#clark ashton smith
Wonder Stories October cover by Frank R. Paul
Master of the Asteroid short story by Clark Ashton Smith
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Happy birthday to my absolute favorite of all of the Weird Tales writers, Clark Ashton Smith. Lovecraft was about cosmic horror; Cave was about revitalizing old horror tropes; Robert E. Howard was about manly adventurers, but Clark Ashton Smith’s greatest gift was in worldbuilding, of a creation of surreal, exotic and strange settings, from Hyperborea, which was Greenland before the ice sheet, which was partially inhabited by reptile men who enslaved mankind, Poseidonis, a part of Atlantis that survived after the destruction of Atlantis in the prehistoric world, and Zothique, a Pangea-like supercontinent that exists a billion years in the future, home to bizarre Arabian Nights horror, necromancers, and ape-creatures.
CAS was mostly ignored for years; his best work was out of print for decades. But in the past year, there’s been a desire to rediscover him. There’s a great documentary about him, Emperor of Dreams, made in 2018, that is really worth seeing and I hope this revival of interest in him continues.
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Frank R. Paul’s city illustrations accompanying Clark Ashton Smith’s scifi in Wonder Stories.
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Laughing wildly in the twilight, the bizarre being capered before him, and cried:
“I am a Satyr, and your Christ is less to me than the weeds that grow on your kitchen middens.” Clark Ashton Smith - The End of the Story
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Eros of Ebony by Clark Ashton Smith
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Selling all my ancient idols,
I worship the new god: before his altar
I bring the mythic fruits of distant lands
and cast the look of ocean-se pulchres.
Eros of Ebony by Clark Ashton Smith
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His mouth and brows, capricious,
mingle their honey with a great bitterness;
upon his shoulder, with tightening talons,
there perches a hard-eyed hawk.
The Tears of Lilith by Clark Ashton Smith
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O lovely demon, half-divine!
Hemlock and hydromel and gall,
Honey and aconite and wine
Mingle to make that mouth of thine—
