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Post by deuce on Aug 7, 2017 21:25:38 GMT -5
"One of the most colorful etchers of fantastic scenery, a portrayer of exotics of
great vividness and depth, Clark Ashton Smith has brooded long on the
time-darkened lanes of history. The lost lore of man’s million-year-old past
leads but to the unfathomable darkness of man’s billion-year future. This is
a tale from the as-yet-unlit corridors along which man may travel during the
endless aeons to come. It is such a tale as only a master dreamer could
conjure up."-- Donald A. Wollheim, introducing The Empire of the Necromancers
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Post by deuce on Aug 10, 2017 10:37:46 GMT -5
A good fanzine article on CAS from the 1950s (scroll down): efanzines.com/FR/fr14.htm#top
Like all who have made their mark in this field, Smith has often been assailed with criticism far from gentle. He has been censured by some for closeting himself in an ivory tower. Reviewers such as Phil Stong have taken strong exception to his Byzantine language. Apparently such a rare vintage is too delicate for many palates. They would prefer him to write in Basic English, while tethering his soaring imagination to this mundane sphere. But his followers know that his attraction lies not entirely in the singing glory of his prose nor the vast scope of his fancy. There is in his work besides a sophisticated wit, a derisive vein of humour, and a degree of characterisation that few have equalled. Let Lovecraft, his friend and correspondent for seventeen years, say the final word : "In sheer daemonic strangeness and fertility of conception, Mr. Smith is perhaps unexcelled by any other writer dead or living."
--Arthur F. Hillman |
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Post by deuce on Aug 11, 2017 13:03:00 GMT -5
"I am glad to see that you announce a poem by Smith in the next issue. He is a poet second to none. Weird poetry possesses an appeal peculiar to itself and the careful use of it raises the quality of any magazine."
-- Robert E. Howard to The Fantasy Fan, November 1933
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Post by ChrisLAdams on Aug 14, 2017 8:54:33 GMT -5
Bow down, I am the emperor of dreams.
~Clark Ashton Smith
CAS, probably my favorite fantasist and certainly one who was admired by Howard, passed away on this day in 1961. Smith would be 124 today were he immortalized at birth and avoided any bizarre entities that can kill gods, demi or otherwise. His poetry and tales, however, are indeed immortal and live on. 
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Post by deuce on Aug 14, 2017 14:35:48 GMT -5
Bow down, I am the emperor of dreams.
~Clark Ashton Smith
CAS, probably my favorite fantasist and certainly one who was admired by Howard, passed away on this day in 1961. Smith would be 124 today were he immortalized at birth and avoided any bizarre entities that can kill gods, demi or otherwise. His poetry and tales, however, are indeed immortal and live on. Right on! Here's what I wrote in remembrance of Klarkash-Ton's passing back in 2009: leogrin.com/CimmerianBlog/the-last-enchanter-drinking-to-his-shade/ |
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Post by deuce on Aug 20, 2017 23:48:33 GMT -5
Smith literally wed Lovecraft's creations to his own gods, which seem to be molded more like the Greek pantheon than the cosmic group of Lovecraft's fiction.[10] He assigned familial relationships to his gods—for example, making the Saturnian being Hziulquoigmnzhah the "uncle" of Tsathoggua[11]—and ascribed this family tree to the Parchments of Pnom, Hyperborea's leading "genealogist [and] noted prophet".[12]
According to Lovecraft, Tsathoggua is the offspring of the deity Yeb, whose twin Nug spawned Cthulhu.[13] Smith's "Parchments of Pnom", however, state that Tsathoggua is the spawn of Ghisguth and Zystulzhemgni, as well as being the mate of Shathak and the parent of Zvilpogghua.
Cxaxukluth[edit]
Cxaxukluth (or Ksaksa-Kluth) is an Outer God, spawn of Azathoth by spontaneous fission. His progeny are Hziulquoigmnzhah and Ghisguth. He is the grandfather of Tsathoggua.
Cxaxukluth dwells on Yuggoth. His immediate family lived with him for a while, but soon left because of his cannibalistic appetites.
Ghisguth[edit]
Ghisguth (or Ghizghuth or Ghisghuth) is the son of Cxaxukluth and the brother of Hziulquoigmnzhah. He is the mate of Zstylzhemghi and the father of Tsathoggua.
Hziulquoigmnzhah[edit]
Hziulquoigmnzhah (also Ziulquaz-Manzah) is the son of Cxaxukluth. He is also the brother to Ghisguth and the uncle of Tsathoggua.
His appearance is much like his nephew, but he has an elongated neck, very long forelimbs, and very short, multiple legs. He has had many homes including Xoth (possibly Sirius B), Yaksh (Neptune), and Cykranosh (Saturn), where he resides to this day.
In Kevin L. O'Brien's "October Surprise" (2006) Hziulquoigmnzhah's mate is Zstylzhemghi's sister Klosmiebhyx who bore him two entities likely matching with the Welsh giant Ysbaddaden and the Scottish war-goddess Scáthach,[14] since both named after these two demigods.
Klosmiebhyx[edit]
Klosmiebhyx is mentioned in Kevin L. O'Brien's "October Surprise" (2006) as sister of Zstylzhemghi.[15] Her appearance is not described, but likely similar to her sibling.
Knygathin Zhaum[edit]
Knygathin Zhaum is the child of Sfatlicllp and a Voormi.
He repopulated Hyperborea after humans deserted the cities of Uzuldaroum and Commoriom. Athammaus tried to execute him by beheading, but because of his preternatural heritage, such attempts proved unsuccessful and only served to aggravate him. As a descendant of Cxaxukluth, Knygathin Zhaum reproduced by fission and thus created an Azathothian strain among the Hyperborean Voormi.
Sfatlicllp[edit]
Sfatlicllp is the daughter of Zvilpogghua. She is the wife of a Voormi and their offspring is Knygathin Zhaum.
Sfatlicllp was likely born on Kythanil and may have procreated the formless spawn once on Earth. She probably dwells in N'kai with Tsathoggua.
Shathak[edit]
Shathak is the wife of Tsathoggua and the mother of Zvilpogghua.
Ycnágnnisssz[edit]
Ycnágnnisssz is the being from the dark star Xoth who spawned Zstylzhemghi by fission.
Zstylzhemghi[edit]
Zstylzhemghi (Matriarch of the Swarm) is the offspring of Ycnagnnisssz along with Klosmiebhyx,[16] mate of Ghisguth and the mother of Tsathoggua.
Zvilpogghua[edit]
Zvilpogghua (the Feaster from the Stars) is the son of Tsathoggua and Shathak, and is the father of Sfatlicllp. Zvilpogghua was conceived on the planet Yaksh (Neptune).
Zvilpogghua is known to the American Indians as Ossadagowah. He usually takes the form of an armless, winged, bipedal toad with a long, rubbery neck and a face completely covered in tentacles. He currently dwells on Yrautrom, a planet that orbits the star Algol
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Post by Voorqual on Aug 22, 2017 22:27:19 GMT -5
Smith also said the Hyperborean goddess Y'houndeh was "married" to the perennial demon piper Nyarlathotep. Hard to say what exactly that means in this context, since I doubt such entities have traditional anythings as humans would know them, but nonetheless it makes for fun mythology, and when Hyperborea isn't cold and grim it's fun and boisterous.
Smith may have filled out all that info for fun more than anything, not taking it deeply seriously, but I prefer it over fans today playing with his creations.
Anyway, Smith is without a doubt my favorite weird author of all time, and my greatest influence in writing my stories. Smith had written a few duds, but they are so much less common than in the oeuvres of Lovecraft or Howard! Even Smith's lesser stuff can be quite enchanting.
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Post by deuce on Aug 25, 2017 23:41:58 GMT -5
A map of Zothique rendered by a Frenchman whose name I could not ascertain...  |
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Post by deuce on Sept 12, 2017 9:17:37 GMT -5
"Howard must turn out a tremendous amount of work, if his published product represents a mere third of it. Personally, I find it physically impossible to go much beyond a certain quota of mass-production--20,000 words a month at most (the average is considerably less) being my limit. This, I understand, isn't much for a pulp-writer, since a lot of them reel off several thousand words per diem. But I simply can't write in other than a painstaking manner, with extra drafts and voluminous revisions and verbal polishing. A further examination of my sold and unsold material reveals the fact that by actual word-count I have placed a higher percentage than a mere toll of titles would indicate--that is to say, about three-fourths. This seems to imply that longish tales are more readily salable than short shorts, as far as I am concerned. A genre classification of the unsold material reveals, surprisingly, that two-thirds of it is science fiction--the remnant of purely weird stuff being comparatively negligible, and the poorest stuff being neither weird nor science fiction but random, brief experiments in the realm of the quasi-natural--experiments which I shall probably not repeat."
-- Clark Ashton Smith to H. P. Lovecraft, Mar 1932Several of those SF stories were Clark's "Volmar" tales. 
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Post by deuce on Sept 26, 2017 10:15:31 GMT -5
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Post by deuce on Sept 27, 2017 13:17:54 GMT -5
"And the field for imaginative fiction, both scientific and non-scientific, is, it seems to me, wholly inexhaustible."
-- Clark Ashton Smith to Astounding Stories, 1931
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Post by deuce on Oct 7, 2017 0:06:19 GMT -5
January, 1932...  |
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Post by deuce on Oct 10, 2017 23:44:24 GMT -5
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Post by deuce on Oct 17, 2017 23:46:35 GMT -5
"[Lafcadio] Hearn, [Oscar] Wilde, and [Thomas] de Quincey (aside from Poe and Bierce) are the prose-writers to whom I seem to take most naturally."
-- CAS to George Sterling, April 14, 1917
That was a very young Clark Ashton Smith writing to his mentor, George Sterling. He added other faves as he grew older, A. Merritt, Lovecraft and CL Moore among them.
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Post by mightythorjrs on Oct 20, 2017 11:05:07 GMT -5
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