well written and are in public domain.
- Well, this worked for me: head over to http://www.feedbooks.com/author/245 (that's the Robert E. Howard of Conan fame).
Pick up any one of the stories tagged "Western". They're almost all humorous stories about a larger-than-life-yet-naive frontier-man who bashes his enemies plentifully, is in turn knocked about and shot at quite a bit, but survives to prevail. Most of his enemies also survive.
With appropriate search-replace, one could probably produce amusing software development parables from those stories. They're about the right length, too.
- A friend recently related the life of Robert E. Howard in a really fascinating way, and one of the points he made about how he got into writing Conan really stuck with me.
Howard started out writing historical fiction, but the research was pretty grueling and the outcomes mediocre, so he switched to a sort of adventurous self-insert character in historical fantasy settings, which later turned into Conan.
When I consider notable science fiction authors, they all seem to start with some understanding of a facet of the natural universe, then tease ideas into explorations of those points. To the layman on reflection, this might seem like some sort of predictive exercise, but I see it as a sort of rote process of extrapolation. Contrast that to science fantasy authors who focus on theme and aesthetic, imagining Westerns in future-space with gadgets or contemporary plots in scifi-associated settings, and there's quite a vast and exciting landscape left to be explored.
- > "they set off the tuning fork in the loins of your own dogmatism."
Eh... I don't know. To me, that sounds very AI-ish.
Claude is very good -- at times -- coming up with flowery metaphoric language... if you tell it to. That one is so over-the-top that I'd edit it out.
Put something like this in your prompt and have it revise something:
"Make this read like Jim Thompson crossed with Thomas Harris, filtered through a paperback rack at a truck stop circa 1967. Make it gritty, efficient, and darkly comedic. Don't shy away from suggesting more elegant words or syntax. (For instance, Robert Howard -- Conan -- and H.P. Lovecraft were definitely pulp, but they had a sophisticated vocabulary.) I really want some purple prose and overwrought metaphors."
Occasionally you'll get some gems. Claude is much better than ChatGPT at this kinda stuff. The BEST ones are the ever-growing NSFW models populating huggingface.
In short, do the posts on OpenClawForum all sound alike? Of course.
Just like all the webpages circa 2000 looked alike. The uniformity wasn't because of HTML... rather it was because few people were using HTML to its full potential.
- Oftentimes, intentionally using superfluous words, particularly obscure words, is important in building mood.
Lovecraft for instance. And Robert Howard (author of Conan).
And, the granddaddy of all: Thomas Carlyle whose “French Revolution” is packed with metaphor, simile, superfluous words, and convoluted sentences... indeed, he made fun of the way he writes in “Sartur Resartus” in a hilarious fashion.
- Standard Ebooks (courtesy of @acabal) has Gatsby up and available: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/f-scott-fitzgerald/the-gre...
For my part, I added two newly available non-Conan Robert E. Howard stories to our shorts compilation: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/robert-e-howard/short-fict...
