Today, as I’m writing this, it’s January 13. Or to put it another way, it’s the birthday of Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961). I’ve been on the road since  I got off work  this morning, and only got home about forty-five minutes ago, which is why I’m posting this so late. Most of you probably won’t see it until tomorrow.

I say all that to say that I’ve not had a chance to read anything by Smith today, so I’m going to do something different. I’m going to take a brief look at the four CAS collections Lin Carter put together for the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. That’s the Ballantine I reference in the title of the post. I’m not going to put “Adult Fantasy” in the title.

As an aside, do you have any idea what comes up if youtype “Ballantine Adult Fantasy” into a search engine? Hint: Don’t try this at work.

Smith’s fiction was almsot all at short story or novelette length. I first read “The City fo the Singing Flame” in an anthology in the seventh grade. I think it was  one of the Robert Silberberg anthologies that my junior high library had plenty of. This was in the year [REDACTED]. Four or five years later, I came across one of the BAF collections in a used book store somewhere.

Here are the four BAF CAS collections, with a brief description of them.

Zothique: This was the first Smith collection, and the sixteenth in the BAF series. It was published in June of 1970. The BAF series tended to have wrap-around cover art, and this book was no exception. The artist was George Barr.

Unlike the later volumes of CAS in this line, which contained stories from more than one story cycle, the stories in Zothique were all set in, well, Zothique. This is a single continent on a dying world. I did an in-depth review of the book in this post a few years ago.

Lin Carter followed up Zothique the next year (1971) with Hyperborea. The art on this one is by Bill Martin. In my opinion, its the weakest of the four BAF CAS covers.

Hyperborea was the first BAF book I read, the one I mentioned above. It’s a solid collection. I was doing a series over at Black Gate some years ago on the BAF series, reading and reviewing the books (mostly) in order of publication. I was going to restart the series with this title, but life got in the way, and the review remains unwritten (for now).

Not all the stories are set in Hyperobrea, a kingdom in prehistoric Earth, but the majority fo them are. It’s a solid collection, and one worth checking out.  Hyperborea was number twenty-nine in the BAF series.

These two are the CAS titles I’ve read in the BAF series. There are two more, but my comments are going to be thinner than they have been for the first two books (these are overviews, remember, not reviews) because I’ve not read them, alhtough I have read some of the stories in them in other collections.

Book number forty-one in the BAF series was Xiccarph (1972). This gorgeous cover was painted by Gervasio Gellardo, who painted many BAF covers and helped give the line its distinctive look. I think it’s the best of the CAS covers, although George Barr’s cover for Zothique certainly gives it a run for its money.

There is not really a central setting for these stories, like there was in Zothique or Hyperborea. There are two that involve the characgter Maal Dweeb and three that are set on Mars. Smith did write a little traditional science fiction, or at least his version of it. The rest of the stories appear to be stand-alones, at least according to the ISFDB.

The fourth and final CAS collection to be published in the BAF line was Poseidonis in 1973. It was book number  fifty-nine in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series.  Once again, Mr. Gellardo provided the cover.

As you can probably tell from the cover, these stories have an Atlantis theme and are set in what Smith called Poseidonis. The story cycle isn’t complete, as Lin Carter notes in his introduction.

A few stories deal with Lemuria, another sunken continent, this time in the Pacific Ocean rather than in the Atlantic. The rest are all stand alones.

And there you have it, a quick look at the four collections of Clark Ashton Smith’s stories in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. These books have gotten hard to come by, at least out in the wild. I did pick up copies of the last two volumes in a Half Price Books in San Antonio last year. The person who processed them in the buying area apparently didn’t realize what they were, because I found them in the regular books, not the collectibles section. I’ve not seen copies of them in any second hand store since, although Smith is one of the authors I look for regularly.

Smith is considered one of the Big Three of Weird Tales, the other two being Howard and Lovecraft. Of the three, I would venture to say he is the least well known today, although he does have his following. Night Shade Books published a five volume collection of Smith’s work entitled The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith. This was in 2007. There are also collections of his poetry, but I don’t know enough about Smith’s poetry to comment on any of those books.

I think one reason Smith isn’t as widely read today as Howard and Lovecraft is that he is so much harder to read. Isaac Asimov has criticized Smith for his extensive vocabulary, saying something along the lines of needing a dictionary handy to read him.

I’m not sure I agree with Asimov on this point, but I do see where he is  coming from. Frankly, I rather like that about Smith’s writing. It forces me to think and learn. And sometimes I just want to enjoy the beauty fo the language. Smith’s work as a poet informs his style as a fictioneer, and to my mind makes it worth reading for that reason alone.