5. CAS, letter to HPL, c. mid-December 1930 (LL 23).

6. Harry Bates, letter to CAS, July 31, 1931 (ms, JHL).

7. CAS, letter to DAW, August 7, 1931 (ms, MHS).

8. CAS, letter to AWD, September 15, 1931 (ms, SHSW).

9. CAS, letter to AWD, September 5, 1941 (SL 333).

The Red World of Polaris

As was described in ES (274-75), Captain Volmar and the crew of the ether-ship Alcyone made their first appearance in “Marooned in Andromeda” (WS October 1930). David Lasser, who edited the magazine for publisher Hugo Gernsback, surprised Smith by proposing “a series of tales about the same crew of characters (Capt. Volmar, etc.) and their adventures on different planets, saying that they would use a novelette of this type every other month.”He described it as “pseudo-scientific with a vengeance: it deals with a race of people who had their brains transplanted into indestructible metal bodies, and who were going to perform the same office for the humans who visited their world.” He added that “there are possibilities in this type of story, though I’d prefer writing something even more extra-terrestrial, with no human characters at all.” Smith completed the first draft during a camping trip to the nearby Sierra mountains late in August 1930, wryly telling HPL that the magnificent scenery “is more likely to be a source of distraction than inspiration, except in retrospect.”¹ He would later reconsiderthis, admitting that “Probably the mountain scenery was a stimulant to my writing—but it was so tremendous that it temporarily altered and confused my sense of values. Mere words didn’t seem to stand up in the presence of those peaks and cliffs. But now, amid the perspectives of familiar surroundings, ‘The Red World’ doesn’t seem so bad. The last chapter could afford themes for Doré or Martin, in regard to cataclysmic scope at any rate.”²

Smith wrote to Lovecraft a couple of months later that the editors were requesting that he add some action to the story, objecting that the first part was “almost wholly descriptive;” he added that “this pretense of being scientific gives me a pain. The mythology of science is not one that intrigues me very deeply.”³ Other complaints by Lasser may have found their way into another letter to Lovecraft: “Most interplanetary yarns might as well have been laid on earth—as far as I can see—the characters seem no more affected by their alien milieu than if they were in some exotic terrestrial region. But certainly, the usual editorial requirements militate against any attempt at a sound psychological treatment... ‘The story is too leisurely.’ ‘No plot, no complications.’ ‘Put some more action in it.’”⁴

Despite some perfunctory attempts at revision, Lasser finally ended up rejecting the story. Smith would later describe the story to Robert H. Barlow as “passably written, but suffers from triteness of plot.”⁵ This may be the reason why he did not spend any further effort on revising the story, since at 13,000 words he had already invested a relatively tremendous amount of time and effort into the tale. This is too bad, because while “The Red World of Polaris” would not have fit into the “Cowboys-and-Indians-in-space” formula of Astounding Stories at this time, Mike Ashley suggests that “it would almost certainly have appealed to F. Orlin Tremaine when he became editor of Astounding Stories a few years later, in 1933, when the magazine was developing its ‘thought variant’ stories,” or even with a little rewrite to FW at WT itself.⁶

Smith sold the only typescripts of two stories, “The Red World of Polaris” and “Like Mohammed’s Tomb” (written circa October 1930), to Michael DeAngelis, a fan then living in Brooklyn, New York who had reprinted CAS’ poem “The Ghoul and the Seraph” as a limited edition pamphlet in 1950. DeAngelis planned to publish the two stories either as separate pamphlets or in a fanzine, but vanished, taking the typescript with him. (It is believed that he had sold the typescript for “Like Mohammed’s Tomb” to another Brooklyn fan, but it remains at this time still lost.) Numerous attempts to locate DeAngelis were made over the years by Smith, Derleth, Roy Squires, Donald Sidney-Fryer, Douglas A. Anderson, and Steve Behrends, but all met with failure until Ron Hilger thought to contact DeAngelis’ co-editor for the fanzine Asmodeus, Alan H. Pesetsky, in May 2003. Pesetsky located a typed copy of the story that he had prepared for publication in their fanzine, and was kind enough to provide us with a copy. It was first published as the title story of the collected Volmar stories by Night Shade Books in 2003.

1. CAS, letter to HPL, August 22, 1930 (SL 117-118). (Note: this letter was incorrectly described as to CAS by David Lasser in both ES (275, n5) and our introduction to RW, “The Magellan of the Constellations,” page 3.)

2. CAS, letter to HPL, c. mid-September 1930 (SL 119-120).

3. CAS, letter to HPL, c. October 24, 1930 (LL 15).

4. CAS, letter to HPL, November 10 [1930] (SL 132).

5. CAS, letter to RHB, May 16, 1937 (SL 301).

6. Mike Ashley, “Evoking Wonder.” Lost Worlds no. 3 (2006): 31.

Told in the Desert

This story was conceived in late 1929 and according to Smith’s “Completed Stories” log was written after the completion of “The Red World of Polaris” in late August 1930 but before “The Willow Landscape.” According to a surviving synopsis, it was to have been originally entitled “Neria”:

A wanderer in the desert, who finds an oasis inhabited only by a beautiful girl, named Neria. He loves her, and is content to dwell with her for awhile; but at last he feels that he must return to the world for awhile, in spite of the girl’s warning that he will never find her again if he does. He goes away, and later seeks to find the oasis again, but spends his whole life searching for it in vain.

¹

Smith sent August Derleth the typescripts of three unpublished stories, “The Metamorphosis of the World,” “An Offering to the Moon,” and this, late in the summer of 1950; in his letter Smith described the tale as “a lengthy and rather uneven prose-poem.”² While Derleth was able to place the first two stories with WT, “Told in the Desert” remained unpublished until 1964, when Derleth included it in an anthology of original or unpublished stories, Over the Edge, published by Arkham House. No manuscript or typescript survives at either JHL or SHSW, and a search of the remaining archives at Arkham House failed to locate the tale. It was collected posthumously in OD.

1. SS 157.

2. CAS, letter to AWD, August 7, 1950.

The Willow Landscape

Completed on September 8, 1930, “The Willow Landscape” was rejected by FW “as it does not seem exactly suited to Weird Tales, and it lacks the swift action that we want for Oriental Stories.”¹ This evoked the following response from Lovecraft: “It is like Wright to reject ‘The Willow Landscape’. The damn fool! Action—hell, what a standard! And yet I know that is the god of the herd.”² Smith then submitted it to Ghost Stories where it “drew the only editorial compliment (‘very charming and poetic’) which this tale has yet received.”³ As an example of the lengths to which Smith was willing to pursue a sale, he finally managed to place the tale with the Philippine Magazine, noting that “The rates are nothing very gaudy; but the editor seems to be appreciative.”⁴ It was published in the May 1931 issue “with a very charming illustration by a native artist.”⁵

Smith would later include “The Willow Landscape” in DS, describing it on an advertising flyer he prepared for the booklet as “A fanciful Chinese tale, about an impoverished scholar and the old landscape painting with which he was loath to part.” FW later accepted the story and published in the June-July 1939 issue of WT, accompanied by a fine illustration by Virgil Finlay. It was included in GL. However, “The Willow Landscape” has the singular distinction in Smith’s work of being selected for performance by the monologist “Brother Theodore” (Theodore Gottlieb) on his 1959 LP album Coral Records Presents Theodore In Stereo. The present text comes from a typescript presented to Genevieve K. Sully that was checked against DS.