| abstract | - Kane is a literary character created by Karl Edward Wagner in a series of sword and sorcery novels and short stories between 1970 and 1985. The stories are set in a grim, pre-medieval world which is nonetheless ancient and rich in history. In some of Wagner's later stories Kane appears in the present day — for example, as a drug dealer in "Lacunae" and as a somewhat suspect publishing magnate in "At First Just Ghostly". Little is known about Kane's origins. Like the Biblical Cain he is a powerful, left-handed man with red hair, said to have killed (strangled) his brother Abel, and has been cursed by a mad god with an eternal life of wandering. Nevertheless, he is vulnerable to wounds, and it is said that he can be killed "by the violence that he himself created". Kane is portrayed as both an excellent warrior ("I kill things," he tells Elric in "The Gothic Touch". "It's what I was made to do. I'm rather good at it") and an accomplished sorcerer, who spends the millennia wandering from one adventure into the next. Also like the Biblical Cain, Kane is marked as a killer - very few people can look him in the eye without qualms. His father's name was Adam and his stepmother's name was Eve. He is often compared to Conan the Barbarian (partly because Wagner also wrote several Conan stories), but is quite different in that he is a devious character with a more somber and reflective outlook on life than Conan and none of the latter's dislike of sorcery. His creator described him as a character "who could master any situation intellectually, or rip heads off if push came to shove". Kane is unconcerned with common morality, since no human relationship can ever last more than a small fraction of his lifetime (although the daughter he fathered in "Raven's Eyrie" turns up as an adult in the modern-day "At First Just Ghostly"); and he frequently ends up on the wrong side in the conflicts in which he involves himself, often to his own detriment. A common theme running through all Kane stories is the hero's weariness with his own immortality and his attempts to give his existence meaning.
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