5. FW, letter to CAS, March 21, 1931 (ms, JHL).
6. HPL, letter to CAS, April 16, 1931 (ms, JHL).
7. CAS, letter to AWD, April 9, 1931 (SL 150-151).
8. CAS, letter to DAW, August 7, 1931 (ms, MHS).
9. CAS, letter to AWD, May 8, 1931 (SL 153).
A Captivity in Serpens
After WS editor David Lasser rejected “The Red World of Polaris,” he clarified WS’s editorial requirements in a letter which unfortunately does not survive among Smith’s papers at JHL, but from which CAS quoted liberally (and bitterly) in his own correspondence. As Smith recounted to Lovecraft, Lasser and Gernsback wanted:
“A play of human motives, with alien worlds for a background.” But if human motives are mainly what they want, why bother about going to other planets—where one might conceivably escape from the human equation? The idea of using the worlds of Alioth or Altair as a mere setting for the squabbles and heroics of the crew on a space-ship (which, in essence, is about what they are suggesting) is too rich for any use. Evidently
Astounding Stories
is setting the pace for them with its type of stellar-wild-west yarn. There doesn’t seem to be much chance of putting over any really good work, and a survey of the magazine field in general is truly discouraging.
1
After being informed of these editorial requirements, Smith put aside a third Volmar story, “The Ocean-World of Alioth,” which he had already outlined and begun, and began work on “A Captivity in Serpens,” at 17,000 words the longest piece of mature fiction he would complete. He vowed to Lovecraft that “I’ll give them their ‘action’ this time,”2 and Lasser must have agreed, as it was not only accepted but also received the cover illustration when it appeared in the Summer 1931 issue of Wonder Stories Quarterly as “The Amazing Planet.” In accepting the story Lasser told Smith that “we were quite pleased with the story and believe it strikes the proper note for effective interplanetary atmosphere.”3
The typescript at JHL is missing several pages, so the text of its original magazine appearance was consulted. It was collected posthumously in OD and included with the other Volmar stories in RW.
1. CAS, letter to HPL, c. November 16, 1930 (SL 134).
2. CAS, letter to HPL, November 10 1930 (SL 132).
3. David Lasser, letter to CAS, March 27, 1931 (ms, JHL).
The Letter from Mohaun Los
According to surviving notes, Smith originally intended to call this story “An Excursion in Time:” “The time-travelling machine, which goes into the future... and lands in a foreign world when it stops, because it has stood still in space while the earth and the solar system {...} whirling on”.1 He developed this idea further in correspondence:
By the way, I may tackle the well-worn idea of a time-travelling machine some day, and bring it to its logical denouement. A journey behind or ahead of earth-time would, it seems to me, land the voyager in some alien corner of space, unless he had made special provision for accompanying the movement of the earth and the solar system during the same backward or forward period. If he went far enough into the future, he might find himself in some world of Hercules! But this is an abstruse subject!
2
The first version of this tale was completed by April 9, 1931, but failed to sell. The reason for its rejection may have been a weak ending, as CAS intimated to Derleth: “Funny—I seem to have more trouble with the endings of stories than anything else. God knows how many I have had to re-write. I have a dud on hand now—‘Jim Knox and the Giantess’ [original title of “The Root of Ampoi”]—which will have to be given a brand-new wind-up if it is ever to sell. The same applies to my 10,000 word pseudo-scientific, ‘The Letter from Mohaun Los’.”3 Finishing the revision on March 29, 1932, Smith submitted the story to Wright, who held it for over three weeks before returning it. However, by the end of May Smith could announce that “Wonder Stories has accepted ‘The Letter from Mohaun Los,’ which will appear in the Aug. issue under a new title, Flight into Super-Time, which fails to elicit my enthusiasm. This tale contains a fair amount of satire, like ‘The Monster of the Prophecy.’ Among other things, there is an uproarious fight between a Robot and a time-machine, in which the two mechanical monstrosities succeed in annihilating each other.”4 Smith would later include the story in LW, referring to it at the time as “one of my more ironic Wonder Stories contributions but I’m sure most of its readers missed the double-barrelled satire.”5
Smith incorporated elements from his previous work into “The Letter from Mohaun Los.” The battle between the warring pygmies occurs in his poem “The Hashish-Eater:”
Then
I watch a war of pygmies, met by night,
With pitter of their drums of parrot’s hide,
On plains with no horizon, where a god
Might lose his way for centuries; [...]
6
Steve Behrends suggests that the rescue of the persecuted alien sage Tuoquan may derive from Smith’s synopsis for a proposed sequel to “The Monster of the Prophecy.”7 In “Vizaphmal in Orphiuchus,” Smith describes how
Tsandai, a savant of Zothique, a world of one of the suns of Ophiuchus, has fallen foul of the local scientific fraternity in general; and they are about to turn him, by the use of a transforming-ray, into a low, brainless type of monster. Vizaphmal, the Antarean wizard-scientist, using his space-annihilator at random, for the sake of adventure, appears in the chamber where the transformation is about to take place. Comprehending the situation telepathically, he rescues Tsandai and carries him away to the uninhabited equatorial zones of the planet.
8
1. SS 160.
2. CAS, letter to HPL, November 10, 1930 (SL 132).
3. CAS, letter to AWD, August 18, 1931 (SL 160).
4. CAS, letter to AWD, May 26, 1932 (ms, SHSW).
5. CAS, letter to AWD, April 31[sic], 1943 (SL 339-340).
6. 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).
7. “Notes to the Text.” SS 260n47.
8. ES 266, SS 143.
The Hunters from Beyond
Smith was working on “The Holiness of Azédarac” when he “suspended work on it to write a 6000 word modern thriller, ‘The Hunters from Beyond,’ which I have just completed. I hope it will have enough ‘plot,’ etc. for the new Clayton magazine.”1 (Smith was referring to Harry Bates’ Strange Tales, which paid two cents a word upon acceptance, as opposed to WT which usually paid a cent a word upon publication.) Smith was somewhat ambivalent regarding the story, telling Derleth that it was “probably junk.”2 Derleth liked the story and made some suggestions:
I daresay if you wanted to you could make it into either a long space story (pursuit of these hunters from beyond, etc etc) or a first rate horror story with a perfectly ghoulish climax (the girl and Cyprian both keeping silent anent their work, the horror gradually encroaching, closing in upon them, Hastane perceiving only hints here and there, until in the end the whole hellish thing bursts on him. But it is good as it stands, and I like it. The end I find just a little weak. It is as if you had got up some morning and said Now I must write and story and evolved this and got tired of it near the end.