7. CAS, “The Hashish-Eater; or, The Apocalypse of Evil.” In The Last Oblivion: Best Fantastic Poems of Clark Ashton Smith (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2002): 24-25.
An Adventure in Futurity
This story originated in a suggestion from editor David Lasser of WS:
We can use in the near future in
Wonder Stories
a good time traveling story, concerning the adventures of a twentieth century man in the future.
I would be glad to work the details of one out with you and help you to whip a good plot in shape. My thought is, in general, that you could show the adventures of a contemporary in some future century, and make it quite realistic.
I believe that you have the ability to portray local color, so that you could show not only the difference in the physical surroundings and the mode of life of our descendants, but also in their different habits of thought. It is quite possible for a man going into the future, to find an entirely different set of moral and social ideas, as is illustrated very well in Shaw’s “Back to Methuselah”. He would find these people absorbed in entirely different ideas, and he would be truly lost as he would be among people of a different race.
I have in mind a story in which no use is made of the old hackneyed, outworn plots. There need not be any rescues of fair maidens of the future, but instead I believe you could work out a stirring drama in which our twentieth century hero is a part.
1
Smith had formed the idea of what would later become “The Letter from Mohaun Los” the previous month, and he was struck by the coincidence: “Odd that the idea of time-travelling stories should have been so much in my mind of late. Not long ago, I received a letter from the Wonder Stories editor, suggesting that I write for him a yarn of this type dealing with the future. I cooked up a synopsis which was approved; and I am now going ahead with the junk as fast as my cold will permit [...] With the former I am depicting an earth modified by interplanetary commerce and immigration, with the problem of ‘unassimilable aliens’ from Mars and Venus.”2 He finished the story on December 27, 1930, despite battling a severe cold, but confided to HPL that
the time-story strikes me as an awful piece of junk. The Venusian slaves and their Martian abettors are left to divide the earth at the end, while the remainder of humanity (which has been driven to the polar regions) takes flight for the farther asteroids. I agree with you that inter-cosmic immigration will never do! The Martians might smuggle in the Black Rot, which devours whole cities and turns half the elements known to chemistry into a fine black powder. Also, there is the Yellow Death, that microscopic aerial algae from Venus, which grows in the air, turning it to a saffron color, and causing all terrestrials who breathe it to die of slow asphyxiation with violent pneumonia symptoms.
3
Despite this frank appraisal of his story, Lovecraft (whose own personal aversion to immigrants is well known) wrote him that he found “An Adventure in Futurity” “really engrossing,” and congratulated CAS on being able “to hit on a tone acceptable to these eckshun-hounds without succumbing utterly to the mechanical banality of their ideal. But of course anybody not a slave to their mannerisms will inevitably encounter a high rejection-percentage.”4
And what did Lasser have to say of the story when he published it in the April 1931 issue of WS?
The stories of Clark Ashton Smith ring with truth. He writes so well and so easily that the scenes that he tries to picture cannot help but be impressed on the minds of his readers.
To write a real story of the future, needs this unusual faculty of writing imaginatively. The author must describe something that has not happened, in an age that has not yet arrived. To do this requires skill of the highest sort. That our author has this skill will be evident from almost the first words of the present story.
The world of the future may not be the paradise that some people imagine. It is quite possible that for every advance in science there will comes with it some subtle damage to our bodies, our minds, our civilization. And it is quite possible that even when man thinks that he has found a golden age, he may realize, as the Greeks did, that destruction is just around the corner.
5
Our text is from a typescript at JHL; judging from Lovecraft’s letter to Smith of April 16, 1931, it appears that either Lasser or Gernsback made some “inane interpolations” to what Smith had written, which have been eliminated. The story was collected posthumously in OD.
1. David Lasser, letter to CAS, November 29, 1930 (ms, JHL).
2. CAS, letter to HPL, c. mid-December 1930 (LL 22).
3. CAS, letter to HPL, c. early-January 1931 (SL 141-142).
4. HPL, letter to CAS, April 16, 1931 (ms, JHL).
5. Editorial remarks to Clark Ashton Smith, “An Adventure in Futurity.” WS 2, no. 11 (April 1931): 1232.
The Justice of the Elephant
Completed on December 29, 1930, Smith described this to Lovecraft as being “grim and gruesome; but [FW] might take it, since it doesn’t involve the supernatural and is not at all poetic. The plot idea is quite similar to that of a tale which I sold to The Black Cat back in my boyhood.”1 (Smith refers to his story “The Mahout,” first published in The Black Cat for August 1911, collected posthumously in OD and TI.) FW accepted the story for the August 1931 issue of Oriental Stories and paid Smith the total of fourteen dollars.2 It was collected posthumously in OD. JHL possesses the holograph first draft, the first, revised typed draft, and a carbon copy of the final version accepted by FW.
1. CAS, letter to HPL, c. early January 1931 (SL 142).
2. Popular Fiction Publishing Company, letter to CAS, October 28, 1931 (ms, JHL).
The Return of the Sorcerer
Smith wrote to HPL on November 16, 1930 that “I seem to have had quite an influx of ghastly and gruesome ideas lately. Some of them will be real terrors, if they are developed properly. ...Another idea concerns a dismembered corpse, whose parts the murderer has buried in various spots. But presently he encounters some of the members running around and trying to re-unite and re-join the head, which he has kept in a locked closet!”1 Smith’s papers include the following synopsis for a proposed story to be called “The Re-union:” “A corpse has been dismembered, and its parts buried in different places by the murderer. He develops the hallucination that the pieces are trying to re-unite, and sees them running separately about in quest of each other.”2 Smith embraced Lovecraft’s suggestion that “both the murderer and the victim [should be] practitioners of the Black Arts,” and acknowledged this debt by “introducing the Necronomicon—in its original Arabic text.”3 The story went through several name changes, beginning with “Dismembered,” then “A Rendering from the Arabic,” before Smith settled on “The Return of Helman Carnby.” Needing a break from cranking out “pseudoscience” for WS, Smith completed a typed draft on January 4, 1930, but continued to make revisions even after mailing out the story for comments among his correspondents; for instance, he wrote Lovecraft “On looking over ‘Helman Carnby’, which I sent you the other day, the word ‘fragments’ strikes me as being too strained and incorrect. On p. 7 read: ‘a body hewn in many portions’; on p. 14: ‘I had buried the portions, etc.’; on p. 19, ‘lay facing the medley of remnants;’ and on p. 20, ‘the fresh segments of that other.’ There may be other slips—I wrote the story at white heat.”4 After reading the typescript, Lovecraft suggested that “if there were any way of piling on another shudder, I’d say it would be by veiling the final horror a little more obscurely from actual sight, & trying to hint or imply the blasphemous abnormality which sent the secretary fleeing from that accursed habitation. I certainly hope that the tale will find a typographical haven.”5 CAS “was greatly pleased and gratified by your reaction to