Hey everyone, I'm doing research at my university on the dying-earth subgenre of fantasy and wanted to know if anyone here knows offhand which stories/poems in Clark A. Smith's corpus are specifically Zothique-related?

Thanks!

“The Empire of the Necromancers”
“The Isle of the Torturers”
“The Charnel God”
“The Dark Eidolon”
“The Voyage of King Euvoran” (though originally planned for the Hyperborea cycle)
“The Weaver in the Vault”
“The Tomb-Spawn”
“The Witchcraft of Ulua”
“Xeethra”
“The Last Hieroglyph”
“Necromancy in Naat”
“The Black Abbott of Puthuum”
“The Death of Ilalotha”
“The Garden of Adompha”
“The Master of the Crabs”
“Morthylla”
the verse play “The Dead Will Cuckold You”
the poem "Zothique"

The original name for Zothique was Gnydrom referred to in the story description "A Tale of Gnydron".

Prior to the Zothique cycle are a few poems and prose poems depicting not just the threat of a dying sun, but the event itself, notably the poem "The Last Night" the prose poems "The Shadows" and "From the Crypts of Memory", & the short story based on this prose poem, "The Planet of the Dead".

Among others, there are articles by Lin Carter, Will Murray, and myself (in the recently published FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS) on this cycle.

Jim

P.S. Check out Boyd's "Cycles of Clark Ashton Smith" in the Criticism section of this website.

"In the Book of Vergama" (1934) is Smith's first name for the tale "The Last Hieroglyph", (1935) - it has been attached to the tale's prologue, which is rarely included with the tale. "Mandor's Enemy" (1989) and "Shapes of Adamant" (1935) were planned but apparently never finished.

Jim

Thank you both very much! I'll be sure to check out the additional articles you mentioned :)

I would suggest you write to Ron Hilger (casofile on this site), who is a particular authority on the Zothique tales.

Dr. Farmer

When delving into the dying-earth subgenre one has to look into the writings of Jack Vance, who wrote a number of stories set in this milieu. A comparison of the two writers is, of course, a matter of taste in fiction.

Maybe it is my own tendency to see the darker side of life in general, but I will always favor Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique over any other delvings into the far future of a dying sun. Smith's colourful, decadent and nihilistic work, complimented by his prodigious vocabulary, is a treat that is always enjoyable to return to.

Good luck with your study, I hope we get to hear more about it.

Glad to know we're thinking the same thing! I just got my interlibrary loan of the The Complete Dying Earth this afternoon. I'm waiting on The House on the Borderlands by Hodgson, but after perusing The Night Land, I doubt focusing on his work will be essential to what I intend to write.

What I've been suffering from thus far is a severe lack of secondary criticism; the Language of Night had nothing to offer except tedious Jungian criticism and the various critical books on dystopian literature I examined all veer too far off into left-field. Thankfully, I did find a collected text of essays on Vance's fiction - especially helpful was one essay which directly compared Smith's work to Vance's.

I finished reading the Zothique cycle, the CAS correspondence on this site, several biographies from my university library, as well as a few of the critical articles you suggested here this past week. It's so refreshing to read Smith after being force-fed so much dry and tedious literature in my last few classes (Keats, as of late). I plan to read Vance's Dying Earth this weekend. I wish I had time to cover some of the later (contemporary) fiction in the genre, but I think the essay will be stronger if I limit myself to Vance and Smith. I'll be happy to share the results with you all in the coming months.

PS. Though I have not read Vance yet, I very much agree with you; Smith's command of the vocabulary unique to weird fiction is overwhelming. My favorites from the Zothique cycle have to be "The Last Hieroglyph" for its profundity and "The Dark Eidolon" for the character of Namirrha.

- Daniel

The Night Land is also a great work, Hodgson is also an amzing writer, you might want to delve a little further into this work before you count it out.

The Compleat Dying Earth is an excellent collection and Vance is a great storyteller, I don't want to dismiss his work, I just prefer Clark Ashton Smith myself. The Vance books are very entertaining and lead to the magic system used in Dungeons and Dragons, the main deity of magic is named Vecna, and anagram of Vance.

Thank you all for you helpfulness with my research! My essay was completed this past May when I graduated (and my reply here is long overdue) - the resulting essay is now posted on Stetson University's thesis archive at [www.stetson.edu]. It is entitled: "She-Devil Otherness and the Last Hieroglyph: Reclaiming the Cosmic in Clark Ashton Smith's 'Zothique Cycle'". I contacted this site's owner to see if he would include it in his collections of reviews.

Best,
Daniel

now available on this site:

She-Devil Otherness and the Last Hieroglyph: Reclaiming the Cosmic in Clark Ashton Smith's "Zothique Cycle"

Though I seem to be late to the thread, if you're interested in delving further into the Dying Earth subgenre I highly recommend the below-listed, all of which I'd loosely categorize as such. Definitely pick up The Night Land by Hodgson, too; IMO it is superior to House, and almost certainly influenced Smith's Zothique tales to some degree:

Book of the New Sun Gene Wolfe (admittedly inspired by Vance's DE)
The Einstein Intersection Samuel R. Delany
The Dancers at the End of Time series by Michael Moorcock

There are many more SF/F stories that fall into this broad category, but these are the ones I think are the most "literary" and thus probably of most interest to you.

I don't think I gave The Night Land enough time when I began reading it last August, but given your praise I'll be sure to pick it up again and make it to the Redoubt this time!

And thanks for the other Dying Earth titles - I'm in need of a new reading list. After reading Vance's Compleat Dying Earth, I must say Cugel's Saga was one of the best fantasy stories I've ever read. I felt as though I had missed a huge swath of fantasy lit out there I didn't even know existed.

THE NIGHT LAND is indeed a difficult book to get in to. There is a greatly abridged version of the story, "The Dream of X," which Hodgson prepared for U. S. copyright purposes, that is much more accessible. Donald M. Grant published this as a limited edition back in the 1970s, but it is easily found on eBay and elsewhere. It will also be in the fifth volume of the Night Shade Hodgson.
BTW, CAS had not read Hodgson until 1933, after he had already begun the Zothique series. It's more a matter of parallel thought than direct influence.
Best,
Scott

E. F. Bleiler complained that it is the pseudoseventeenth century prose that undermines the success of The Night Land, but I became used to that fairly quickly, and this is a case where it can be argued that a certain quaintness in the prose works well as a distancing effect. What has troubled me about the novel, and made me put it down several times, is just how unbelievably bizarre and/or saccharine the interactions between the hero and heroine can be, during those episodes when they are out of immediate peril. Once moment he is carrying on about his own sweet love-slave or her dainty feet, and the next he is punishing her with his belt for not obeying him. There is nothing else in literature quite like this book for vividness of its maleficent landscapes and the sheer abundance and variety of its supernatural menaces, but I wish Hodgson had devoted much less time to the romantic interludes. The problem with The Dream of X, was that, although there is much less romance, Hodgson has also cut or trimmed several of the supernatural portions as well, and the romantic portions are still swooningly sentimental.

Jim

Scott Connors Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> BTW, CAS had not read Hodgson until 1933,
> after he had already begun the Zothique series.
> It's more a matter of parallel thought than direct
> influence.
> Best,
> Scott

Interesting.. Thanks for the info, I didn't realize that. I guess I assumed from CAS's comments concerning the The Night Land (which I read somewhere on this site I believe) that he had read it prior to scribing the Zothique tales.

As far as being difficult to digest, I couldn't agree more. I somehow read it over the course of only a week, last year. At first I trudged along through sheer determination, but after a while I got caught up in the character's monomania and couldn't put it down. There's definitely nothing else like it (nor should there be :). I tend to re-read books I like, but this one is going on my, "I may never read this again," list. Once a decade I might be able to handle.