When Robert E. Howard chronicled the adventures of Conan the Cimmerian, he also created a fictional history of the so-called Hyborian Age. That fictional history dealt not only with the period during and after Conan's life, but also with events some eight thousand years earlier, during the Thurian civilization which gave rise to King Kull, an exiled warrior from Atlantis in the days before that continent sank into the surging seas.
It is a world that has been shaken by several cataclysms and other catastrophes, which have caught the inhabitants, pre-human, non-human and human, every time roughly at the threshold from bronze age to iron age, destroying their civilisations with a thoroughness, that they often forgot all their former glory and were thrown back into what we might superciliously term savagery, having to begin the whole cycle anew from scratch, developing upward, or downward, depending on what view of civilisation you are taking. The Hyborian age grew on the rubble left by the last series of cataclysms.
Whenever the Hyborian age is, was or will be, from our point of view it is a past age, and as such much better than the present one, as all times past are, including last year, although it may have seemed pretty rotten when it was the present year.
Maybe the attraction of the Hyborian world is that it never reached that stage of civilization when useless theoretical constructs like Freudian psychology and social sciences evolved, which fail to become any less inaccurate and superficial, however much they are regurgitated in universities and courts, to gloss over the fact that some people are just plain bad and useless.

Hyborian No-nos

Hyborian Oh-Nos

Oh yes? Oh No? Oh well?

Last exit to the Hyborian world

The theories that shall now be forwarded here about where, when or what the Hyborian world is are adventurous at best, and that’s putting it tamely. Neither are they based on any facts that could be counted, weighed or measured, but such facts have gone out of fashion anyway, to the extent that they aren’t considered polite. Little is known of the position of the hyborian world in the forth dimension. It has been suggested, that the hyborian age began about 15000 years ago, or that it hails back to the times when Europe, Asia and Africa were still one continent.
In the light of recent discoveries in the field of the physics of an increasingly complex and perplexing universe we may want to embrace more ludicrous theories. Whenever it is or was or will be, the existence of magic in the hyborian world and the relative lack of it in the world we go to work, pay mortgages and bring up our beautiful children in, is a clear indication that its location in the fifth dimension must be different from that of the one we spend most of our time in.

You are here

Our world is situated in the sector of higher probabilities, where a special case of the General Law of Probability applies, discovered by an individual who denies that his name is Murphy, the law not named after him being for the General Law of Probabilities what Newtonian physics are for the General Theory of Relativity.
The five dimensions branch out in the future which means that in the present they are a bewildering haze of other cues being shorter, the other decision having been the right one and missing city busses by exactly 15 seconds, this being completely unrelated to the time you set out to catch them. The next one will be behind schedule and break down on the way.
Thus along the fifth dimension, in order of increasing probability, lie the Brave New Worlds which have been described in several fascinatingly gloomy works.

Just a jump to the left - The Would-Have-Been-If -sector

In the other direction of the fifth dimension, just a jump to the left in fact, a string of worlds extends beside ours in order of decreasing probability, beginning with the one where everybody isn’t so stupid, greedy, egotistical, cowardly and lacking sleep as we are here and were one doesn't miss city busses. Actually it is surprising how little it matters in the long run, if one catches a particular bus or not. All our better and happier selves are hanging out there, the one who has kept that first strong vow never to touch liquor again, or at least the fifth, the one who never puts up tedious tasks until manhana, gets up early and always is at the busstop in time. It is unlikely that a better version of this writer exists in these worlds, there’s sure to be a sort of a blank were she should be, the smug cow.

And another step to the left– oops -yaaaaaah

A step to the left of the Would-Have-Been-If sector there is an anomaly in the probability axis, like a narrow but very deep chasm of a fuzzy blue colour, and beyond the deep fuzzy blue lies a set of worlds where laws other than Murphies apply. These are charmed worlds, where several other laws that govern nature and human society do not apply neither, or at least not with such tediously persistent causality, giving us a break now and then. The Hyborian world lies there, stark Cimmeria, powerhungry Aquilonia, Shadizar the Wicked and Arenjun, City of Thieves, fabulous Vendhya and fabled Khitai, all there.
Beyond the Hyborian world, towards zero probability, there are more worlds even more wildly improbable, worlds of dream and nightmare and free lunches, and beyond these, in negative probability, lies the strange, awesome, forbidding world where justice is done. When this world touches ours, it may happen that a particularly heinous deed is avenged instead of yielding a fine fat profit.

Now you see it, now you don't

Some of these worlds we can almost see and touch, others we can’t. Interestingly enough the visibility of a world is quite independent from its position on the probability axis, on account of its screwy nature. Thusly, looking at things from the corner of ones eyes, particularly at sundown, one may perceive the shadow of things in the forth and fifth dimensions, just at the border of our field of vision. Another method is to turn ones head sharply and stare hard over ones shoulder. It usually takes a split second for the images of things to recover from their surprise and congeal into innocent three-dimensionality. You can also contemplate things or persons through coloured glass or music or sto gram of vodka. And there are darkness and night, but you are not advised to mess around with those.