Arvidnelson.com The online home of Arvid Nelson, writer of Rex Mundi & Zero Killer

Red World of Madness

Clark Ashton Smith is one of my favorite writers. Right up there with Edgar Allen Poe and Lord Dunsany, as far as I'm concerned. His accomplishments are all the more impressive because most of his stories are first drafts (as far as I know). The classic pulp rags were literary meatgrinders, after all. When you consider the conditions under which writers like Smith, Lovecraft and Howard wrote, you can't help but have an increased respect for them.

For a long time, Smith's The Red World of Polaris was assumed to be lost. It was the El Dorado of Smith fanatics. But a copy turned up a few years ago – it was nothing short of a miracle. The people at Nightshade Books published it, along with the rest of Smith's Captain Volmar stories, of which Red World is one. God bless ya, Nightshade Books. They also publish very scholarly, very beautifully bound editions of the rest of Smith's prose.

The discovery of Red World of Polaris is an adventure in itself, and it's recollected in the preface to the Nightshade Books edition, so I won't repeat it here – buy the book!

The parallels in Red World to Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness practically slap you across the face. The aliens of Smith's Polaris are very similar in appearance to the "Ancient Race" of Mountains of Madness. And the stories are basically the same: a race of bio-engineered servitors rebel and destroy their masters. The servitor races are strikingly similar, too – in Smith's story they're called "Murms", and in Lovecraft's they're "Shoggoths".

I know Lovecraft and Smith kept up a correspondence through the mail. I wonder if Smith inspired Lovecraft... or vice-versa? I have no idea of the exact date of either story.

The Captain Volmar tales are not my favorites of Smith, but I'll read anything by him. My vocabulary invariably grows by at least a half-dozen words every time I finish one of his stories. The Volmar yarns have a sort of "golly-gosh-gee-whiz" feeling to them, which shows how far ahead of the curve Smith was – that tone/style of writing became very prominent in the sci-fi of the 50s and 60s, 30 years after he was active.

If you've never encountered Smith before, it's hard to say where to begin... I would just pick up the first volume of the Nightshade Books collection and go for it. You won't want to come back.