Scott Connors

The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith

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It seems to be a time of wrapping up reading projects. With this, I’ve read – if not reviewed – all of Clark Ashton Smith’s fiction except for his juvenile novel The Black Diamonds.

Review: The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith, eds. Scott Connors and Ron Hilger, 2011.

Cover by Jason Van Hollander

Obviously, with a title like that, you’re not going to get a lot of top of the line Clark Ashton Smith fiction here. For that, you need to get Night Shade Books’ five volume set of his stories. (I’ve reviewed volumes 1, 2, 4, and 5.) But, if you’re a Smith completist or even just a fan like me, you will want this book. Not only does it have reprints of rare Smith items, but it also prints, for the first time, several of his works.

Editors Scott Connors and Ron Hilger’s able “Foreword” has several surprises.  It seems “The Abominations of Yondo” in 1925 was not Smith’s first published fiction or even his first fantastic fiction. It also gives a reason why Smith stopped submitting stories to Weird Tales magazine. It changed ownership in 1938, and, in an interview, the new owner, William J. Delaney, said he didn’t want “nasty” stories that left a “sickish feeling in the reader”, and no more stories where characters spent a lot of time talking in “French, German, Latin, etc”. Now, he may have been thinking of Smith for the “nasty” stories (the interviewer thinks Delaney was thinking of Smith’s “The Coming of the White Worm”), but I’m pretty sure it was Smith he was thinking of in the third banned category: “stories wherein the reader must constantly consult an unabridged dictionary”.

It seems that Smith eventually entered into a partnership with E. Hoffman Price. Smith would provide one of his unpublished manuscripts, and Price would modify it, and they would split the sales proceeds with Price taking two-thirds.

Donald Sidney-Fryer is the closest thing we have to a literary biographer of Smith as well as compiling bibliographies on Smith. He actually met Smith in 1958 and remained Smith’s friend until his death in 1961. His “Introduction: The Sorcerer Departs” was written in 1963 since Sidney-Fryer was worried Smith would be forgotten. This is the third reprinting of it since then.

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Sargasso #2

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Review: Sargasso: The Journal of William Hope Hodgson Studies #2, ed. Sam Gafford, 2014.

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Cover by Robert H. Knox

The first issue of this journal had lots of material. This one is thinner – whether from a lack of contributors or due to production costs, I don’t know.

“Andy Robertson R.I.P. (1955-2014)” remembers the man who sparked a mini-Hodgson revival with his creation of The Night Land website devoted to Hodgson’s eponymous novel, and Robertson also published and wrote stories set in the world of that work.

“Under the Skin: A Profile of William Hope Hodgson” by Jane Frank offers a brief look at Hodgson’s personality. By the age of five, three of Hodgson’s brothers had died. Hodgson’s unusual middle name – usually a female name – may have had theological implications for his clerical father and his wife. (They wanted a daughter.) Frank sees Hodgson as, from an early age, energetic, imaginative, and always wanting more. Part of the behavior that some saw as egotistical and self-centered (Frank quotes from editors who met him and letters Hodgson wrote) may have been the result of his desire for attention.

She sees Hodgson’s personality as shaped by the two ages he lived in: the “repressive” Victorian world of his youth where mores were important and the energetic Edwardian age of fortune-seeking and technology. Hence we see Hodgson as an early adopter of the typewriter and photography and his entrepreneurial streak and attempts to support himself after leaving the Mercantile Navy. Hodgson was in boarding school by age eight, and his family had moved five times by the time he was 13. He was a temperamental lad and, around his father, unruly and disobedient. Continue reading →

The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith, Volume 1: The End of the Story

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Since there seems to be some interest in Clark Ashton Smith (as well there should be), I will continue my series on him.

Actually, I was going to do it anyway.

After reading A Rendezvous in Averoigne, I decided to start buying Night Shade Books The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith.

Unfortunately, I was reading like a normal person in 2007 meaning I didn’t make notes on a lot of things, and that includes only partial notes on this volume.

So, it’s a …

Low Res Scan (2007): The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith, Volume 1: The End of the Story, eds. Scott Connors and Ron Hilger, 2006.end-of-the-story

“Introduction”, Ramsey Campbell — Besides a brief account of Campbell’s youthful delight on reading the titles of a Smith collection — to say nothing of the actual stories, Campbell manages a number of concise one sentence summations of many stories in this collection as well as saying how certain stories pre-figured more famous stories by other authors.

“To the Daemon” — Not a story but a prose-poem from something called Acolyte (the date is 1943, many years after most of Smith’s stories here but the work could have been written earlier) in which Smith, in his fine poetic ways, tells, in the space of less than a page, how he is tired of stories “that lies between the bourns of time or the limits of space”. He even mentions the Oriental themes of his earliest fiction — “the isles that are westward of Cathay”.

“The Abominations of Yondo” — A very simple plot here: a tortured man is released by his captors into the desert of Yondo where he encounters several disturbing sights including a “monstrous mummy of some ancient king” which cause him to flee back to the comfort of his captivity. There is little here except wonderful language, especially the opening paragraph, no moral except perhaps the cynical, weird idea that even captivity and torture are preferable to some things. Continue reading →

Star Changes

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Clark Ashton Smith was one of those authors it took me a long time to warm to.

I’d certainly heard of him in the late 1970s when I read Robert Holdstock’s Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and its section on the “Three Musketeers” of Weird Tales: Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton Smith.

My first encounter with Smith was “The Return of the Sorcerer” in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Volume 1, and I wasn’t impressed.

However, at Arcana 34 in 2004, I heard Tim Powers talk about Smith and his admiration for him. (The title of Powers’ Romantic poets and vampires novel, The Stress of Her Regard, is from a Smith poem.) The dealer’s room had a copy of The Last Oblivion: The Best Fantastic Poetry of Clark Ashton Smith. After reading it, I was hooked on Smith, and, eventually, you’ll get some retro reviews of the Night Shade Books reprints of all of Smith’s fiction.

Before that came along, though, Smith was hard to find and you had to shell out money for expensive collector hardbacks like this.

A retro review from February 4, 2006 …

Review: Star Changes: The Science Fiction of Clark Ashton Smith, eds. Scott Connors and Ron Hilger, 2005.Star Changes

Smith is an author I recently discovered, so I make no claims to being an expert on the different editions of his work. This is only the second collection of his I’ve read. The first was A Rendezvous in Averoigne: The Best Fantastic Tales of Clark Ashton Smith, and I would recommend that as introduction rather than this volume. It has a sampling of Smith’s many series, his fantasy and his science fiction, and much stronger examples of the feverish, poetic prose which made him a special fantasy writer. The stories in this collection are not as memorable. Smith reconciled himself to hackwork on occasion in order to support himself and his aged parents. And part of that was science fiction, a genre he had no special knowledge of before writing it. Smith wasn’t particularly interested in science and no lover of technology since he thought the world over mechanized. For Smith, the point of fiction was to create an alien world, so he had little patience for the expository passages of pulp science fiction or depicting individual characters. He regarded a truly alien world as one inherently inimical to the mental health of a human. His strongest science fiction is often of the horrific sort. Continue reading →