Lost Worlds (Bison Frontiers of Imagination)

Lost Worlds (Bison Frontiers of Imagination)
by Clark Ashton Smith

Lost Worlds (Bison Frontiers of Imagination)
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Book Summary Information

Author: Clark Ashton Smith
Introduction: Jeff VanderMeer
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-10-01
ISBN: 0803293518
Number of pages: 426
Publisher: Bison Books

Book Reviews of Lost Worlds (Bison Frontiers of Imagination)

Book Review: best in his field
Summary: 5 Stars

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 Real writing has been replaced by kindergarten prose.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.

Summary of Lost Worlds (Bison Frontiers of Imagination)

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.

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