Lost Worlds (Bison Frontiers of Imagination) [Paperback]

Clark Ashton Smith (Author), Jeff VanderMeer (Introduction)

Book Description

Series: Bison Frontiers of Imagination | Publication Date: October 1, 2006

An artist, poet, and prolific contributor to Weird Tales, Clark Ashton Smith (1893–1967) is an influential figure in the history of pulp fiction. A close correspondent and collaborator with H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, Smith was widely celebrated as a master by his contemporaries. Back in print for the first time since 1971, Lost Worlds brings together twenty-three of Smith's classic stories, all of which were originally published in Weird Tales. Rather than center his works on heroes, Smith created fantastical worlds around which he built cycles of stories. Included here are tales from the realms of Averoigne, Zothique, Hyperborea, and others. Told in lush poetic prose, these haunting stories bring to life dark, dreamlike realms full of gothic monsters and mortals. Jeff VanderMeer provides an introduction for this Bison Books edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Incredible worlds, impossibly beautiful cities, and still more fantastic creatures... Take one step across the threshold of his stories and you plunge into colour, sound, taste, smell and texture: into language."--Ray Bradbury "None strikes the note of cosmic horror as well as Clark Ashton Smith. In sheer daemonic strangeness and fertility of conception, Smith is perhaps unexcelled by any other writer, dead or living."--H. P. Lovecraft

About the Author

Jeff VanderMeer is a two-time World Fantasy Award winner whose books of fiction and edited anthologies have been finalists for the Philip K. Dick Award and the International Horror Guild Award.

Product Details

• Paperback: 426 pages
• Publisher: Bison Books (October 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0803293518
• ISBN-13: 978-0803293519
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #584,359 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Table of contents, August 10, 2009

By 

Matthew T. Carpenter (Peoria, IL, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Lost Worlds (Bison Frontiers of Imagination) (Paperback)

For potential buyers I am listing the table of contents. The two books from Bison represent an alternative to A Rendezvous in Averoigne as a good basic Smith collection.

"The Tale of Satampra Zeiros"
"The Door to Saturn"
"The Seven Geases"
"The Coming of the White Worm"
"The Last Incantation"
"A Voyage to Sfanomoë"
"The Death of Malygris"
"The Holiness of Azédarac"
"The Beast of Averoigne"
"The Empire of the Necromancers"
"The Isle of the Torturers"
"Necromancy in Naat"
"Xeethra"
"The Maze of Maal Dweb"
"The Flower-Women"
"The Demon of the Flower"
"The Plutonian Drug"
"The Planet of the Dead"
"The Gorgon"
"The Letter from Mohaun Los"
"The Light from Beyond"
"The Hunters from Beyond"
"The Treader of the Dust

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Fantasy From an Early 20th Century Master, February 13, 2007

By 

Paul Cook (Tempe, Arizona USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Lost Worlds (Bison Frontiers of Imagination) (Paperback)

This is an extraordinary collection of fantasy (and sometimes horror) masterpieces by a much-neglected, but very influential author. Smith published mostly in WEIRD TALES in the Twenties and Thirties but also published in the occasional science fiction pulp magazine as well. This is fantasy before Tolkein and has nothing of the Arthurian mold to it. Smith writes of weird worlds, strange sorcerers, men who set out to explore the ruins of a dead city of antiquity only to unleash some horror on the world. Lovecraft is the one author who lurks in the background, but Smith is really a writer all of his own. The other factor that is important here is Smith's use of language. It's very poetic and rich, perhaps over the top at times. But this is the attraction of this kind of literature; the very language itself is what evokes these weird worlds and strange landscapes. I can highly recommend this book, especially if you are a fan of fantasy. But be forewarned: This isn't the sword-and-sorcery of Robert Jordan or David Eddings. These stories are dark are the kind that gave WEIRD TALES its power and uniqueness. The editors at Bison should be commended for bringing these stories back out into the open.

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars best in his field, December 13, 2010

By 

king wolf (Jotunheim) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lost Worlds (Bison Frontiers of Imagination) (Paperback)

Clark Ashton Smith is the greatest pulp writer of all time, and overall the best fantasy writer America has produced, largely because he is the only one who writes genuinely literary prose (and that would include even Raymond Chandler, who writes beautifully but very minimally). His closest competition for the title of best pulp writer is, of course, his two more famous friends from Weird Tales. Certainly Lovecraft's pseudo-occultish yarns can be amusing enough, and the sheer force of R. E. Howard's vision elevates his work to a sort of workingman's Nietzchean greatness. If most pulp writers are soda pop, those guys are beer. But Smith, by contrast, is fine wine. (A different, darker, sweeter wine than the usual at that - blueberry or blackberry, perhaps).

Smith, indeed, is too good to be classed with the pulp writers, because he has the depth and richness that only artistry, not commerce, can aspire to. His only competition as America's greatest fantasist, and as a crafter of prose, is Jack Vance, who, after imitating Smith in his first masterwork (The Dying Earth) became primarily a novelist, and so it is something of apples to oranges to compare him to Smith.

Of course, all of these men - pulp writers included - are better writers than anyone who has come along in the last sixty years or so, because they were produced by a superior time and place. Common sense perspectives on the world taken for granted then are unpublishable now. Real writing has been replaced by kindergarten prose. The decline of Western civilization is accelerating towards its terminal point and good fiction is now nearly impossible. (Just look, as an example, to the silly complaints in the introduction to this book by some modernist type who evidently thinks himself a writer - whose works and that of his ilk will, I promise, be ground into dust in no time, where Smith is still being read after a century and will long remain so.)

Low level readers, who like ittle-bitty words and sentences in the modernist, Hemingway style, and who like being spoon fed in the form of conventional plots and characters, will find little to entertain them in Smith. That's why he is so obscure, so overlooked; his work demands more than modern readers can give. His work is dark phantasmagoria, written in an elevated language and style which demands concentration, imagination and participation from the reader.

If you are among those few who still know what a book is for, rejoice - you just discovered a true hidden gem, in one of the last places you might have expected to find it. As I have become reacquainted with his works my appreciation of Smith has only grown greater. It is well known that he is the inspiration of early Jack Vance, just as he was himself inspired by Lord Dunsany, but while my intellect rejects it, my heart knows that Smith, in the ways that count most, surpasses them both. Smith's consciousness roamed where it would, unbound by mortal considerations, and his work as a result has a remote, objective spirituality and a consistency of invention that even the great Irish Baron and science fantasy's premiere novelist cannot quite match. Personally I rank him behind only E. R. Eddison as a fantasy writer and Jorge Borges as a short story writer, but in his subgenre of weird, short, heroic fantasy he is unsurpassed and given the times will likely remain so forever.