7.6 /10 1 Votes
3.8/5 AbeBooks Country United States Series Conan the Barbarian Media type Print (Paperback) Followed by Conan the Triumphant Publisher Tor Books | 3.8/5 Goodreads Cover artist Kirk Reinert Language English Publication date 1983 Originally published 1983 Preceded by Conan the Defender Genre Sword and sorcery | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Similar Robert Jordan books, Conan (Robert Jordan) books, Sword and sorcery books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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).
Contents
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."
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."