I hate to do the first-post plugging thing, but let's just get it out of the way. Hippocampus Press has just announced my book
Sex & the Cthulhu Mythos for sale - an examination of love, sex, and gender in the Cthulhu Mythos, from H. P. Lovecraft and and his contemporaries like Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith down to modern authors like W. H. Pugmire, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Edward Lee and Alan Moore. It also examines sex and the Mythos in other media, with its use and depiction in film, comic books, art, the occult, and more.
Honestly, you could write a whole book on Clark Ashton Smith and sex - the stories he sold to the Spicies, the stories he
couldn't sell to the Spicies because they were too spicy, the E. Hoffmann Price revisions, his erotic poetry and translations of Baudelaire, and of course his personal life - the
The Shadow of the Unattained really provides a lot of great material which deserves a bit of analysis - but in the context of this book, I really only have room to look at Smith's fiction, and even then only the material most tied into the Cthulhu Mythos. I know, a bit of an arbitrary limit, but I had to draw the line somewhere. So anyone hoping for a well-deserved hundred pages on CAS in this book...would be disappointed. But there's some other material in there, and I talk a bit about how Smith's work has been an influence on how love and sex are depicted in the Mythos, and some of the ways that his work has inspired or been emulated by others - from Richard Corben's comics adaptations to Simon Whitechapel, "The Scarlet Succubus" to “In Deep Dendoâ€. Probably a lot of it will be a bit old hat for y'all, but I hope there's a few bits that might interest you.
As a point of curiosity though, and to make this thread more than blatant pandering, I'd really like to here your thoughts on love, sex, and gender with regards to Clark Ashton Smith - what, if anything, would you be interested in reading about regarding that aspect of the man and his work?