Poseidonis - Tales of Lost Atlantis [Mass Market Paperback]

Clark Ashton (Introduction by Lin Carter) Smith (Author), Gervasio Gallardo (wraparound cover) (Illustrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1973

Science Fiction, Adventure, Fantasy

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 210 pages
• Publisher: Ballantine Books; First Printing edition (1973)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345033531
• ISBN-13: 978-0345033536
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 4.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #672,356 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars As good as it gets, December 13, 2010

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king wolf (Jotunheim) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Poseidonis - Tales of Lost Atlantis (Mass Market Paperback)

Don't even think about falling into the usual trap of comparing Smith to his contemporaries Howard and Lovecraft. There is no comparison - Smith is at least two orders of magnitude better than either. 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. His closest competition for the title of best pulp writer is, of course, the two more famous friends of his from Weird Tales just mentioned. 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. A more legitimate comparison would be Jack Vance, Smith's only competition as America's greatest fantasist, and as a crafter of prose. Vance was imitating Smith in his first masterwork (The Dying Earth) but afterwards became primarily a novelist. Smith wrote only short stories, and so the comparison ends there.

Of course, all of these men - pulp writers included - are better writers than anyone who has come along in the field 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 (check out the letters written by the Weird Tales guys to each other and other writers and you will enter a politically incorrect time warp of men speaking normal truths that were once taken for granted by informed people). Real writing has since 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 some other authors and reviewers have towards Smith in the intros to some of his books and on the main website devoted to his works - even people that like Smith tend to like what is least in him and despise what is best. No matter- he will certainly outlast them all.)

Writers of that ilk, and other low-level readers, who like ittle-bitty words and sentences in the modernist, Hemingway style, and who like being spoon fed conventional ideas, plots and characters, will find little to entertain them in Smith. As usual, that's why Smith is so overlooked; his work demands more than modern readers can give (though granted his work was too elite for the hoi polloi even in the thirties, in the last gasp of real civilization - hence the relative popularity of Howard and Lovecraft, so decidedly third rate compared to Smith). Unlike the laughable horrors of Lovecraft or the simple historical adventures of Howard, Smith's work is dark phantasmagoria, written in an elevated language and style which demands concentration, imagination and participation from the reader, not the passive acceptance of emotional manipulation that makes for bestsellers.

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 might be true that he was inspired somewhat by Dunsany, just as he himself is the inspiration of Vance, but while my intellect rejects it, my heart knows that Smith, in the ways that count most, surpasses even Dunsany. 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 cannot match. Most importantly, unlike Dunsany the quality of Smith's work never let up. He has seven great stories to every one that Dunsany (or Borges, for that matter) ever wrote. Personally I have come to rank Smith behind only E. R. Eddison, but in his subgenre of weird, short, heroic science fantasy he is unsurpassed. Given the times we live in he will likely remain so forever.