vintagegeekculture: Happy birthday to my absolute favorite of all of the Weird Tales writers, Clark
vintagegeekculture: Happy birthday to my absolute favorite of all of the Weird Tales writers, Clark Ashton Smith. Lovecraft was about cosmic horror; Cave was about revitalizing old horror tropes; Robert E. Howard was about manly adventurers, but Clark Ashton Smith’s greatest gift was in worldbuilding, of a creation of surreal, exotic and strange settings, from Hyperborea, which was Greenland before the ice sheet, which was partially inhabited by reptile men who enslaved mankind, Poseidonis, a part of Atlantis that survived after the destruction of Atlantis in the prehistoric world, and Zothique, a Pangea-like supercontinent that exists a billion years in the future, home to bizarre Arabian Nights horror, necromancers, and ape-creatures. CAS was mostly ignored for years; his best work was out of print for decades. But in the past year, there’s been a desire to rediscover him. There’s a great documentary about him, Emperor of Dreams, made in 2018, that is really worth seeing and I hope this revival of interest in him continues. -- source link