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Volume three of

The Collected Fantasies Of

Clark Ashton Smith

Edited by Scott Connors and Ron Hilger

With an Introduction by Michael Dirda

Night Shade Books

San Francisco

by Night Shade Books

Jacket design by Claudia Noble

Interior layout and design by Jeremy Lassen

First Edition

ISBN: 978-1-59780-030-3

Night Shade Books

Please visit us on the web at

http://www.nightshadebooks.com

INTRODUCTION

By Michael Dirda

Clark Ashton Smith (1893–1961) was one of the three great contributors to Weird Tales (along with H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan)—and, just possibly, the greatest of all.

Consider the testimonials: Lovecraft himself maintained that “in sheer daemonic strangeness and fertility of conception, Clark Ashton Smith is perhaps unexcelled by any other writer dead or living.” Two of our contemporary grandmasters of fantasy and science fiction, Jack Vance and Ray Bradbury, clearly modeled their own early “poetic” styles after his. According to Bradbury, Smith “filled my mind with incredible worlds, impossibly beautiful cities, and still more fantastic creatures on those worlds and in those cities.” And he did this largely through his gorgeous style and the courtly pacing of his sentences. “Take one step across the threshold of his stories,” declares Bradbury, “and you plunge into color, sound, taste, smell, and texture—into language.”

Smith’s formal diction and syntax have often been likened to prose-poetry, or even incantation. Some people can’t bear this “grand manner,” as Smith once described his taste for the ornate, and simply resent “all that savors of loftiness, exaltation, nobility, sublimity, and aristocracy.” Yet as he explained in a letter, his reason for resorting to a luxuriant vocabulary was solely “to achieve precision, variety and richness. The words are never plugged in for their own sake, but simply because they expressed a finer shade of meaning or gave the tone-color that I wanted.” You can hear Smith’s “painted speech” at its best, in the opening sentences of his very first fantasy story, “The Abominations of Yondo” (1926):

“The sand of the desert of Yondo is not as the sand of other deserts; for Yondo lies nearest of all to the world’s rim; and strange winds, blowing from a gulf no astronomer may hope to fathom, have sown its ruinous fields with the grey dust of corroding planets, the black ashes of extinguished suns. The dark, orb-like mountains which rise from its pitted and wrinkled plain are not all its own, for some are fallen asteroids half-buried in that abysmal sand. Things have crept in from nether space, whose incursion is forbid by the watchful gods of all proper and well-ordered lands; but there are no such gods in Yondo, where live the hoary genii of stars abolished, and decrepit demons left homeless by the destruction of antiquated hells.”

Frankly, I think this excellent prose of its kind—elegant, rhythmic, original in diction, sonorous in tone, at once evocative and precise.

In Smith’s best stories, this style serves the operatic, death-obsessed grandeur of his vision. For example, “The Dark Eidolon”—arguably Smith’s finest story (yet to come in the Night Shade Collected Fantasies)—requires a language full of majesty just to match a sorcerer’s grisly, poetic vengeance on the king who wronged him. It begins this way:

“On Zothique, the last continent of earth, the sun no longer shone with the whiteness of its prime, but was dim and tarnished as if with a vapor of blood. New stars without number had declared themselves in the heavens, and the shadows of the infinite had fallen closer. And out of the shadows, the older gods had returned to man: the gods forgotten since Hyperborea, since Mu and Poseidonis, bearing other names but the same attributes. And the elder demons had also returned, battening on the fumes of evil sacrifice, and fostering again the primordial sorceries.

“Many were the necromancers and magicians of Zothique, and the infamy and marvel of their doings were legended everywhere in the latter days. But among them all there was none greater than Namirrha…”

After reading sentences like that you know you’re embarking on a real Story by a real Storyteller, one working in the tradition of the fairy tale, the Arabian Nights, and the fin-de-siècle decadents. This is vision, opium-dream, imagination at work, not some disguised memoir or slice of life about adultery in Connecticut. That paragraph also conveniently mentions three of Smith’s favorite fantasy realms: the ancient lands of Hyperborea and Poseidonis and the over-ripe, far-future Zothique. A fourth is Averoigne, a part of an imagined medieval France, a darker version of James Branch Cabell’s Poictesme. In all of them magic and sorcery are the tools of ambition, avarice and lust. By contrast, Smith’s Golden Age-style science fiction stresses sheer wonder and the utterly alien, while his occasional straight horror tales call to mind a gruesomeness we associate with old comics like Tales from the Crypt.

Fantasy realms of magic, the fates of empires, Grand Guignol horror, the completely “other,” the last days of Earth—such colossal themes encourage a grave or formal diction, full of descriptions of the undescribable, and always balancing the ineffable and sublime against the histrionic and sententious. When Smith takes a misstep or simply goes overboard, his baroque vocabulary and elaborate harmonies may actually cloud our minds and dull rather than illuminate his transcendental visions. To my mind, his most effective work nearly always focuses on the fate of individuals. But Smith shared with Lovecraft the belief that in a tale of wonder “the real actors are the terrible, arcanic forces, the esoteric cosmic malignities,” and so often downplayed his human characters.

That said, Clark Ashton Smith doesn’t, in fact, always sound like the young M.P. Shiel on steroids. He can vary his approach considerably, as the stories in this volume testify. A science fictional adventure, like “Seedling of Mars” or “The God of the Asteroid,” can relate an alien encounter with clipped, Asimovian efficiency. “The Eternal World”—despite its longueurs—offers a cosmic vision of the universe in the grand manner of Olaf Stapledon, with a touch of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. “A Vintage from Atlantis” might almost be one of the leisurely club tales of Lord Dunsany’s Joseph Jorkens, just as “The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan” and “The Holiness of Azédarac”—two of my own favorites— possess something of the refreshing black humor of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth stories. One could readily imagine “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis” emerging from the pen of H.P. Lovecraft, while “The Seed from the Sepulchre,” which takes up a similar theme, neatly complements well-known horror classics by William Hope Hodgson and John Collier. The plot of “Ubbo-Sathla” approaches a Borgesian fable of identity, almost a mixture of “The Aleph” and “The Circular Ruins.” “The Double Shadow” even opens in a voice that recalls any number of Borges’ stories:

“My name is Pharpeton, among those who have known me in Poseidonis; but even I, the last and most forward pupil of the wise Avyctes, know not the name of that which I am fated to become ere tomorrow. Therefore, by the ebbing silver lamps, in my master’s marble house above the loud, ever-ravening sea, I write this tale with a hasty hand, scrawling in an ink of wizard virtue on the grey, priceless, antique parchment of dragons.”