Episode 5.5: At the Corner of Weird Avenue and Fantastical Boulevard
- James Hedrick
- May 26
- 12 min read
Updated: May 30
Welcome back everyone, to Episode 5.5 of Something About Dragons. Since we established our relevant distinctions between the Romances and the Pulps last week, leaving poor Mirralees woefully underdiscussed, this week I thought we'd cover in more detail Clark Ashton Smith. As I mentioned in the last installment, the Venn diagram of “early pulp fantasy” and “weird fiction” is basically a circle, so I’ll be kinda smudging the two together in this post in the person of Clark Ashton Smith, since he wrote stories of both more cosmic horror and more sword-and-sorcery. And through Clark Ashton Smith's work, we'll discuss what I think are the most under most under-appreciated aspects of pulp/weird fiction, at least how they pertain to the development of the broader fantasy literature.
How the pulps broadened the audience for what became fantasy literature; and,
How the pulps helped create the next generation of both fantasy readers and writers.
The importance of broadening the audience cannot be overstated. Dunsany’s great, but he’s the only one of the romance writers moving any real units in the early 20th century. And he doesn’t entirely count because his Time and the Gods and The Gods of Pegana were self-published. Again except for children’s literature, which was something you were supposed to grow out of before you went and got your solid classical education in The Odyssey, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, One Thousand and One Nights, and all those great literary classics with no fantastical elements whatsoever.
Meanwhile, the pulps are pulling kids into reading about wizards and demons and swords and whatnot. Also, horses and detectives and pilots and whatnot, but that’s someone else’s podcast.
Long story short, Time and the Gods is great, if you’re into that kind of thing. The pulps and folks like Clark Ashton Smith are what get you into that kind of thing.
Clark Ashton Smith also represents one of the earliest purveyors of this new type of pulp fiction and, along with Lovecraft and Howard, considered one of the “Big Three” of Weird Tales and weird pulp fiction more generally. He was also one of the most prolific authors we’ll cover in this show. That massive body of work is important. Based on the Internet Speculative Fiction Database’s information, which is one of the best resources for basic facts like this, I count more than 125 pieces of short fiction published in his lifetime and over 250 pieces published as partly or completely written by him, including fragments, vignettes, incomplete stuff, etc. and this is not including just a ton of poetry, prose poetry, etc.[1] Clark Ashton Smith wrote A LOT. King or Sanderson prolific, if you want a modern parallel.
Clark Ashton Smith’s output is often organized into different cycles, based on the setting. This is worth highlighting, because it’s the first time we have seen an author specifically setting up multiple secondary worlds for different types of stories. My personal favorite is the Zothique cycle, Smith’s “dying earth” setting full of dark wizards, ancient gods, etc. The Dark Eidolon, a tale of wizardly revenge and one of CAS’s most famous stories, is set in Zothique. This is a “Yes, Spoilers” podcast, but I recommend you go read it now and, just this once, I won’t spoil too much for you. It’s a tale of revenge gone wrong and a bargain with dark gods. There’s a twist, an equine-based revenge theme that’s just fantastic, and what Clark Ashton Smith describes as “a saturnalia of doom” before likening gargantuan skeletons squashing an entire imperial court to death while dancing on them to smashing grapes for wine.
Damn, I love the pulps.
The other two major Clark Ashton Smith cycles are Hyperborea (make a note of that name, we’ll be hearing it again) which is similar to Zothique. Lots of wizards and ruins, but it’s far past rather than nominally far future. And finally, Averoigne, which I don’t like as much because I constantly try and pronounce it as “Auvergne”, but it’s pseudo-French and medieval and fun. More straightforward monster stories, less of the wild creativity. There are a couple other settings - Mars, Poseidonis, etc. - but Zothique, Hyperborea, and Averoigne are the big three.
If you’ll allow me a brief tangent on collections and “how to read” these older tales, I think it might be helpful. If you check out the File Share page, I’ve listed the 2002 Fantasy Masterwork Collection from Millennium publishing entitled Emperor of Dreams as my choice for reading Clark Ashton Smith. Personally, I really wanted to delve into a collection like the Emperor of Dreams because it was arranged chronologically. I really wanted to read (and re-read) the stories as they would have come out, basically how a reader in the 1920’s or 30’s might have experienced them.
Additionally, I think chronology is important to the development of the genre and of Clark Ashton Smith as a writer. For example, his first Weird Tales story is called “The Ninth Skeleton”, published in the September 1928 issue. It’s a brief story, but the protagonist gets lost and sees visions on his way to meet his fiancé in a clearing. The visions consist of eight adult skeletons that stride by, each holding an infant skeleton. Then his fiancé awakens him from his trance/vison, but not before he sees her as the ninth skeleton. Really disturbing and very effective vignette.
But compare that to The Dark Eidolon, a novelette from Weird Tales in 1935. The Dark Eidolon is much longer, almost a novella. It has more complex themes – the blinding danger of revenge and the risk in defying anyone given the title “Lord of the Seven Hells and God of Earthly Evil”. You know, relatable stuff.
It tracks the rise and fall of a single, obsessive character, the dread sorcerer Namirrha. And it takes place within a shared world, hinting at other places and entities, borrowing from other mythologies. Other later stories like The Door to Saturn (1932) follow a similar trajectory. This development of Clark Ashton Smith's style, from short snapshots of the weird and fantastic, almost vignettes, to something broader, more interconnected, and deeper, is important because it mirrors the development of the weird fiction/pulp subgenre as a whole. Clark Ashton Smith’s rapid development as a short story writer and weird fiction author – though he was already an accomplished poet – shows that the editors of Weird Tales weren’t totally off-base about how they were adding some sophistication to the genre.
I say all that to say that I wanted to delve chronologically into CAS for this podcast, to trace that development in his art, and the Emperor of Dreams collection was specifically arranged that way. However, the cheapest price for Emperor of Dreams on Amazon as of writing this script: $89.04. Digging around, AbeBooks.com had a copy for $33.53. Not in great condition though. Any of the available Ballantine Adult Fantasy series paperbacks from the early 70’s are in roughly the same price range, and there are 4 of them (Zothique, Hyperborea, Xiccarph, and Poseidonis.)
I'm a federal worker writing this in early May 2025. Basically every day is me waiting around to see when I get fired.
This project does not have that kind of budget.
However, the ebook version of The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies (Penguin Classics) was 99 cents. Also, the Lair of the Eldritch Dark: The Collected Works of Clark Ashton Smith (Illustrated) is also much cheaper, available as an ebook, and published in 2022. It also arranges many of the stories by the setting, which can be helpful. So, we’re mostly working with stories from those two collections, which don’t have everything, but http://www.eldritchdark.com/ has almost all of CAS’s writings posted for free, because most of this stuff is out of copyright.
Long story short, I’m doing CAS on the cheap and so can you. As he would have been read in the heady days of the late 20’s and early 30’s by shoe-shine boys and newsies.
Also, as a brief aside to this brief aside, I am a wholly converted ebook reader. I do occasionally pick up physical editions at secondhand bookstores and the like – especially, for this project, as we get into the middle of the century and some authors’ books haven’t been republished electronically – but for the more part, I like using my Kindle and various ebook aps. This isn’t an advertisement for Amazon by any means – and much of the stuff we covered so far I read and reread using the Project Guttenberg website – but ebooks are my jam. I can carry around a library on my phone. I’m living in the future, and it’s awesome.
Back to Clark Ashton Smith. Just to make everything more interesting, Clark Ashton Smith was also a contemporary/disciple of everyone's favorite contemporary racist, H.P. Lovecraft. Smith was a frequent correspondent with Lovecraft until Lovecraft’s death in 1937, as well as with other authors such as Frank Belknap Long. Following Lovecraft’s death, Smith also corresponded extensively with August Derleth about aspects of the Cthulu mythos and assisted Derleth in organizing and preserving Lovecraft's works and mythos. The letters are interesting and available at www.eldritchdark.com.
We’ll talk about this more next episode with Robert E. Howard, but Weird Fiction at this time, and the related tributary of the emerging Sword and Sorcery genre, was a pretty small world, at least for authors. This was a fertile and creative time for this part of the emerging fantasy genre and people were just riffing on whatever someone else put out. Clark Ashton Smith himself noted this in a letter to August Derleth from Christmas Eve 1932, “It would seem that I am starting a mythology. Just look at the titles “The Vaults of Yoh Vombis” or “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” and see if it doesn’t get your cosmic horror juices following. Parts of the Cthulhu mythos are woven through all of these stories. And Lovecraft borrowed specifics from Clark Ashton Smith as well, particularly the Book of Eibon and Tsathoggua, the toad god, both part of the Hyperborea setting.
To use a musical analogy, think of this period of weird pulp fiction in the 1920’s and 1930’s as a local music scene. Seattle in the late 80’s and early 90’s. Liverpool before “I Wanna Hold Your Hand”, Houston’s hip-hop scene of the late 90’s/early 2000’s when everything was getting chopped and screwed. The weird fiction authors are reading and editing each other, borrowing neat ideas, interweaving their mythology, sending each other letters, asking each other questions, and essentially the network between them produces great art.
Critic Maggie Brown (borrowing from Lauren Berlant) calls the writers and readers of Weird Tales an “intimate public”, which I think is both an evocative and theoretically interesting way of looking at this era in fantasy literature. Lauren Berlant was a literary theorist (she passed in 2021) that I am not particularly familiar with, so apologies for me butchering descriptions of her work here. She primarily wrote on feminist literary theory, the idea being that women’s culture originated “intimate publics” where, quote, “When people don’t feel like they enjoy the privileges of belonging to a general culture, they engender other kinds of places where they can feel de-isolated, sanctioned, held, and where they can learn about how other people survive it.”[1] That idea of intimate publics has been broadly applied to the culture output and activities of many marginalized groups: African American publics, disability publics, LGBT publics, etc.
Many of these early weird fiction authors definitely felt as if they didn't belong to the general, mainstream American culture. Even a cursory of their correspondence confirms their vision of themselves as outsiders and outcasts. While obviously “mostly white dudes who are fans of fiction about giant toad gods” and truly marginalized groups are NOT the same thing, I think it’s an interesting and worthwhile lens for looking at the development of some aspects of fantasy literature. Also, and perhaps most particularly, intimate publics becomes a useful framework for examining fantasy fandom later in the 20th century. Because while many of the authors thought of themselves as outside the mainstream culture, that idea really becomes internalized among science fiction and fantasy fans as those cultures coalesce.
Returning to Clark Ashton Smith's place in early pulp fantasy, he represents something of a midpoint in the Big Three of pulp fiction, between Lovecraft and Howard. To vastly oversimplify, Lovecraft exemplifies weird fiction/horror, Howard is the godfather of sword and sorcery, and Smith is somewhere in between. He absolutely has his weird fiction horror vignettes. And he also has his sword and sorcery, dark wizard stories. His heroes are less sword swinging and thieving than Conan or Kull, more wizards and whatnot who embrace magic – almost exclusively to their detriment. But Smith has also some contemporary-ish heroes, similar to Lovecraft, such as the narrator of “The Vaults of Yoh Vombis”, which reads like the very best of Lovecraft and is 100% Smith’s version of “At the Mountains of Madness”. His prolific writing gives him a body of work that spans almost all of genre fiction, broadening the options for later writers to borrow his ideas. Say what you will about Dunsany or Howard, but they mined a very narrow vein, as Le Guin put it. Clark Ashton Smith was much more expansive within the weird fiction genre.
Smith's career was broad, but his output peaked in the in the late 1920’s, early 1930's, when he would just pump out dozens of stories a year for pulps Weird Tales, Wonder Stories, Astounding, etc. This output by folks like Smith and other pulp writers really takes off during the 1930’s and the Depression, because pulps are cheap, re-readable entertainment, and it helped spawn a whole new generation of both readers and authors. And continues to do so until today.
I could go on about Clark Ashton Smith for ages, as you've probably noticed, but I want to bring this in for a landing. I want to highlight a few particulars about his work that will be relevant to discussions of the genre going forward. First, I really like that his magic systems and supernatural occurrences aren’t overly explained. Smith deals primarily in "soft" magic systems. Smith is predominantly writing pay-by-story/pay-by-word short fiction, so you aren’t going to get Sanderson-level explanations of the magic system. In fact, Smith mostly handwaves magical power as “pact with a demon” and focuses on the creating truly breathtaking scenes of horror (see The Dark Eidolon or The Door to Saturn). You come for Clark Ashton Smith’s descriptions of “megacosmic” spectral horses, not exactly how Nimeria’s runes work when cast on alternate Tuesdays under a waxing moon between the summer solstice and vernal equinox. It’s similar to what King does in a lot of his books, like The Dark Tower series. See also our brief discussion of Miralees’s ambiguity in the previous posting as well.
Personally, I find this refreshing. Modern fantasy has a lot of detailed magic systems - Brandon Sanderson, Patrick Rothfus, Mercedes Lackey - and not nearly enough revenge banquets with reanimated royal corpses as the waitstaff. The immediacy and the acceptance by the author of the reality of the action is never in doubt, so it’s quite easy to immerse yourself in the secondary world.
Also, Clark Ashton Smith was an autodidact, and it shows. The vocabulary is…ornate, and he’ll never say “head” when “cranium” is right there. But the sentences read well. The language is GOOD, even accounting for how flowery he gets at times. However, as time goes on, his writings move from feeling like he is throwing a wall of adjectives at you to see what sticks, to the use of precise, if often obscure, vocabulary to evoke the appropriate picture in the reader’s mind. That precise visualization makes it clear that he was a poet first and a visual artist (sculptor) later in life. He even slips this into the story “The Hunters from Beyond”.
There are some very tantalizing flashes of modern urban fantasy in some of Smith’s material as well. The occasional inclusion of the fantastic within the real world is something that Clark Ashton Smith captures in a few of his stories more in the Lovecraftian-weird fiction stye. “The City of the Singing Flame” jumps out, as the narrator of the fictional found manuscript is transported by walking between some random rocks near Crater Ridge. Smith likes to focus on places where there are still holes in the map, so to speak. The fantastic is usually still set-apart, but there are places where the boundaries are thin. “The Hunters from Beyond” is another good example.
There’s also a lot more humor here than you might expect. Lud-in-the-Mist is one of the funnier books I’ve read as part of this project so far, and flits back and forth between puns, slapstick, and dry humor. Smith sticks with dry, almost desiccated humor. From “The Door to Summer”, he describes a religious inquisitor chasing Eibon the wizard as “like an agile but somewhat asthmatic mountain-sheep.” Another quote from the same story, “Though the Ydheems were religious, they did not carry their devotional fervor to the point of bigotry or intolerance; so it was quite impossible to start an inquisition among them.” Lovecraft absolutely had a pickle up his butt, but Clark Ashton Smith weaves some pretty good dry humor into his writing. Very much like Terry Pratchett to my ear at times.
I think that’s a good place to end today's installment. Last episode, we briefly discussed Lud-in-the-Mist as the height of the literary, romantic strain of fantasy literature. As I said, we didn’t give Mirrlees nearly her due, and neither has fantasy fiction, honestly. So, please, go read Mirralees. Today, we mostly discussed the emergence of weird/pulp fiction and particularly the author I think should be acknowledged as the undisputed master of the form, Clark Ashton Smith. His work, along with that of many others, gave a shot of adrenaline to the emerging fantasy fiction genre. The pulps allowed for shorter, punchier works that focused more on action, adventure, horror and direct encounters with the fantastic and supernatural. Smith, in particular, brought an authorial skill to the pulps, writing pieces that absolutely have claim to literary merit and sophisticated critical analysis, as well as being excellent examples of the fresh energy of the pulps.
We’ll continue down this road in the next episode with Robert E. Howard and C.L. Moore, two other titans of 1930’s era pulp fiction. Get ready for some sword-swinging fun with Conan, Kull, and the woefully underappreciated (except by Mercedes Lackey) Jirel of Joiry.
[1] https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?819. Retrieved 2/28/2025
Comments