Sunday was the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Clark Ashton Smith. We morbid fans of a writer with a delectable taste for morbidity love to celebrate death anniversaries as much as birth ones, and the seduction of the half-century mark is too great to dismiss. My own celebration ended up in the hands of others, however. Two weeks ago, Jim Planck, an editor for The Daily Mail, a New York State newspaper, contacted me about doing an interview to…
Read More Read More
What a TRIP… In the world of epic fantasy, poetry often gets a bad rap. In the world of legendary fantasists, one name that continues to be revered is Clark Ashton Smith. As one of the “big three” WEIRD TALES writers from the 1920s and 30s, Smith gained a reputation that rivaled that of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard for fantastic fiction. His superbly dark fantasies set in realms such as Zothique, Hyperborea, Atlantis, and Averoigne set a new…
Read More Read More
Confession: I am a fan of pulp fantasy who has, until recently, read very little Clark Ashton Smith. Yes, the man who comprises one of the equilateral sides of the immortal Weird Tales triangle has largely eluded me, save for a few scattered tales and poems I’ve encountered in sundry anthologies and websites. This past week that all I changed when I cracked the cover of The Return of the Sorcerer: The Best of Clark Ashton Smith (2009, Prime Books)….
Read More Read More
I would hope by now that regular visitors to this site are aware of the fine work going on over at The Cimmerian. I try to visit the web site several times a week, as there’s always something of interest for the fantasy fan — particularly the heroic fiction fantasy fan, but frequently for any fan of fantasy. This week The Cimmerian has really pulled out all the stops and launched a series of articles on Clark Ashton Smith. He’s…
Read More Read More
By Ryan Harvey Copyright 2007 by New Epoch Press. All rights reserved. Location, location, location…that might have been Clark Ashton Smith’s motto for fantasy writing. Where most continuing fantasy sagas center on the adventures of specific heroes, such as Conan, Tarzan, and Imaro, Smith elevated milieu over character. Smith’s dark ironies and bleak fates made continuing characters unlikely, and his writing style cleaved more to the sensations a setting could evoke than the deeds of the people within it. The…
Read More Read More
by Ryan Harvey All rights reserved. Copyright 2006 by New Epoch Press. When Robert E. Howard discovered the character Conan in 1932, his writing took on a feverish intensity as the barbarian warrior turned into a literary obsession that allowed his creator’s natural skills and inclinations as a writer to bloom. Likewise in 1932, when Clark Ashton Smith discovered the last continent of dying Zothique, he knew that he had found the ideal setting for his poetic and dark imagination…
Read More Read More
By Ryan Harvey Copyright 2007 by New Epoch Press. All rights reserved. In the beginning, there was Clark Ashton Smith… …in the end, there was Clark Ashton Smith. Smith was a one-man literary movement, an alpha and omega unto himself. Although a major early fantasy innovator whom many later writers credit as an influence, he did not begin an ongoing trend in fantasy fiction as some other pioneers did. Contrariwise, he seems to have borrowed his style from almost no…
Read More Read More
By Ryan Harvey Copyright 2007 by New Epoch Press. All rights reserved. Legend says that after his exile from Iceland, Erik the Red voyaged to a frozen island and settled there in 982 C.E. Deciding not to scare away new settlers with an intimidating name like “Iceland,” he dubbed the place “Greenland.” We can scoff at Erik’s bit of dishonesty-in-advertising, and certainly any homesteaders who fell for his marketing ploy would have felt like cleaving Mr. The Red’s skull with…
Read More Read More
In this, the final chapter of Black Gate‘s deep, rich look at the extravagant worlds of the writer fondly remembered by his Cthulhuoid nickname Klarkash-Ton, explorer Ryan Harvey takes us on a tour of several of the prose-poet’s more obscure creations. From a fast-sinking Atlantis to a dying Red Planet to an extra-solar world unlike any ever put to paper, these imaginative visions may have been seldom used by Smith, but they ultimately would play host to some of his…
Read More Read More
“A far northern continent in its younger days before glaciers claimed it, when wizards and elder gods and wily thieves and greedy moneylenders crisscrossed its steamy jungles and ebony mountains and opulent cities.” That is how Ryan Harvey introduces us to Hyperborea, the second invented world of Clark Ashton Smith’s to be put under Black Gate‘s critical microscope. Join us on a journey to one of fantasy’s most delightfully strange milieus. READ THE ARTICLE