Conan: The Robert Jordan Novels

About the Conan: The Robert Jordan Novels series

Years before he began The Wheel of Time, Robert Jordan (then early in his career under the name he'd make famous) was hired to continue Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian in a run of licensed adventure novels for Tor Books. Across seven books, Jordan's Conan roams the Hyborian Age as a mercenary, thief and reluctant hero, brawling through haunted ruins, hostile courts and battlefields in the pulp adventure tradition Howard originated in the 1930s — sorcerers to outwit, kingdoms to topple, and no shortage of monsters and femme fatales along the way.

Jordan wrote these as fast, plot-forward genre entertainment rather than as a stage for the deep worldbuilding he'd later become famous for, and fans looking for early hints of Wheel of Time's scale and moral complexity mostly won't find them here. What the novels do show is a young, prolific writer working confidently within someone else's established universe and house style — solid, unpretentious sword-and-sorcery that holds up as an entry point for both Conan completists and Jordan completists tracing his career from the beginning.

How to read this series

The seven novels don't form a tight ongoing plot the way Jordan's later Wheel of Time books do — each is a mostly self-contained Conan adventure, so reading order matters less than with his epic fantasy work. Publication order is still the simplest way through: Conan the Invincible and Conan the Defender (both 1982), Conan the Unconquered and Conan the Triumphant (both 1983), then Conan the Magnificent, Conan the Destroyer and Conan the Victorious (all 1984). Conan the Destroyer is a novelization of the 1984 film of the same name rather than an original Jordan plot, so readers who only want his original Conan fiction may prefer to treat it as optional. The first three novels were later collected as The Conan Chronicles, and the final three as The Further Chronicles of Conan.