[Ballantine Adult Fantasy 59] • Poseidonis

Thousands of books, articles and stories have been written about Atlantis since Plato presented the dialogues in which he first postulated the Lost Continent

Later writers, philosophers, story-tellers, believers and non-believers have created their own names for the legend, have changed the geography (which indeed, was always pretty vague), have treated the concept as the purest fiction, and ps the purest non-fiction: the stream is endless and there will undoubtedly be more to come.

But few writers of the imaginative have produced such tantalizing glimpses of richness as Clark Ashton Smith created in his Tales of Poseidonis (one of the many names for Atlantis). The embroidery of his extraordinarily graphic prose, the clarity of his weird images, are ideally suited to the re-creation of his own purely imaginary world. He makes no pretense that this is the real lost Atlantis—but it is an Atlantis that surely should have lived. Enter it, and you enter a fascinating reality beyond the mundane world—a reality in which the remarkable mind of Clark Ashton Smith was perfectly at home, and in which he will entangle you with the sorcery of an artist…