The People of the Black Circle
core novella 1934 Conan / Kull / Bran Mak Morn
Record
| First published | 1934 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novella |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.72 (653 ratings, collected 2026-09-13) |
| Page count | 149 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9781681463919 |
Synopsis
Now chieftain of a fierce Afghuli hill tribe on the frontier of Vendhya, Conan kidnaps Devi Yasmina, the kingdom's ruling princess, intending to hold her for ransom and leverage against Vendhya's forces. His plan is complicated when the sorcerous Black Seers of Yimsha, a reclusive order with designs of their own on Yasmina and on Vendhya's throne, intervene in the conflict, while rival Vendhyan and Turanian factions each maneuver to seize the princess and the political advantage she represents. As pursuit and counter-pursuit sweep through the mountain passes between the Black Seers' stronghold and the lowlands, Conan finds himself drawn into a struggle far larger than the simple ransom he first intended, and increasingly bound to Yasmina's fate.
Where it sits
- Universe: Conan / Kull / Bran Mak Morn
- Series: The Conan Stories core; position 10 of 20 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Robert E. Howard
Notes
- Serialized in 3 parts, Weird Tales Sep-Nov 1934.
- 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 10 of 20: previous The Devil in Iron (1934) · next A Witch Shall Be Born (1934)
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Howard_bibliography
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Barbarian
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People_of_the_Black_Circle
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