A Vintage From Atlantis

by Clark Ashton Smith

  Smith submitted the story to Harry Bates, telling Derleth that he felt “Wright would perhaps consider it too fantastic”,2 but it failed to get past publisher William Clayton.3 Wright accepted the story apparently without hesitation and offered Smith thirty-three dollars for it.4 It appeared in the June 1932 issue of Weird Tales, and was collected in OST and RA. Smith also planned to include it in Far from Time, which indicates that he possibly regarded it as more than a mere filler.

  1. SS 166.

  2. CAS, letter to AWD, December 2, 1931 (ms, SHSW).

  3. Harry Bates, letter to CAS, December 15, 1931 (ms, JHL).

  4. Popular Fiction Publishing Company, letter to CAS May 28, 1932 (ms, JHL).

  The Invisible City

  Harry Bates, editor of Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, edited a sister genre magazine for publisher William Clayton, Astounding Stories of Super-Science. Smith had not submitted any stories to it despite his success with Strange Tales because its basic formula could be summed up as cowboys and Indians in space. It comes as no surprise that CAS did not have a high opinion of the magazine, telling Lovecraft “Astounding absolutely gags me—in one of the stories, for example, there is a Man from Mars who talks American slang! I shall not buy the magazine again”.1 On the other hand, Bates had already bought two stories from Smith for Strange Tales, and was about to buy three more, one of which he had specially commissioned. It is not surprising, then that Bates wrote to Smith on October 16, 1931 to solicit submission for his science fiction magazine: “I wonder why you can’t write an acceptable short story for our Astounding Stories. I see you do it for our competitors”.2

  “The Invisible City” was the first “scientifiction” story Smith wrote after receiving this invitation. Two plot synopses exist for this story among Smith’s papers. The first dates approximately to 1930, and reads simply “An invisible barrier, like a city wall is encountered by explorers in the Gobi desert. Groping, they find a gate in this wall—and are trapped in an unseen labyrinth of buildings. They spend a night in this labyrinth before escaping”.3 He would later develop this idea further:

  Two explorers, wandering in the Gobi desert, lost, and searching for water, come to a series of strange, regular-shapen pits in the desert floor. Examining these, they find to their amazement that the pits are covered with an invisible, solid substance, that they are walking among unseen walls, on unseen pavements, in what appears to be a maze of buildings wrought of an ice-cold substance absolutely permeable to light. In some of the pits they see the apparently floating bodies of strange creatures, which they take to be mummies. One of the two men falls down a flight of steps, drops his rifle, and is attached by an unseen monster, the minotaur of this strange labyrinth. The other man, following more carefully, manages to shoot the monster in a vital spot, and kills it. The thing becomes visible in death, and putrefies with amazing rapidity. The men escape from the city; and crossing a low ridge, find themselves on the bank of a river which will take them to the huts of desert tribesmen.4

  Smith found the actual composition of the story less than satisfying, and expressed concern that it would prove unsaleable. The problem was that it had “not enough atmosphere to make it really good—and too many unexplained mysteries for the scientifiction readers, who simply must have their little formulae. A story in which the “heroes” don’t solve anything would hardly go. To hell with heroes anyway”.5 His fears were realized when, after completing the story on December 15, 1931, Bates rejected it as “too vague and pointless”.6 After finishing some revisions on February 2, 1932, Smith resubmitted the story, but to no avail. Bates’ letters do not survive, but according to Smith it was felt that his stories lacked “human interest” and his heroes “didn’t show enough excitement over their prodigious adventures”.7 (To this last criticism Smith wryly observed “But if anything could be more insouciant than some of the birds who figure in the A.S. yarns—”8) Having already invested more effort in the story than he probably felt it deserved, Smith sent it along to Wonder Stories, where it was accepted by David Lasser on March 5, 1932.9 It appeared on the cover of the June 1932 issue, and Ione Weber was eventually able to extract sixty-five dollars for it from Gernsback’s purse.

  Smith probably didn’t know it, but it appears that Gernsback sold the foreign language rights to his story. “The Invisible City” was translated as “Die unsichtbare Stadt” in the ninth issue for 1933 of the German magazine Bibliothek der Unterhaltung und des Wissens, published in Stuttgart by Union Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft. Smith would later sell the rights to the story to the British magazine Tales of Wonder, edited by Walter Gillings, and would also take the cover spot.

  Smith called the story “a hunk of tripe”,10 although Lovecraft praised it as “vivid & ingenious in the extreme—& with enough ‘eckshun’ to please the most exacting clientele”.11 Lovecraft would later write a story with a similar theme (“In the Walls of Eryx,” Weird Tales, October 1939), but the idea for this story came from his teenage collaborator, Kenneth Sterling (1920-1995), who identified his inspiration as Edmond Hamilton’s “The Monster-God of Mamurth” (Weird Tales, August 1926).12

  1. CAS, letter to HPL, [c. late October 1930 (SL 123)].

  2. Harry Bates, letter to CAS, October 16, 1931 (ms, JHL).

  3. SS 158-59.

  4. SS 172-73.

  5. CAS, letter to AWD, December 12, 1931 (ms, SHSW).

  6. CAS, letter to AWD, January 31, 1932 (ms, SHSW).

  7. CAS, letter to AWD, February 10, 1932 (ms, SHSW).

  8. CAS, letter to AWD, February 24, 1932 (ms, SHSW).

  9. David Lasser, letter to CAS, March 5, 1932 (private collection).

  10. CAS, letter to AWD, March 15, 1932 (SL 173).

  11. HPL, note to CAS [Postmarked May 13, 1932] (courtesy of S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz).

  12. S. T. Joshi, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1996), p. 604.

  The Immortals of Mercury

  Despite his unpleasant experience with “The Invisible City,” Smith found the two cents a word paid by the Clayton magazines as alluring as any pilgrim to Ydmos found the call of the Singing Flame. His next attempt to storm the barricades at Astounding Stories was “The Immortals of Mercury.” The planet closest to the sun apparently excited his imagination, as story ideas such as “The Ghoul from Mercury” and “The Conquest of Mercury” were found among his papers. One such idea, “A Sojourn in Mercury,” follows: “The terrestrial explorer, landing in the twilight zone of the dark frozen side of Mercury, who is driven forth by the inhabitants toward the burning desert of the side toward the sun”.1 A later version of this idea follows immediately after the second outline of “The Invisible City,” the title now reading “The Immortals of Mercury:”

  An explorer caught by the aboriginals of Mercury, who is tied to the back of a salamander-like monster that carries him away into the sun-ward deserts of the planet. Almost swooning with the insupportable heat, he sees the lifting of an artificial lid in the desert floor, and is rescued and carried into subterranean regions by strange beings who have achieved immortality by wearing clothes of a material that excludes the destructive cosmic rays.2

  Smith began the composition of the story around the middle of December 1931, but its completion was delayed until mid-January because his mother became ill with an infected heel, which required him both to care for her and to accomplish the chores she usually performed.He was not overly pleased with the completed product, describing it as “a lot of tripe, I’m afraid; but if it brings me a 200.00 dollar check, [it] will have served its purpose”.3 Lovecraft, as usual, offered his support, telling Smith encouragingly “What you suggest about ‘The Immortals of Mercury’ sounds alluring, even though concessions to Claytonism may have been made”.4 Unfortunately, Bates rejected the story for the same reasons discussed above (see “The Invisible City”).

  In order to increase the chances of its acceptance by Farnsworth Wright, Smith rewrote the tale to gi
ve it “a grim and terrific ending”,5 which led HPL to observe ironically “for once commercial pressure may have an effect other than deleterious—leading you into some potent realism which you would not otherwise have introduced”.6 (This remark was related to a running exchange between Smith and Lovecraft concerning the relative merits of romanticism versus realism in the weird tale.) Wright declined to use “The Immortals of Mercury,” preferring instead to serialize such immortal classics as Victor Rousseau’s “The Phantom Hand” (Weird Tales, July through November 1932) and public domain novels like Frankenstein.

  David Lasser accepted “The Immortals of Mercury,” mentioning that they might print it as a separate pamphlet rather than use it in either Wonder Stories or its sister quarterly.7 The booklet appeared early that summer, with Lovecraft writing Smith that he found it waiting for him upon his return from a trip to New Orleans:

  It would have been much better, I fancy, if not deprived of the parts you mention—but even as it is it furnishes more than one authentic shudder. It ought to have “eckshun” enough to suit even the canny Gernsback, & in addition, the later parts give a very real thrill of subterrene horror. Glad that Hugo & Co. didn’t demand a happy ending—the present abrupt punch comes as a magnificently ironic touch.8

  According to the accounts obtained by his attorney, Ione Weber, Smith was due eighty dollars from Gernsback’s Stellar Publication Corporation for the story’s publication as Science Fiction Series no. 16, a rather unprepossessing pamphlet issued with no cover illustration. The story was included in TSS. No complete manuscript exists, although we were able to examine several pages of a first draft for “Immortals.” We also compared the text from TSS with that of a copy of the 1932 pamphlet corrected by Smith, and between them were able to correct most of the numerous typographical errors that crept into both editions.

  1. SS 160.

  2. SS 173.

  3. CAS, letter to Derleth, January 19, 1932 (ms, SHSW). Two hundred dollars is what Astounding Stories would have paid for the ten thousand word novelette.

  4. HPL, letter to CAS [postmarked January 28, 1932] (ms, JHL).

  5. CAS, letter to AWD, February 21, 1932 (ms, SHSW).

  6. HPL, letter to CAS, February 26, 1932 (AHT).

  7. David Lasser, letter to CAS, March 16, 1932 (ms, JHL).

  8. HPL, letter to CAS, July 10, 1932 (AHT).

  The Empire of the Necromancers

  In this story Smith introduced what Brian Stableford has called “the most dramatically appropriate”1 of his secondary worlds, Zothique. Will Murray,2 Steve Behrends3 and Jim Rockhill4 have all discussed the origins of this series in some depth, tracing its origins as far back as Smith’s 1911 poem “The Last Night”5 and a brief sketch “Account of an Actual Dream—1912.”6 CAS described it to L. Sprague de Camp as “the last inhabited continent of earth” where the “science and machinery of our present civilization have long been forgotten, together with our present religions. But many gods are worshipped; and sorcery and demonism prevail again as in ancient days.”7 The first use of the name occurs in a synopsis for “Vizaphmal in Ophiuchus,” a never-completed sequel to “The Monster of the Prophecy,” where it referred to a world in another solar system, that he plotted in April 1930.8 In February 1931 he came up with the idea of “Gnydron, a continent of the far future, in the South Atlantic, which is more subject to incursions of ‘outsideness’ than any former terrene realm; and more liable to the visitation of beings from galaxies not yet visible; also, to shifting admixtures and interchanges with other dimensions or planes of entity”.9

  Also in 1930 CAS scribbled an idea about the exploitation of the dead by the living, which he called “The Empire of the Necromancers:” “Two sorcerers, who raise up an entire people from the dead, in order that they may reign over them. The dead, however, revolt against being brought back to life”.10 The idea laid dormant, much like the people of Cincor, until he developed the plot further in August or September 1931:

  A story told by a man centuries dead—the prince of a perished people. He and all his subjects are raised up from death to be the slaves of two necromancers greedy of dominion and power. These people, living a ghostly, hollow, shadow-like existence, are driven to toil for the necromancers, are tortured for their sadistic pleasure, made to serve their necrophilic lusts. The prince, learning the secret of their power, and throwing off their spell in a measure, resolves to rescue his people from this terrible doom. He contrives that the necromancers shall themselves die, to awaken at a stated time and find themselves among the living dead. Then he and his people, freed from their slavery, seek the oblivion of a second death by flinging themselves into the subterranean fires beneath the kingdom.11

  Smith worked on it at the same time as, and possibly as an antidote to, “The Invisible City” and “The Immortals of Mercury,” completing it on January 7, 1932. “There is a queer mood in this little tale; and, like my forthcoming, ‘The Planet of the Dead,’ it is muchly overgreened with what H. P. once referred to as the ‘verdigris of decadence’.”12 HPL called it “great—one of the best things I’ve seen lately—& I’m immensely glad to learn that it has landed with Wright”.13 “The Empire of the Necromancers” was the most popular story in the September 1932 issue of Weird Tales. It was collected in LW and RA. This text is based upon two carbon copies of the typescript, one at JHL forming part of Smith’s papers, and another presented by CAS to Lester Anderson, a Bay Area science fiction fan, that incorporates some holograph changes that do not appear on either the JHL copy or the published text . This presentation copy was purchased by the Bancroft Library a few years ago as part of a large lot of Smith’s letters, manuscripts and other ephemera.

  1. Brian Stableford, “Outside the Human Aquarium: The Fantastic Imagination of Clark Ashton Smith,” In FFT 161.

  2. Will Murray, “Introduction” to Tales of Zothique by Clark Ashton Smith (West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1995), p. 7-12.

  3. Steve Behrends, chapter 2, “Zothique,” Clark Ashton Smith, Starmont Reader’s Guide 49 (Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1990), pp. 24-37.

  4. Jim Rockhill, “As Shadows Wait Upon the Sun: Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique,” In FFT 277-92.

  5. The Star-Treader and Other Poems (San Francisco: A. M. Robertson, 1912), p. 31.

  6. SS 245.

  7. CAS, letter to L. Sprague de Camp, November 3, 1953 (SL 374).

  8. ES 266.

  9. SS 165.

  10. SS 158.

  11. SS 170.

  12. CAS, letter to AWD, January 9, 1932 (ms, SHSW).

  13. HPL, letter to CAS [postmarked January 28, 1932] (ms, JHL).

  The Seed from the Sepulcher

  If we use the number of times a story has been anthologized as an indication of its popularity, then “The Seed from the Sepulcher,” at eight times (not counting different editions of the same anthology), is Smith’s most popular story, beating “The Return of the Sorcerer” (five times), “The City of the Singing Flame” (four times), “A Rendevous in Averoigne” (four times), and “The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan” (three times)—and it wasn’t even included in one of his collections until after his death!

  Timeus Ashton-Smith (1855-1937), the father of Clark Ashton Smith, was the son of a wealthy British industrialist who used his patrimony for travel and gambling. Based upon accounts received from his friend, H. P. Lovecraft described Timeus as “something of a soldier of fortune [who had] travelled in many odd corners of the earth, including the Amazon jungles of South America. Clark probably derives much of his exotic taste from the tales told him by his father when he was very small—he was especially impressed by accounts of the gorgeously plumed birds and bizarre tropical flowers of equatorial Brazil”.1 These stories undoubtedly were on Smith’s mind when he conceived of this story.

  Steve Behrends, in his notes to Smith’s story-ideas published in Strange Shadows, identifies this plot germ, originally called “A Bottle on the Amazon” (later changed to “Orinoco”
) as the genesis of “The Seed from the Sepulcher:”

  A whisky-bottle floating in the ^Orinoco^ [Amazon] is picked up near the river’s mouth, and is found to contain a ms. which details the adventures of two explorers in an untrodden country of Venezuela. Here one of the two men is bitten by a monstrous fanged vegetable growth ^having a vague, distorted likeness to a human figure^, and shortly after, begins to show signs of an appalling transformation. Little by little he is turned into a replica of the thing that had bitten him. Finally, he takes root in the jungle—and stings the narrator of the story, just as the other is about to abandon him in horror and despair.2

  According to Behrends, this synopsis probably dates to the summer of 1931. He began working on the tale toward the end of January 1932, mentioning in a letter that he was “doing another story, ‘The Seed from the Sepulcher,’ for submission to Strange Tales… ‘The Seed from the Sepulcher’ will be the best of the lot, from my standpoint. It describes a monstrous plant growing out of a man’s skull, eyes, etc., and trellising the roots on all his bones, while he was still alive”.3 It was completed by February 10, since in a discussion of his recent stories Smith told Derleth “I like ‘The Seed from the Sepulcher’ best, for its imaginative touches, but am going to chuck the malignant plant idea after this. I don’t want to run it into the ground!”4 When he submitted it to Harry Bates,