Happy birthday to my absolute favorite of all of the Weird Tales writers, Clark Ashton Smith. Lovecr
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
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