The God in the Bowl
core short fiction 1975 Conan the Barbarian
Record
| First published | 1975 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | short fiction |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.66 (315 ratings, collected 2026-08-31) |
| Page count | 19 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780441116713 |
Where it sits
- Universe: Conan the Barbarian
- Series: The Conan Stories core; position 18 of 20 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Robert E. Howard
Notes
- Complete Howard manuscript rejected by Weird Tales in his lifetime. A heavily rewritten version by L. Sprague de Camp was first published in 1952 (Space Science Fiction, Sep) -- this database registers a different text, not that rewrite. Howard's own restored/unaltered text was first printed in THE TOWER OF THE ELEPHANT (Donald M. Grant, 1975), predating the more widely-cited Wandering Star (2002)/Del Rey 'The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian' (2003) scholarly editions by decades. Correction 2026-08-06: this entry previously listed 1996, sourced from an unverified secondary claim; 1975 is the correct first-appearance year for Howard's own text per reh.world's detailed publication history (Grant 1975 restored text -> Grosset & Dunlap 1978 -> Wandering Star 2002 -> Del Rey 2003 -> Gollancz 2006). No rating-platform work page distinguishes Howard's restored text from de Camp's rewrite -- the only standalone rating-platform page under this title (work id 17567455) is explicitly the 1952 de Camp version, a different registered work by this project's own rule, so it is not used for this book's rating. Reader-rating data collection for this specific book is not expected to be resolvable through the standard per-book rating-platform lookup; it would require either the rating platform adding a distinct restored-text edition page, or a documented exception to the standard lookup.
- 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 19 of 20: previous The Vale of Lost Women (1967) · next The Black Stranger (1987)
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Howard_bibliography
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Barbarian
- https://reh.world/stories/the-god-in-the-bowl/
- https://reh.world/howardworks/hardcovers/conan-wandering-star-1/
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One of 3732 works in the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.