Conan The Free Lance [Mass Market Paperback]

Steve Perry (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 15, 1990

Fate tosses the dice for Conan of Cimmeria, and they come up...death. Dimma, the Mist Mage, knows nothing of the muscular Cimmerian, but the vile necromancer's plans require his death. Thayla, beautiful Queen of the Pili, would rather take Conan to her bed, but her own plots mean he must die. The sorcerous changeling Kleg wasn't only to do his master's bidding, but Conan stands in his way. Even the lovely Cheen will let nothing stop her from recovering the sacred Talisman of her people.

The game is deadly, the stakes are life, but whatever the risks, Conan of Cimmeria will play until the final toss.

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Tor Fantasy; First Edition edition (February 15, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812506901
• ISBN-13: 978-0812506907
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,707,082 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I'm married, got kids, grandkids, dogs, all like that. Ex-hippie, long-time martial artist, duffer on the guitar.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars This is NOT Conan, August 4, 2007

By 

Chess Buddhist (Long Beach, California) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Conan The Free Lance (Mass Market Paperback)

This is not really a Conan tale. The character in no way resembles that of Robert E. Howard or some of the better authors in the series. Perry completely fails to capture the personality, mannerisms, speech and logic of Conan. The movie version of Conan was better than Perry's Conan, to put it bluntly. Perry's story is more like a cheesey 80s space story about a solitary human thrust into a conflict among two different species of aliens. The Pili and Selkie races are basically Saturday morning cartoon characters, only even less dimensional. There is no precedent for such characters in any previous Conan stories that I can find. They don't belong in the cast of characters that populate Hyborea. Perry's use of language lacks style and originality, not to mention this book could have used quite a bit more editing. I would characterize this book as juvenile literature if it weren't for the sexual aggressiveness of one of the characters. Perry also made an attempt at humor, but his jokes and puns are bland and obvious. This just isn't Conan as any real fan would know him.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Only Roland Green and L Sprague de Camp topped this for horrible effect, May 20, 2009

By 

Jay "SarahsJay" (Douglasville, GA, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Conan The Free Lance (Mass Market Paperback)

All right, so let's get some lizard people, some shark people, a wizard who randomly becomes incorporeal, superpowerful electric eels, a city built on a sargasso reef (!), a nearly indescribable monster (apparently Perry found it so), a Conan who's apparently below the australopithecus on the intelligence level, and some hippy tree people. Mix all this with an incomprehensible plot and a lizard woman who screws anything male and two-legged, and you have this book. It's every bit as bad as it sounds.

1.0 out of 5 stars Very cheesy book, August 11, 2004

By 

M. Fisher - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Conan The Free Lance (Mass Market Paperback)

I love my Conan books, but this one is horrible.

First, it's just plain cheesy. The writing - descriptions, point of view, etc. - is elementary. The descriptions are pathetic and vague: "The Kralix was one of a kind... It most resembled a thing that might have been born of wolf, bear, and toad, had the three somehow mated together..." (p. 124) The plot is predictable. There's no suspense, nor are the characters materially different. The point of view is ineffective, given that everyone thinks the exact same things. The repetition is almost unbearable.

Even a marginal editor could have reduced it by a third by tightening the grammar, eliminating repetition, and rewording the descriptions to be more descriptive and precise.

Oh, and despite having to read about it a few times, you never do get an image of a wolf/bear/toad.