Mark Finn | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | October 1969 |
| Occupation | Writer, Biographer |
| Nationality | American |
| Notable works | Blood & Thunder: The Life & Art of Robert E. Howard |
Mark Finn (born October 1969) is the pseudonym of Mark Farr-Nash, an American science fiction and fantasy writer, essayist, and playwright. In 2007 he was nominated for World Fantasy Special Award: Professional.
Finn's earliest published work was a series of comic book stories that he wrote and drew for Absolute Comics, notably the “Punk” series he created with William Traxtle and Shane Campos, among others, from 1991 to 1994. He left comics in the mid-90s to concentrate on fiction writing. He also wrote a number of essays and articles for Playboy’s online website before establishing his own weekly self-distributed column, “Finn's Wake.”
Finn worked for Chessex Manufacturing for a year, serving as their editor-in-chief, where he worked on a number of product lines including Lost Worlds, Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective, and helped design a variety of ancillary game product tie-ins for Vampire: the Masquerade, Call of Cthulhu, Chessex' Speckled Dice line, and others.
Finn returned to Texas in the late 1990s and formed Clockwork Storybook with fellow writers Chris Roberson, Matthew Sturges, and Bill Willingham. Their monthly shared world anthology of urban fantasy centered on the fictitious city of San Cibola, California, and the magical inhabitants that lived side-by-side with the normal citizens. From this collective, Finn published the novels Gods New & Used and Year of the Hare, the first collection of stories revolving around Sam Bowen. Finn later became a contributing editor for RevolutionSF.com and wrote a number of articles and reviews to the website.
Finn served as the creative director for the Violet Crown Radio Players, an audio theater troupe based in Austin, Texas, from 2002 to 2007. He has written several original scripts to critical acclaim and also adapted novels and short stories to an old time radio format, most notably “The Adventures of Sailor Steve Costigan”, and “King Kong”, which was nominated for a B. Iden Payne award.
He has been active in Robert E. Howard studies since 2002 and is now considered to be a scholar in the field. [1] His biography of Howard, Blood & Thunder: The Life & Art of Robert E. Howard (Monkeybrain, Inc.), was released in November 2006 at the World Fantasy Convention and was a finalist for the 2007 Locus Awards for Best Non-Fiction. [2] For his work on Blood & Thunder, Finn was nominated for the 2007 World Fantasy Award in the Special Award Professional category. [3] Finn won the 2005 Cimmerian Awards for Outstanding Achievement, Best Essay (for “Fists of Robert E. Howard” from The Barbaric Triumph), and the Emerging Scholar plus the 2007 Awards for Outstanding Achievement, Book By A Single Author (for Blood & Thunder) and Outstanding Achievement, Website (along with Leo Grin, Rob Roehm and Steve Tompkins for The Cimmerian blog). [4]
In 2013, 2014 and 2016 Finn was named one of the top movie critics in Texas by the Texas Associated Press Managing Editors awards. [5]
Finn is a founding member of the Gentlemen Nerds podcast.
Conan the Barbarian is a fictional sword and sorcery hero who originated in pulp magazines and has since been adapted to books, comics, films, television programs, video games, and role-playing games. Robert E. Howard created the character in 1932 for a series of fantasy stories published in Weird Tales magazine.
Robert Ervin Howard was an American writer. He wrote pulp fiction in a diverse range of genres. He is well known for his character Conan the Barbarian and is regarded as the father of the sword and sorcery subgenre.
Sword and sorcery (S&S) is a subgenre of fantasy characterized by sword-wielding heroes engaged in exciting and violent adventures. Elements of romance, magic, and the supernatural are also often present. Unlike works of high fantasy, the tales, though dramatic, focus on personal battles rather than world-endangering matters. Sword and sorcery commonly overlaps with heroic fantasy.
The Hour of the Dragon, also known as Conan the Conqueror, is a fantasy novel by American writer Robert E. Howard featuring his sword and sorcery hero Conan the Cimmerian. It was one of the last Conan stories published before Howard's suicide, although not the last to be written. The novel was first published in serial form in the December 1935 through April 1936 issues of the pulp magazine Weird Tales. The first book edition was published by Gnome Press in hardcover in 1950. The Gnome Press edition retitled the story Conan the Conqueror, a title retained by all subsequent editions until 1977, when the original title was restored in an edition issued published by Berkley/Putnam in 1977. The Berkley edition also reverted the text to that of its original Weird Tales publication, discarding later edits. Later editions have generally followed Berkley and published under the original title. The 1997 film Kull the Conqueror is loosely based on The Hour of the Dragon, replacing Conan with Kull but otherwise keeping the same basic plot.
"The People of the Black Circle" is one of the original novellas about Conan the Cimmerian, written by American author Robert E. Howard and first published in Weird Tales magazine in three parts over the September, October and November 1934 issues. Howard earned $250 for the publication of this story.
Gnome Press was an American small-press publishing company primarily known for publishing many science fiction classics. Gnome was one of the most eminent of the fan publishers of SF, producing 86 titles in its lifespan — many considered classic works of SF and Fantasy today. Gnome was important in the transitional period between Genre SF as a magazine phenomenon and its arrival in mass-market book publishing, but proved too underfunded to make the leap from fan-based publishing to the professional level. The company existed for just over a decade, ultimately failing due to inability to compete with major publishers who also started to publish science fiction. In its heyday, Gnome published many of the major SF authors, and in some cases, as with Robert E. Howard's Conan series and Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, was responsible for the manner in which their stories were collected into book form.
Dark Valley Destiny: the Life of Robert E. Howard is a biography of the writer Robert E. Howard by science-fiction writer L. Sprague de Camp in collaboration with Catherine Crook de Camp and Jane Whittington Griffin, first published in hardcover by Bluejay Books in December 1983, and in trade paperback by the same publisher in May 1986. An E-book edition was published by Gollancz's SF Gateway imprint on September 29, 2011, as part of a general release of de Camp's works in electronic form.
Tales of Conan is a 1955 collection of four fantasy short stories by American writers Robert E. Howard and L. Sprague de Camp, featuring Howard's sword and sorcery hero Conan the Barbarian. The tales as originally written by Howard were adventure yarns mostly set in the Middle Ages; they were rewritten as Conan stories by de Camp, who also added the fantastic element. Three of the stories also appeared in the fantasy magazine Fantastic Universe, two of them before publication of the collection and the other one after. The book has also been translated into Japanese. The collection never saw publication in paperback; instead, its component stories were split up and distributed among other "Conan" collections. "The Flame Knife" was later also published as an independent paperback.
Chris Roberson is an American science fiction author and publisher based in Portland, Oregon, best known for alternate history novels and short stories.
Conan, the sword-and-sorcery character created by Robert E. Howard, is the protagonist of seven major comic series published by Dark Horse Comics. The first series, titled simply Conan, ran for 50 issues from 2004 to 2008; the second, titled Conan the Cimmerian, began publication in 2008 and lasted 25 issues until 2010; the third series, titled Conan: Road of Kings, started publishing in December 2010 and ended in January 2012 after 12 issues; a fourth series, titled Conan the Barbarian, continuing from Road of Kings, lasted 25 issues from February 2012 to March 2014; a fifth series, titled Conan the Avenger, started publishing in April 2014 and ended in April 2016 after 25 issues; a sixth and final series, titled Conan the Slayer lasted 12 issues from July 2016 to August 2017.
Clockwork Storybook (CWSB) was a writer's collective and independent book publisher based in Austin, Texas. It specialized in the fantasy, horror and adventure genres.
MonkeyBrain Books is an independent American publishing house based in Austin, Texas, specialising in books comprising both new content and reprinting online, international, or out-of-print content, which show "an academic interest," but which "reach a popular audience as well."
Lou Anders is the author of the Thrones & Bones series of middle grade fantasy novels. Anders is a Hugo Award-winning American editor, a Chesley Award-winning art director, an author and a journalist.
Glenn Lord was an American literary agent, editor, and publisher of the prose and poetry of fellow Texan Robert E. Howard (1906–1936), and the first and most important researcher and scholar of Howard's life and writings.
Robert E. Howard's legacy extended after his death in 1936. Howard's most famous character, Conan the Barbarian, has a pop-culture imprint that has been compared to such icons as Tarzan of the Apes, Count Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, and James Bond. Howard's critical reputation suffered at first but over the decades works of Howard scholarship have been published. The first professionally published example of this was L. Sprague de Camp's Dark Valley Destiny (1983) which was followed by other works, including Don Herron's The Dark Barbarian (1984) and Mark Finn's Blood & Thunder (2006). Also in 2006, a charity, Robert E. Howard Foundation, was created to promote further scholarship.
The works of Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) have been adapted into multiple media, the most famous being the Conan films starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. In addition to the Conan films, other adaptations have included Kull the Conqueror (1997) and Solomon Kane (2009). In television, the anthology series Thriller (1961) led the adaptations with an episode based on the short story "Pigeons from Hell." The bulk of the adaptations have, however, been based on Conan with two animated and one live action series. Multiple audio dramas have been adapted, from professional audio books and plays to LibriVox recordings of works in the public domain. Computer games have focussed on Conan, beginning with Conan: Hall of Volta (1984) and continuing on to the MMO Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures (2008). The first table-top roleplaying game based on Howard's works was TSR's "Conan Unchained!" (1984) for their game Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. The first comic book adaptation was in the Mexican Cuentos de abuelito - La reina de la Costa Negra #8 (1952). Howard-related comic books continued to be published to the present day. Howard is an ongoing inspiration for and influence on heavy metal music. Several bands have adapted Howard's works to tracks or entire albums. The British metal band Bal-Sagoth is named after Howard's story "The Gods of Bal-Sagoth."
The distinctive literary styles and themes of Robert E. Howard rely on a combination of many factors. In his fiction, he used devices borrowed from classical and traditional works, as well as formal rhetoric. In his poetry, he used rhythm, stress, and intonation to achieve a sense of motion. Some of his fiction has been described as prose poetry. His works can be distinguished by his use of violence and hate as positive forces in his universe, which can be seen as a part of the American Myth. In keeping with the era in which he worked, a grim and hardboiled theme pervades. The continuing cycle of civilisation and barbarism is highlighted in several works. Although he died before it was formally defined, an existentialism subtext runs through his writing. He was an aesthete and had affinity for romanticism and neo-romanticism, although in this he was out of step with his era.
Blood & Thunder: The Life & Art of Robert E. Howard is a biography of the writer Robert E. Howard by Mark Finn, first published in a trade paperback edition in November 2006 by MonkeyBrain Books. A second, expanded and corrected edition was published in hardcover by The Robert E. Howard Foundation Press in January 2012; a trade paperback followed from the same publisher in 2013. Both editions include an introduction by suspense writer Joe R. Lansdale.
Conan the Bold is a fantasy novel by American writer John Maddox Roberts, featuring Robert E. Howard's sword and sorcery hero Conan the Barbarian. It was first published in paperback by Tor Books in April 1989 and reprinted in June 1997.
Breckinridge Elkins is a fictional character created by pulp writer Robert E. Howard. He was featured in twenty-six humorous Western short stories, most of which originally appeared in the pages of Action Stories between 1934 and 1937, as well as the novel A Gent from Bear Creek.
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