Black Colossus
core short fiction 1933 Conan / Kull / Bran Mak Morn
Record
| First published | 1933 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | short fiction |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.75 (756 ratings, collected 2026-09-13) |
| Page count | 183 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9781633553491 |
Synopsis
The ancient sorcerer Thugra Khotan, sealed alive in a tomb for centuries, awakens from his long entombment and, operating under the alias Natohk the veiled prophet, begins gathering desert tribes and dark magic toward the conquest of the Hyborian kingdoms. The small kingdom of Khoraja, ruled by the young Princess Yasmela and left without capable military leadership, faces annihilation unless it can find a commander able to match Natohk's growing horde. Acting on a vision she believes came from her patron god, Yasmela places Khoraja's defense in the hands of Conan, a foreign mercenary captain whose blunt competence contrasts sharply with the court's paralysis in the face of Natohk's supernatural threat.
Where it sits
- Universe: Conan / Kull / Bran Mak Morn
- Series: The Conan Stories core; position 5 of 20 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Robert E. Howard
Notes
- From the series record (The Conan Stories): 20 works wholly written by Robert E. Howard himself (16 published in his lifetime, 1932-1936, plus 4 complete manuscripts he finished but that were rejected by Weird Tales and only published posthumously in his own unaltered text, 1954-1996), the modern Del Rey 'Original Conan' trilogy (ed. Patrice Louinet, 2002-2005) presents all 20 together as the definitive, textually-restored, Howard-only edition. No internal in-story chronological order is recorded here: at least six independent, mutually disagreeing chronologies have been proposed by different editors/scholars since 1936 (Miller/Clark, de Camp's two versions, William Galen Gray, Joe Marek, Dale Rippke), and Howard himself is documented as having 'had little more than a general idea of the character's career path' and deliberately wrote the stories out of sequence, the same principled non-invention applied to Steven Brust's Dragaera. Book order here follows first-publication-of-the-actual-registered-text year, which is a sourced fact, not an invented reading order.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings and are never conflated: a book's place in one says nothing about its place in the other.
- Publication order, within the series The Conan Stories: position 5 of 20: previous The Pool of the Black One (1933) · next Rogues in the House (1934)
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Howard_bibliography
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Barbarian
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Colossus
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