CHAPTER EIGHT
SCIENCE FANTASIES
The largest market for imaginative fiction in the 1930s was to be found in science-fiction magazines. Amazing Stories, Wonder Stories, and Astounding Stories competed on a monthly basis for works in this new genre, then commonly called “scientifiction” or “stf”. Smith’s desire to enter this market was a natural one: beyond purely financial considerations, his early poems had demonstrated his romantic interest in unearthly and extraterrestrial realms and flights through space,112 and several of the prose poems that pre-date his story writing period actually take place on other worlds.
The editors of these magazines were not looking for richly colorful prose poems, however, and were more eager to recruit physicists to their pages than poets. Their interest lay in stories that extrapolated science and technology into the future and that featured the interplay of stock characters against quasi-realistic surroundings; the emphasis was on fast-paced action and adventure, a clear and straight-forward style of writing, and simple diction. Smith reacted strongly to these editorial requirements or preferences, and each had its influence on the science fiction he would write.
Smith viewed the demand for science and machinery as further evidence of the tyranny of realism in literature and the general trend from romanticism to materialism. He also felt that it indicated an uncritical adoption of scientific reasoning as the only viewpoint for approaching the world. Smith had no great love for science, and he resented the popular belief that the scientific dogma of the day had explained—or could explain—everything in the universe, that every imaginable event could be understood solely “in terms of the test-tube”.113 He railed against the “laboratory-minded donkeys... who are so hell-bent on realism and scientific verisimilitude”, and advised them to “stick to the Scientific American in which they will find no superstitions other than those of current materialism”.114 Smith attributed his viewpoints to an “innate romanticism that makes me at least hopeful that the Jeans and Einsteins have overlooked something”,115 as well as to a genuine skepticism of the grand claims of researchers and other pundits. “Tomorrow”, he wrote, “the accepted theories of science and human psychology may be superseded by a brand new lot”;116 “the mythology of science [my emphasis] is not one that intrigues me very deeply”.117
Smith defended the role of mystery and the fundamentally unknowable in science fiction in several short essays, published in the letters-columns of the “stf” magazines. He argued for the acceptance of tales that “induce a sense of cosmic mystery, terror, beauty, strangeness or sublimity”118 without supplying pseudo-scientific explanations for their fantastic elements:
I think those who condemn such stories are suffering from a rather amusing—and pathetic—sort of unconscious hypocrisy.... Some of them are afraid to accept and enjoy anything—even a fairy tale—that is not couched in the diction of modern materialistic science.... They would like and praise the very stories that they condemn if the writer had used a different terminology, and had offered explanations that were even superficially logical according to known laws.119
Such stories, Smith contended, would naturally emphasize “ultrahuman events, forces, and scenes, which properly dwarf the terrene actors to insignificance”.120
Smith’s twenty or thirty science fiction tales can be grouped into three broad categories that grew out of the interaction of his attitudes with the demands of his editors. In one group of stories, Smith adheres to his stated principles; in another, he satirizes the genre; in the third group, he follows more conventional patterns.
Stories in the first category include “The City of the Singing Flame”, “The Light from Beyond”, “A Star-Change”, “A Voyage to Sfanomoë”, “Master of the Asteroid”, “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis”, and “The Eternal World”. These stories are rich in imagination and idea, slow on action, simple in plot, and feature strong elements of wonder and mystery. Alien characters, when such are present, are silent and unfathomable, and no real communication with Mankind is possible; they are present merely to emphasize the strangeness of distant worlds.
When Smith offered explanations for the central wonders of these stories, they were indeed only “superficially logical”, and the science involved was either minimal or nonexistent. In fact, of the Smith tales accepted by the “stf” magazines, the finest were slipped past the editors through the kind of “terminology changes” he advocated above. When a character is suddenly precipitated into an unearthly realm of magic and wonder, he is said to have undergone “a process of atomic re-vibration”, for example.
The second group of science-fiction stories carries this process of duping his editors and readers one step further. At times the temptation to poke fun at the genre and its restrictions became too much for Smith to resist, and he indulged in satire. “The Monster of the Prophecy”, “The Letter from Mohaun Los”, “The Metamorphosis of the Earth”, and to some extent the Alcyone series, are examples of this kind of story. The “outrageous space-annihilator”121 of “The Monster of the Prophecy” is a jab at gadgetry and pseudo-science, and the character Roger Lapham in “The Metamorphosis of the Earth” parodies the omnipresent, omniscient scientist. “The Letter from Mohaun Los” satirizes blasé adventurers: when Domitian Malgraff tells his Chinese factotum that he has invented a space-flyer (here Smith makes fun of ‘the boy inventor’) which will whisk them both into space that night, Li Wong replies, “Me go pack.... You want plentee shirt?”
Smith was certain that much of his satire was not fully appreciated, and in a sense he was grateful for the obtuseness of his readers: “I don’t think Gernsback [of Wonder Stories] would print my work, if he realized the Swiftian irony of some of it”.122
Smith’s third category of science fiction represents concessions to the demands of his editors. Such stories include “The Immortals of Mercury”, “The Invisible City”, “The Dimension of Chance”, and “An Adventure in Futurity”. Smith acknowledged that some of these pieces bordered on hackwork, that many were slanted for a quick sale to a particular editor (“An Adventure in Futurity”, “The Dimension of Chance”, and “Seedling of Mars” were actually written to order). Much less space is devoted to the creation of place and atmosphere in these tales. Alien characters are usually strangely-featured humanoids with the ability to communicate telepathically with the human characters; they are concessions to plot, and serve to expedite ‘the action’. As in all of Smith’s science fiction, the scientific element is restricted to no more than the use of certain ‘buzzwords’ and catch-phrases (“magnetic”, “dynamo”, “ultra-cosmic rays”, etc.), but science and gadgetry generally play more prominent roles in these stories.
“The City of the Singing Flame” (1931, OST) falls squarely into the first category of stories and is one of Smith’s most successful works in any genre. It carries a profound and pervasive magic, a high sense of wonder and mystery, and has impressed writers as diverse as Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison with its excellence.
The tale consists of the diary of Giles Angarth, a writer of fantastic fiction vacationing alone in the Sierras, who stumbles upon two worn pillars that form a doorway to another world. He makes his way across a purple plain to a city “whose massive towers and mountainous ramparts of red stone were such as the Anakim of undiscovered worlds might build”. Housed within is the Singing Flame, a fountain of fire whose strange music “seemed to promise all the impossible splendours of which Angarth’s imagination has vaguely dreamt”. This music draws exotic, alien pilgrims to the city, where they immolate themselves—with great ecstasy—in the Flame. At the end of the story, Angarth joins them.
Although often combined with its lesser sequel, “Beyond the Singing Flame”, we refer to the story as it was originally conceived and published,123 which corresponds to chapters I-III of the combined version. In its sequel, other adventurers travel to the City of the Flame. They immolate themselves as well but find that the Flame is really a doorway to yet another world. They meet Angarth, who explains the nature of both the City and the Flame to them. Thus this second story does much to dispel the atmosphere of magic and mystery created by the first; and for all its inventiveness, it is an inferior work. Smith had also projected a third story in the sequence, “The Rebirth of the Flame” (SS).
Strong autobiographical elements are apparent in the character and terrestrial setting of “The City of the Singing Flame”, and the escape given Angarth represents the fulfillment of a fantasy for Smith who had long wished for some “escape from the human aquarium”.124 And in actuality, Smith himself had walked along Crater Ridge, the takeoff point for the journey to the land of the Flame, in the late 1920s. “The Ridge is a wild, eerie place, differing wholly in its geology and general aspect from the surrounding region, exactly as pictured in the story. It impressed my imagination profoundly, suggesting almost at first sight the contiguity of some unknown, invisible world to which it might afford the mundane approach and entrance”.125 In the story the terrain is described as looking “like the slag and refuse of Cyclopean furnaces, poured out in pre-human years, to cool and harden into shapes of limitless grotesquerie”.
Smith’s intention with this story was to create an air of verisimilitude for a fundamentally wondrous experience. One of his many complaints about typical scientific adventures was the matter-of-fact way that characters react when faced with the impossible, and he was determined that “The City of the Singing Flame” not share this fault. He worked a ‘realism’ of character reaction into “The City of the Singing Flame” in order to give Angarth’s adventure some power and credibility. Because Angarth experiences a full range of emotions—fear, timidity, alienation, confusion, and disorientation, as well as exaltation and rapture—the level of the reader’s involvement in the narrative is deepened.
In the description of Angarth’s first journey through the pillars, Smith makes an interesting use of credible character reactions. He begins by invoking a familiar experience: “Nothing is more disconcerting than to miscalculate the degree of descent in taking a step. Imagine, then, what it was like to step forward on level, open ground, and find utter nothingness underfoot!” Confusion, not exhilaration or adventurousness, characterizes Angarth’s first moments in the new world, together with feelings of dislocation and the “ghastly sense of separation from all the familiar environmental details that give colour, form and definition to our lives”.
Several paragraphs follow that detail Angarth’s visual impressions of the landscape. A description of his emotional state then follows: “I felt only a wild desire to escape from the maddeningly oppressive bizarrerie of this region and regain my own world. In an effort to fight down my agitation, I tried to figure out, if possible, what had really happened”. Only at this point does Angarth engage in speculation or reasoning, and this is a deliberate move on Smith’s part: by not providing an immediate explanation for what has befallen the story’s main character, Smith forces the reader to concern himself entirely with Angarth’s sensations and emotions. As a result, the reader is drawn more fully into the strange experience. Ray Bradbury had this technique in mind when he wrote that Smith “encloses his characters, and therefore his readers, in a scene, an atmosphere, providing a frame of reference. Once you have trapped your reader in sights, sounds, smells, and texture...no matter how high, wide or grotesque the miracles you introduce, your readers are unable to resist them”.126
The conclusion of “The City of the Singing Flame” reflects Smith’s fascination with loss, or “falls from grace”. After his penultimate visit to the land of the Flame, Angarth sees his earthly existence as wan and inadequate beside the glory of a fiery death in the Flame: “literature is nothing more than a shadow. Life, with its drawn-out length of monotonous, reiterative days, is unreal and without meaning, now, in comparison with the splendid death which I might have had”. His journal ends, “Tomorrow, I shall return to the city....” Angarth must seek to regain the splendor he has lost.
At one point Angarth admits that “the world about me” (i.e., the mundane world) “seems hardly less improbable and nightmarish than the one which I have penetrated in a manner so fortuitous”—the unheard-of realm of the Flame is no less real to him than his everyday life. “A Star-Change” (1932, GL) pursues these questions of alternate realities and of illusion versus substance. Like “The City of the Singing Flame”, we again are given a solitary man, Lemuel Sarkis, hiking through mountains. He encounters two strange beings on a lonely ridge, aliens so imaginatively conceived that they must rank high in the annals of science fiction’s non-anthropomorphic life-forms:
Each of the beings was about four feet high, with a somewhat doubtful division into head and body. Their formation was incredibly flat and two dimensional; and they seemed to float rather than stand, as if swimming through the air. The upper division, which one accustomed to earthly physical structures would have taken for the head, was much larger than the lower, and more rotund. It resembled the featureless disk of a moonfish, and was fringed with numberless interbranching tendrils or feelers like a floral arabesque.... The lower division suggested a Chinese kite. It was marked with unknown goblin features.... It ended in three broad streamer-like members, subdividing into webby tassels, that trailed on the ground but seemed wholly inadequate for the purpose of legs.
These creatures bring Sarkis to their home world, Mlok, where he is overwhelmed by the unearthly sights, sounds and other sense impressions. Shortly he becomes disoriented, and experiences “an inexpressible malaise, a frightful mixture of confusion, irritation and depression to which all his senses contributed”. Smith had long been convinced that “transportation to an alien world would be an experience of utmost terror and strangeness for human nerves, and the probable result would be delirium and madness”.127
To relieve this anguish, his hosts perform an operation that modifies Sarkis’ senses, making them more similar to those of the planet’s inhabitants. The world he sees upon awakening bears no resemblance to the intolerable milieu he first beheld, but is exotic and wondrous. He has become the recipient of many new or expanded senses: “He saw new colors of supernal softness and beauty.... One of these [new senses] can best be described as a combination of hearing and touch.... Another sense was that of audible color”. (Unfortunately, Smith seemed unable to imagine, or at least describe, new senses that were not simply combinations of the familiar five.)
Sarkis128 remains on Mlok for a time, but when disaster threatens the planet he is forced to return to Earth, in a haste that prevents the reverse surgical procedure from taking place. Back on Earth, Sarkis’ new sensory powers reveal to him an unrecognizable world of horror:
Around him, in a sullen light, he saw the looming of dark, chaotic masses, whose very contours were touched with nightmare menace. Surely this place was not his studio room—these crazily angled cliffs that closed him in were not walls, but the sides of some infernal pit! The dome above, with its dolorously distorted planes, pouring down a hellish glare, was not the sky-lighted roof that he recalled. The bulging horrors that rose before him along the bottom of the pit, with obscene forms and corrupt hues, were surely not his easel, table and chairs.
He is eventually diagnosed as suffering from delirium tremens and is committed to an asylum, where to the consternation of the doctors he “persists in dying”.
“A Star-Change” expresses several ideas of prime interest to Clark Ashton Smith. Foremost, there is the romantic lure of new senses, to know sensual glories inexperienced and unexperienceable by human beings, to see the universe as a god might see it. And that both Mlok and Earth appear so different to Sarkis after his operation drums home Smith’s belief that reality stands upon a shifting, unstable ground defined by our senses. However, Smith is careful to avoid saying that humanity alone is hidebound and sense-blinded, for the Mlokians may be as far from ‘the truth’ as mankind: “Whether or not his new mode of cognition was closer to ultimate reality, he could not know. It mattered little”. Smith also felt that the story stood out for its originality and honesty: “As far as I know, it is almost the only attempt to convey the profound disturbance of function and sensation that would inevitably be experienced on an alien world”.129 And on a final note, “A Star-Change” may have influenced Robert Silverberg’s novels Thorns (1967) and The Man in the Maze (1969), in which characters are surgically altered by the inhabitants of the worlds they visit.
“The Light from Beyond” (1931-32, LW), another of Smith’s quality science fiction tales, has much in common with “The City of the Singing Flame” and “A Star-Change”. All three feature autobiographical characters (a writer of fantastic fiction, two illustrators of fantastic fiction, each of whom encounters something strange in California mountains), the introduction of new senses or new realities, and the presence of wondrous scenes and happenings. All end pessimistically; in each story the main character suffers some kind of loss. Like “The City of the Singing Flame” the emphasis of these stories is on unfathomable mysteries and the notion that exotic vistas lie unseen but close at hand.
Although published as “The Light from Beyond” by Wonder Stories, Smith’s own title for the tale had been “The Secret of the Cairn” (he once complained that the magazine’s editors “seem to have a mania for changing titles”130). The story begins with strange nocturnal phenomena witnessed by Dorian Weirmoth, a solitary Sierran artist. Wheels of light seem to emanate from behind a nearby ridge; his valley is filled with a strange incense; he hears “a faint music... like the breathing of fairy flutes, ethereally sweet, thrilling, eldritch”. He finds a newly-built cairn atop the ridge, which he is unable to approach; and the vegetation around the cairn is strangely mutated. No explanation is provided for these happenings; there is only mystery.
Later a group of “diaphanous... birdlike” beings arrive atop the ridge. They remove something from the cairn, an object “drab, oval, and about the size of a falcon’s egg. I might have deemed it no more than a common pebble, aside from one peculiar circumstance: a crack in the larger end, from which issued several short, luminous filaments”. Weirmoth inadvertently accompanies the beings to their “infinite world”, where the egg or seed grows into a fan of energy like a tree:
The thing was a fountain of unsealed glories, an upward-rushing geyser of emerald and opal.... The foliage spread like a blown spray of jewels. The plant became colossal, it towered with a pillar-thick stem, and its leafage meshed the five suns.... I saw the fruiting of the tree: the small globules, formed as of blood and light.
After he eats one of the fruits of the tree, Weirmoth’s senses expand and develop in the manner of Sarkis’ after his operation, and he undergoes a transition to an omniscience and godhood reminiscent of the Emperor of Dreams in “The Hashish-Eater”: “I rose into spheres ulterior and superior. Infinities were rolled before me, I conned them as one cons an unrolled map. I peered down upon the utmost heavens.... I possessed a million eyes and ears.... I recall...the flowering of thoughts into stars and worlds”.
But like the tree “that had sprung from the mated energies of earth and the celestial Otherworld”, and like the fruits of the tree, formed of an equal mixture of “blood and light”, the essence of Weirmoth is divided between the terrestrial and the ultra-terrestrial. The halves split, and Weirmoth becomes two: “I seemed to lose and leave behind me the colossal, shadowy god that still towered above the stars.... I, who beheld the alter ego, was aware of a dark and iron weight, as if some grosser gravity had claimed me”. His terrestrial self is returned to earth, and evermore he is “a mere remnant of [his] former self...a clod”, haunted by visions of the other world.
In “The Monster of the Prophecy” (1929, OST), the elements of wonder found in the previous stories are tinged with satire. The story was one of Smith’s favorites; he called it “the result of a definite inspiration”, “absolutely novel in interplanetary fiction”, “hilariously satiric in its implications”.131 The hero, Theophilus Alvor, is a country poet trying to make a name for himself in New York City (a fantasy of Smith’s?). Unable to market his work, he is on the verge of tossing himself from the Brooklyn Bridge when he encounters Vizaphmal, an alien wizard in human semblance, who takes him to Satabbor, a planet of Antares. After many adventures there, Alvor chooses to remain on the alien planet rather than return to the inhospitable Earth. Smith plotted a sequel, “Vizaphmal in Ophiuchus” (SS), which would have chronicled further adventures of the Antarrean wizard. The story would have had no human characters.
Central to the plot of “The Monster of the Prophecy” is an idea Smith used in several other satires—the idea of momentous events triggered by misinterpretation, blundering, or pure chance. These events are often mistakenly seen in a religious light and take the form of omens or heavenly visitations; here he is clearly satirizing the solemn mysteries and miracles of terrestrial religions. Alvor is brought to Satabbor to fulfill an ancient prophecy, in which a wizard enters the city of Sarpoulom in the company of “a white monster” possessing two arms and two legs. He accompanies Vizaphmal to the city, the presiding government falls, and Vizaphmal is proclaimed the ruler. Other examples of this sort of satire are found in “The Door to Saturn”, in which Eibon and Morghi inadvertently serve as misunderstood prophets for a succession of Saturnian races, and “The Letter from Mohaun Los”, in which a temporary fault in Malgraff’s time-space sphere causes the device to fall upon a group of soldiers engaged in battle. The crushing of this group is taken as a godly judgment, and the tide of the battle turns.
At several points in “The Monster of the Prophecy” we are treated to passages of exotic description, which Smith used to emphasize the fabulous nature of Alvor’s adventure and to sustain an unearthly atmosphere. The details of an Antarrean meal, for instance, would have fit well within the dense, extravagantly imaginative “Hashish Eater”:
The foods were beyond belief in their strangeness, for they included the eggs of a moth-like insect large as a plover, and the apples of a fungoid tree that grew in the craters of dead volcanoes.... Likewise he was given, in shallow bowls, a liquor made from the blood-like juice of living plants, and a wine in which the narcotic pollen of some night-blooming flower had been dissolved.
The story also provides some model examples of Smith’s heavy use of metaphor to deepen the emotional significance of a situation. When Vizaphmal first drops his illusion of human form and reveals his true appearance,
Alvor had the sensation of standing on the rim of prodigious gulfs, on a new earth beneath new heavens; and the vistas of illimitable horizons, fraught with the multitudinous terror and manifold beauty of an imagery no human eye had ever seen, hovered and wavered and flashed upon him....
With its talk of profound gulfs and limitless horizons, the imagery used above is extremely characteristic of Smith.
Some shortcomings of “The Monster of the Prophecy” must also be mentioned. A fine line exists between the satire of hackwork and hackwork itself, and although this line may have been clearly drawn in Smith’s mind, the reader is not certain what to take seriously in this tale. Vizaphmal’s initial conversations with Alvor are unquestionably the weakest and most unconvincing moments of the story:
“But who are you?” exclaimed Alvor....
“I am not a human being”, rejoined the stranger, “even though I have found it convenient to don the semblance of one for a while just as you or another of your race might wear a masquerade costume. Permit me to introduce myself: my name, as nearly as can be conveyed in the phonetics of your world, is Vizaphmal, and I have come from a planet of the far-off mighty star that is known to you as Antares”.
Alvor’s acceptance of Vizaphmal’s offer to visit Satabbor is equally rushed and unbelievable. These passages may have been intended as satires of the genre, or may simply represent trite, second-rate writing.
The story also witnesses the introduction of yet another dreadful deus ex machina. After the government of Vizaphmal falls, Alvor is seized by the local priesthood who torture him as an abomination against nature. In the midst of his ordeal, however, a meteor strikes the inquisitorial building, killing everyone but himself. Alvor is then free to seek a more even-tempered clime. Perhaps this is a bit of anti-religious irony? Possibly; but other stories certainly demonstrate Smith’s willingness to invoke implausible rescues or unlikely coincidences simply to move the plot along.
One final aspect is worth noting, namely that the character of Alvor parodies what Smith saw as his own position in life. Alvor’s “old-fashioned classic verses, in spite (or because) of their high imaginative fire, had been unanimously rejected both by magazines and book firms”. And soon after arriving on Satabbor, Vizaphmal warns Alvor: “You will be doomed to a certain loneliness among us: you will always be looked upon as a monster, a portentous anomaly; but such, I believe, was your lot in the world where I found you.... There, as you have learned, all poets are regarded as no less anomalous than double-headed snakes or five-legged calves”.
“Master of the Asteroid” (1932, TSS) departs from the autobiographical pattern established in the stories discussed so far, and while it bears the trappings of conventional science fiction, the story remains an exceptional mood piece. It is told in diary form, and Smith uses the medium to ably convey an atmosphere of isolation and fear, a sense of ghastly separation from the terrestrial and of the unknown horrors of space. A rocket crashes on a small asteroid. The sole survivor, unable to leave the ship and with supplies dwindling, discovers that life exists in the valley surrounding him. The dominant creatures resemble huge ‘walking-stick’ insects and seem to worship him as some kind of god (Smith’s first title for the story was “The God of the Asteroid”), but here we find no religious satire. No communication with the aliens can be established.
The seasons of this small world last only a few days, and the survivor witnesses a cycle of the life and death of his worshippers. One day an even stranger creature appears, and after its mist-like tentacle passes through the crystal view port, the survivor’s diary abruptly ends. The ship, surrounded by the husks of the insect creatures, and containing a staring, desiccated corpse, is found by a later expedition.
It is significant that Smith wrote less frequently for the “stf” magazines as his career as a fictioneer matured. By the time he had begun to withdraw from fiction-writing in 1933-1934, his science fiction had all but disappeared, while he continued to write sporadically of Zothique, Averoigne, and Hyperborea. This was due in part to the falling out he had had with Wonder Stories, his most lucrative market for science fiction,132 but Smith had never really been comfortable writing for any of the science fiction magazines. In an article calling Smith “The Poet of Science Fiction”, Arthur Hillman wrote that “he and a few others were fighting a losing battle against the latest trend of heavy science which, with the growing awareness of the social and mechanical aspects of science fiction, brought a decline in tales of ingenuous wonder”.133 For a time Smith fought this decline through his essays and, by example, through his fiction.
Smith, of course, recognized the irony of his position, as a fantasy writer tailoring his products for the science-fiction market. After selling “The Eternal World” to Wonder Stories, he shared a chuckle with August Derleth: “Gemsback... advised me to put ‘more realism’ into my future stories, saying that the late ones were ‘verging dangerously on the weird.’ That’s really quite a josh—as well as a compliment”.134
112. Sidney-Fryer has long emphasized the continuity of Smith’s artistic output. In particular he has written: “Through all three [of Smith’s early poetry] collections runs the theme of what may be called the cosmic-astronomic—this theme was undoubtedly suggested to Smith by the example of the poems of a similar nature by George Sterling.... When Smith came to write in the 1930’s what may nominally be termed science fiction...he was merely utilizing material he had handled fifteen to twenty years earlier”. (“The Alleged Influence of Lord Dunsany on Clark Ashton Smith”; see Sec. Bib.)
113. “Where Fantasy Meets Science Fiction” (PD).
114. Letter to Barlow, 16 November 1933.
115. Letter to Lovecraft (#36, LL), ca. early November 1933.
116. “Realism and Fantasy” (PD).
117. Letter to Lovecraft (#14, LL), ca. 21 October 1930.
118. Letter to Derleth, 3 November 1931.
119. “Where Fantasy Meets Science Fiction” (PD).
120. Fantasy and Human Experience” (PD). This belief echoes Lovecraft’s dictum that “the true hero of a marvel tale is not any human being, but simply a set of phenomena” (“Some Notes on Interplanetary Fiction”). It is interesting to note that while Lovecraft considered his statement as advancing the cause of realism in literature, Smith’s own statement was a reaction against the realist school. In fact, both men were fundamentally in agreement with one another. Both considered the generation of atmosphere the most important job for a writer of imaginative fiction. For Lovecraft, the height of a weird story came when a single unnatural event was revealed against a meticulously constructed realistic background of people and places. He was interested in an atmosphere of abnormality, created through contrasts of the prosaic and the impossible; “realism” was crucial in developing the sense of normalcy against which the impossible is portrayed. On the other hand, Smith’s own interests centered on descriptions of the wondrous or unnatural events themselves, on the creation of an atmosphere of awe and mystery. Fritz Leiber has noted this: “[Smith] seldom put realistic details into his stories simply for the sake of making the fantastic events more plausible, though describing such fantastic events with the greatest possible realism” (“Clark Ashton Smith: An Appreciation”, IM).
Smith and Lovecraft disagreed only on the question of emphasis, on the balance of the mundane and the fantastic in their stories, and both employed detailed, “realistic” descriptions to create atmosphere and mood. But, because the moods they wished to generate were different, Lovecraft chose to emphasize and describe the mundane or realistic aspects of his stories, whereas Smith concentrated on the fantastic.
121. Letter to Derleth, 3 November 1931.
122. Letter to Derleth, 1 December 1930.
123. It should be noted that only through happenstance did the two “Flame” stories appear under the single title “The City of the Singing Flame” in Smith’s first Arkham House collection, Out of Space and Time. Smith had originally intended to include only the first story but had lost the tear-sheets of its original Wonder Stories appearance. He did, however, possess tear-sheets of a more recent British publication in Tales of Wonder, where the two stories had been linked together by the editor, Walter Gillings. These he passed on to Derleth, after making some revisions of Gillings’ interpolating paragraphs.
It may be that Smith understood the dissimilarity of the two “Flame” stories; at any rate, he had no desire to see them inseparably linked in the way they have become today.
124. Letter to Lovecraft (#20, LL), ca. 27 January 1931.
125. “Planets and Dimensions” (PD).
126. Introduction by Ray Bradbury, dated 7 April 1957, to Smith’s projected paperback collection, Far from Time. In modified form, this piece was used as an introduction to IM.
127. Letter to Lovecraft (#5, LL), 9 January 1930.
128. Sidney-Fryer offers an interesting interpretation of this name: “So often Smith’s proper names give us excellent clues as to the type of characterization of his heroes. Lemuel Sarkis is no exception—like Lemuel Gulliver (CAS was very fond of the excellent satire, Gulliver’s Travels), Lemuel Sarkis is also a traveller but on a far greater scale: the ‘Sark’ in his name has...reference to the Greek root of sark or sarkos, that is, flesh” (private communication). Sarkis is thus to be seen as a voyager through the realm of the physical, fleshly senses.
129. Letter to Derleth, 23 May 1933.
130. Letter to Derleth, 9 April 1931.
131. Letters to Lovecraft,9 January 1930 (#5, LL), and 10 December 1929 (#4, LL); letter to Derleth, 1 December 1930.
132. Aside from the publication of the adulterated “Dweller in the Gulf”, in May of 1934 Smith engaged the services of a New York attorney to secure $769 in late payments from Wonder Stones.
133. Arthur F. Hillman, “The Poet of Science Fiction” (see Sec. Bib.).
134. Letter to Derleth, 21 November 1931.