It is January 13 as I write this. Today’s birthdays are  Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961) and Ron Goulart (1933-2022).

Smith needs no introduction here. He was one of the Big Three during the heyday of Weird Tales, along with H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. In addition to also being a scultor, Smith was a poet. His work reflects that. He arguably had the most extensive vocabulary of any fantasy and science fiction writer.

I once read an introduction years ago in one of the (at the time) ubiquitous anthologies that had Isaac Asimov’s name on the cover as one of the editors. (I don’t recall which anthology.) He said he didn’t like reading Clark because he had too look up too many words in  the dictionary. I think that says more about Asimov than it does Clark. I never had that problem, and I first read Clark in the seventh grade.

Pound sand, Isaac, As a stylist Clark has you beat by a light year or more.

Smith wrote no novels, but he did write multiple story cycles. Series doesn’t really apply, because with few exceptions only backgrounds and settings were consistent among the stories of any story cycle. Many of these are collected by cycle in the four Smith volumes from the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series.  That’s the cover for Xiccarph on the right.

I will argue that smith had, and still has, no equal when it comes to  his ability to write prose that is otherworldy. Yes, he takes some focus to read. He’s not light bedtime reading like, say, Isaac Asimov (whose work I do like).

From 2007 through 2010, NightShade Books published a five volume The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith. Those books are available as audiobooks. (So are the five volumes of NightShade’s Manly Wade Wellman, but that’s another post.) I’ve listened to the first few stories in the first volume. Now that classes for the spring semester are starting later this week, I’ll be listening to more of them. I’ll go on to the other volumes over the course of the year.

Ron Goulart is another writer whose name was once well-known but has begun to fade into obscurity.

If you are looking for dark, large-scale epics, you probably won’t find that in his work. He wrote both novels and a number of short stories, but they tended to be the type of off the wall gonzo humor than anything else.

Goulart was also a ghost writer. The ISFDB credits him for writing the Tek books that were published with William Shatner’s name on the cover.

Goulart also wrote mysteries, although I haven’t read many of them.

One thing you should look for is his nonfiction. He wrote multiple books about comics. The Dime Detectives is a great survey of the detective pulps.

A retrospective omnibus of hsi best short ficetion is long overdue.