Who better to interview a living legend than another living legend? “Talking with Tom” is the second installment of a new Tor.com series in which Tor publisher Tom Doherty chats with one of the many authors and industry icons whose careers he helped launch and shape.

Please enjoy this fascinating and wide-ranging conversation between Tom Doherty and Harriet McDougal, who collaborated for decades on many iconic science fiction and fantasy titles, including of course every novel in The Wheel of Time series. Tom and Harriet discussed Harriet’s work as an editor, her late husband’s career (including information about an as-yet unpublished fantasy novel by Jordan), the Wheel of Time’s famous artwork, and of course the recently released final installment in the series, A Memory of Light. Also present was Irene Gallo, Art Director for Tor Books.

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Take the early wardrobe and make-up tests for Star Trek: The Next Generation, set them to creepy music, and let the scare times roll in. Brent Spiner has never looked shinier or more terrifying. (Like, literally he hasn’t. They thankfully toned down his look for the actual who.) Check out the full video here for more old school Next Generation. (via io9)

Your daily offsite links are programmed in multiple techniques. Highlights include:

1. A monster-mash mash-up
2. What is going on with the new Conan.
3. Asteroids!

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Deadline is reporting that Arnold Schwarzenegger is set to return to his role as Conan the Barbarian in new movie The Legend of Conan, debuting in summer 2014, a time that surely will be fondly remembered as “the Shirtless Summer.”

[Oh, but there’s more]

Mankind, not content to merely jump from space to the surface of the Earth, also recently set the record for shortest free-fall during a stunt on a recent episode of Conan. Check out video below the cut.

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Just how upset should you be on a day-to-day basis about the death of the dinosaurs? If you were to hang out with us, we’d answer that question with “very.” If you aren’t sad about the dinosaurs being dead, there’s a chance you’re part of the problem. Best Week Ever agrees with us so much that they recently lost their cool about HBO’s new show Girls excluding raptors from mainstream media once again. Did everyone forget how smart raptors are? I mean, the man said “clever girl” for crying out loud. Didn’t HBO think “Clever girls” could have been a good tagline for this show, had it included raptors?

We continue to be confused. Your offsite links always travel in packs.

Highlights include:

1. More on the real-life asteroid mining.
2. Jim C. Hines poses like a man.
3. What Palpatine’s face almost looked like.

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At the time of his death in 1936, thirty-year-old Robert E. Howard had published hundreds of works of fiction across an astonishingly broad swath of genres. His voluminous output, according to Paul Herman of the Robert E. Howard Foundation, is estimated to have been “approximately 3.5 million words of fiction, poetry, letters and articles.” Among those millions of words were the iconic stories of Conan the Cimmerian, a character whose popularity has firmly established Howard’s reputation as the father of heroic fantasy, parallel to J.R.R. Tolkien’s place as father of epic fantasy.

But while Howard was an extraordinarily prolific writer, he was also a somewhat disorganized one and left behind a trunk of unpublished works. The so-called “Howard Trunk” contained thousands of typewritten pages by Howard. These abandoned stories and early drafts were collected and published in 2007 by The REH Foundation Press as The Last of the Trunk.

[One manuscript, however, baffled the Howard estate.]

My late father was a massive Conan nerd; he had boxes and boxes of Conan comics, would hold court endlessly about how awesome Conan was to anyone who didn’t get out of the way fast enough, and took me to both of the movies in the 80s starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. (He was deeply impressed that I knew who James Earl Jones in the first, and Wilt Chamberlain and Grace Jones in the second, were already at the age of like 6). Until the very end, nothing was more sure to bring a smile to dad’s face than the line, “You killed my snake.” I hate to think how terribly disappointed the old boy would have been by the new Conan the Barbarian. It’s really not good. At all.

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Arnold Schwarzenegger brought the Barbarian to the mainstream in 1982. Today, Jason Momoa brings the Barbarian back to the big screen in Conan the Barbarian.

But Conan is much more than a Hollywood icon; he is the legendary Cimmerian on a quest to conquer the pages of Robert E. Howard’s Conan of Cimmeria series. Now you can follow the amazing tales of Conan brought to life by narrator Todd McLaren.

[Free audio excerpts below]

Hither came Conan the Cimmerian, black-haired [badly wigged], sullen-eyed, looking mostly confused, sword in hand, [with] a thief, a reaver [former NBA star], and slayer Grace Jones, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet [and amazing jockstrap].

If you watch Conan the Destroyer back-to-back with Conan the Barbarian, it should take you less than five minutes to divine know how bad this movie is going to be. In the thirty years since I last saw it, I’d forgotten just how terrible it is. The Carmina-Burana-like “Anvil of Crom” theme that started the original has been replaced by a more upbeat adventure theme; the forging of a sword is now footage of horsemen wearing armor that looks suspiciously like armor from the first film; and we’ve been informed that Wilt Chamberlain is playing a role, and may be speaking lines. Things go rapidly downhill from there, and never recover.

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This is the first of two reflections on the Arnold Schwarzenegger Conan films from the 1980s. (Check back tomorrow on Tor.com for the second one.) Both bear titles that reference the lines from Robert E. Howard’s first published Conan story, “The Phoenix on the Sword,” made famous as the epigraph to issues of Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian comic series: “Hither came Conan the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet.” We’ll get to the gigantic mirth soon enough with Conan the Destroyer. For now, we’ll focus on the gigantic melancholies of the first film, John Milius’s Conan the Barbarian, from 1982.

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Part three of a three part series. Check back at this link to read them all.

All considerations of talent and natural inclination aside, writing was important to Robert Howard for two reasons. Strictly controlled and home and resenting it, he couldn’t have lasted very long at any job where he had to obey someone else. Temperamentally, he had to be a freelance writer. After high school, he made a pact with his father, that his father would pay for him to take a bookkeeping course at a local business college. Afterwards, he had one year to prove he could make a living as a writer. Failing that, he’d have to become a bookkeeper, a career in which Robert would doubtless have gone stark raving mad very quickly.

Fortunately, he got to be a writer, but it was a near thing.

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Part two of a three part series. Check back at this link to read them all.

Robert E. Howard committed suicide at the age of thirty. While that no more sums up who he was and why he matters than it is adequate to say that William Shakespeare was a guy with a receding hairline, Howard’s self-destruction looms large in any consideration of him. Early on June 11, 1936, as his mother lay dying, Robert Howard asked the attendant nurse if she would ever recover consciousness and the nurse said gently, “No.” Howard then stepped outside and got into his car. No one present thought anything of this, because he made a daily run into town (Cross Plains, Texas) to pick up his mail. But then a shot rang out. Robert slumped over the steering wheel. He had shot himself above the right ear, the bullet passing out the other side of his head. He died eight hours later, without regaining consciousness. His mother died the next day.

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Part one of a three part series. Check back at this link to read them all.

Know, O Reader, that long before anybody thought of making a Conan movie, long before Arnold Schwarzenegger was born or Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian #1 appeared on the newstands, in 1932, to be precise, the world’s most famous Barbarian sprang to life in the pages of Weird Tales magazine under the byline of Robert E. Howard (1906-1936). Any suggestion that Conan is the work of many hands — some reference works will say “Robert E. Howard and others” is rather like saying Sherlock Holmes was created by “A. Conan Doyle and others.” No, there have been subsequent pastiches, reinterpretations, and movie adaptations, but the real, 100% bona fide Conan is Howard’s.

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It all began with an unassuming cover, from a Marvel comic called Chamber of Darkness #4, in the spring of 1970. A clash of grim Victoriana and mod fashions, the image on the front of that comic recalled the darker side of Edward Jekyll from Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous novella and featured an ominous caption which read “And the Monster Man Came Walking – Walking – ”

But what was more important, perhaps passing unnoticed by the young readers who grabbed that 15-cent issue off the spinner rack at the local corner store, was the small yellow text box in the lower-left hand corner of that cover. “Also, in this incredible issue…” it read, “The Man who Owned the World” and “The Secret of the Silver Sword.”

That last title, odd for a horror comic, is the one that matters. It’s where Conan was born, at least in the pages of Marvel Comics. Readers didn’t realize it at the time. But that’s okay, because neither did the writer or the artist.

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To Game of Thrones fans, Jason Momoa is better known as Khal Drogo, the Dothraki leader. But now, he might be known by another name: Conan! Like he says in the trailer, how many names does he need? (The number of shirts he needs is apparently zero.) Complete with Ron Perlman, this bloodbath may end your summer on fun, if maybe a little cheesy note. What do you think of the new Barbarian?

Hrmmm...this might be one of those movies where 2:14 minutes is enough. What say you REH fans? Looking forward to, or dreading, this August 19th release?

Dark Horse Comics just sent along the finished cover for the upcoming issue #5 of Conan: The Road of Kings, adapted by Roy Thomas and drawn by Mike Hawthorne and John Lucas.

The cover artist depicting Conan’s forthcoming (and messy, judging from the angle) execution is longtime Conan and Star Wars artist Doug Wheatley. His portfolio is up for persual here.

Conan: The Road of Kings #5 comes out on April 20th, the first issue is on stands now. Thanks to Dark Horse for the sneak peek!

Italian movie producer Dino De Laurentiis has died at the age of 91. A film student in Rome whose studies were interrupted by World War II, De Laurentiis got his start in producing by working with legendary directors Roberto Rossellini and Federico Fellini during the height of the Italian neo-realist period. He was successful enough at it that by the 1960s, De Laurentiis built his own studio facilities in Italy.

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It’s cold outside, so let’s curl up under the covers and undertake “The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath”!

The Story:

Randolph Carter, traveler of the dreamlands, decides he wants to find the unknown city of Kadath after dreaming about it, so he undertakes an interminable quest through the world of dreams to find the city. He meets some friendly cats, he sails to the moon, he goes to many places with dumb names and meets creatures and people with dumb names, all in his quest to find Kadath because…he feels like it.

[Does he find Kadath?  I don’t know either!  But please keep reading anyway!]