RAA Rendezvous in Averoigne
(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1988).
RHB
Robert H. Barlow (1918-1951), correspondent and collector of manuscripts of CAS, HPL, and other
WT
writers.
RW Red World of Polaris
. Ed. Ronald S. Hilger and Scott Connors (San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2003).
SHSW
August Derleth Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin Library.
SL Selected Letters of Clark Ashton Smith
. Ed. David E. Schultz and Scott Connors (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 2003).
SS Strange Shadows: The Uncollected Fiction and Essays of Clark Ashton Smith.
Ed. Steve Behrends with Donald Sidney-Fryer and Rah Hoffman (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989).
ST Strange Tales
, a pulp edited by Harry Bates in competition with
WT.
SU The Shadow of the Unattained: The Letters of George Sterling and Clark Ashton Smith.
Ed. David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2005).
TI Tales of India and Irony.
Ed. Scott Connors and Ron Hilger (San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2007).
TSS Tales of Science and Sorcery
(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1964).
WS Wonder Stories
, a pulp published by Hugo Gernsback and edited first by David Lasser and then Charles D. Hornig.
WT Weird Tales
, Smith’s primary market for fiction, edited by FW (1924-1940) and later Dorothy McIlwraith (1940-1954).
The Door to Saturn
Completed on July 26, 1930, “The Door to Saturn” was one of Smith’s favorites among his own tales “partly on account of its literary style.”1 (He later remarked that “I take out the ms. and read it over, when I am too bored to read anything in my book-cases!”2)CAS explained to HPL that “I find it highly important, when I begin a tale, to establish at once what might be called the appropriate ‘tone.’ If this is clearly determined at the start I seldom have much difficulty in maintaining it; but if it isn’t, there is likely to be trouble. [...] The style of a yarn like ‘The Door to Saturn’” forms still another genre; and this tale seemed unusually successful to me in its unity of ‘tone.’” Unfortunately its “light ironic touch helped to make it seem ‘unconvincing’ to Wright,”3 who rejected it no fewer than three times.4 He would later fume to Lovecraft that
The style—or lack of it—required by nearly all magazine editors, would call for a separate treatise. The idea seems to be that everything should be phrased in a manner that will obviate mental effort on the part of the lowest grade moron. I was told the other day that my ‘Door to Saturn’ could be read only with a dictionary—also, that I would sell more stories if I were to simplify my vocabulary.
5
The story finally found a home at ST, whose editor, Harry Bates, appreciated “the slight humor that emerges from time to time.”6 Smith appreciated the irony of the situation, noting “It will be a josh if Strange Tales should take [‘The Door to Saturn’]” because ST paid “exactly double” what he “would have received from Wright” for the story.7 However, Bates had noticed that the typescript was somewhat battered from its repeated rejections, so he asked CAS “to tell him, for his own edification, what reasons other editors had given for turning it down.”8 Smith selected the story for inclusion in OST, but it was not collected until LW.9 Our text uses a carbon copy of the typescript held by the JHL.
1. CAS, letter to AWD, September 15, 1931 (ms, SHSW).
2. CAS, letter to AWD, January 20, 1931 (ms, SHSW).
3. CAS, letter to HPL, c. November 16, 1930 (SL 137).
4. “The only way I can land a lot of my stuff is through repeated submission, revision, etc. One needs to be hard-boiled about rejections. I doubt, though, if I’ll ever achieve the persistence of Derleth, who says that he has sold some of his things to Wright on the tenth or eleventh trip! Three submissions of a tale (to Wright) has been my limit so far; but some of my things have gathered a multitude of ‘regrets’ before landing. ‘The Door to Saturn,’ for example, garnered at least six or seven rejections.” CAS, letter to HPL [c. mid-March 1932] (LL 35).
5. CAS, letter to HPL, c. mid-December 1930 (LL 23).
6. Harry Bates, letter to CAS, July 31, 1931 (ms, JHL).
7. CAS, letter to DAW, August 7, 1931 (ms, MHS).
8. CAS, letter to AWD, September 15, 1931 (ms, SHSW).
9. CAS, letter to AWD, September 5, 1941 (SL 333).
The Red World of Polaris
As was described in ES (274-75), Captain Volmar and the crew of the ether-ship Alcyone made their first appearance in “Marooned in Andromeda” (WS October 1930). David Lasser, who edited the magazine for publisher Hugo Gernsback, surprised Smith by proposing “a series of tales about the same crew of characters (Capt. Volmar, etc.) and their adventures on different planets, saying that they would use a novelette of this type every other month.”He described it as “pseudo-scientific with a vengeance: it deals with a race of people who had their brains transplanted into indestructible metal bodies, and who were going to perform the same office for the humans who visited their world.” He added that “there are possibilities in this type of story, though I’d prefer writing something even more extra-terrestrial, with no human characters at all.” Smith completed the first draft during a camping trip to the nearby Sierra mountains late in August 1930, wryly telling HPL that the magnificent scenery “is more likely to be a source of distraction than inspiration, except in retrospect.”1 He would later reconsiderthis, admitting that “Probably the mountain scenery was a stimulant to my writing—but it was so tremendous that it temporarily altered and confused my sense of values. Mere words didn’t seem to stand up in the presence of those peaks and cliffs. But now, amid the perspectives of familiar surroundings, ‘The Red World’ doesn’t seem so bad. The last chapter could afford themes for Doré or Martin, in regard to cataclysmic scope at any rate.”2
Smith wrote to Lovecraft a couple of months later that the editors were requesting that he add some action to the story, objecting that the first part was “almost wholly descriptive;” he added that “this pretense of being scientific gives me a pain. The mythology of science is not one that intrigues me very deeply.”3 Other complaints by Lasser may have found their way into another letter to Lovecraft: “Most interplanetary yarns might as well have been laid on earth—as far as I can see—the characters seem no more affected by their alien milieu than if they were in some exotic terrestrial region. But certainly, the usual editorial requirements militate against any attempt at a sound psychological treatment... ‘The story is too leisurely.’ ‘No plot, no complications.’ ‘Put some more action in it.’”4
Despite some perfunctory attempts at revision, Lasser finally ended up rejecting the story. Smith would later describe the story to Robert H. Barlow as “passably written, but suffers from triteness of plot.”5 This may be the reason why he did not spend any further effort on revising the story, since at 13,000 words he had already invested a relatively tremendous amount of time and effort into the tale. This is too bad, because while “The Red World of Polaris” would not have fit into the “Cowboys-and-Indians-in-space” formula of Astounding Stories at this time, Mike Ashley suggests that “it would almost certainly have appealed to F. Orlin Tremaine when he became editor of Astounding Stories a few years later, in 1933, when the magazine was developing its ‘thought variant’ stories,” or even with a little rewrite to FW at WT itself.6