As I mentioned in my previous post, today (January 13) is the birthday of Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961).
I’m not sure what I can say about Smith that hasn’t been said, and said better, by someone else. This isn’t the first post I’ve made about Smith.
I havne’t read anything by him in a while, so I’m not going to try and review any of his stories. But I do want to acknowledge his birthday
So here goes.
Clark Ashton Smith was one of the Big Three of Weird Tales in the 1930s. the other two were Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft. Unlike those two, Smith lived for over two decades after Howard and Lovecraft died. Sadly, he didn’t write much after the 1930s.
He also is probably the least well-known of the Big Three these days. I’m not sure why that is. His imagination was equal to the imaginations of Lovecraft and Howard. Arguably greater, maybe.
Perhaps it his extensive vocabulary that he wasn’t afraid to use. That’s not surprisng, because in addition to being a fiction writer and a sculptor, Smith was also a poet. His work isn’t light bedtime reading. He will stretch your vocabulary. Maybe too many of today’s readers are too lazy to use a dictionary. I don’t know.
The thing that I’ve had in mind about Smith for a while is his story cycles. I wouldn’t really call them series in the traditional sense. Only rarely do the same characters show up more than once. What the stories in the different cycles have is a common setting adn background iin which various characters have adventures. One example is Zothique. That’s the cover of ther Ballantine Adult Fantasy volume.
(Just as an aside, the artist for that particular book was George Barr (1937-2025). It’s also his birthday today, was well as Smith’s and Goulart’s.)
I really like idea of a common setting for stand-alone stories. That’s a little different than what I think of a series of a future history. There’s no overarching plot or story. Just tales in a common setting. I can see how such a story cycle wouldn’t be commercially viable compared to a series about a single character or group of characters.
But Smith, in my mind at least, set the gold standard for such a story cycle. I’ve not read all of Smith’s story, so that’s a project for the future.
People complain about the vocabulary in Smith (and other writers like Gene Wolfe) a bit too much. If you can’t infer the meaning of a word from its context you can look it up online or in one of those really thick dictionaries. It does not seem like a big deal to me. Also, I like learning new words and concepts.
I’m with you on this. Nott looking up unknown words could be an indication of laziness on the part of a reader. And it’s possilbe to look up the word in some ebooks.
I lucked into a bunch of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy books back in the nineties. Yes, I have the Smith ones.
Most of those are getting really hard to find or really expensive. Often both. The Smith books in the BAF series are some of hte most highly sought after, although my understanding is that they aren’t the rarest.