It would have been much better, I fancy, if not deprived of the parts you mention—but even as it is it furnishes more than one authentic shudder. It ought to have “eckshun” enough to suit even the canny Gernsback, & in addition, the later parts give a very real thrill of subterrene horror. Glad that Hugo & Co. didn’t demand a happy ending—the present abrupt punch comes as a magnificently ironic touch.

⁸

According to the accounts obtained by his attorney, Ione Weber, Smith was due eighty dollars from Gernsback’s Stellar Publication Corporation for the story’s publication as Science Fiction Series no. 16, a rather unprepossessing pamphlet issued with no cover illustration. The story was included in TSS. No complete manuscript exists, although we were able to examine several pages of a first draft for “Immortals.” We also compared the text from TSS with that of a copy of the 1932 pamphlet corrected by Smith, and between them were able to correct most of the numerous typographical errors that crept into both editions.

1. SS 160.

2. SS 173.

3. CAS, letter to Derleth, January 19, 1932 (ms, SHSW). Two hundred dollars is what Astounding Stories would have paid for the ten thousand word novelette.

4. HPL, letter to CAS [postmarked January 28, 1932] (ms, JHL).

5. CAS, letter to AWD, February 21, 1932 (ms, SHSW).

6. HPL, letter to CAS, February 26, 1932 (AHT).

7. David Lasser, letter to CAS, March 16, 1932 (ms, JHL).

8. HPL, letter to CAS, July 10, 1932 (AHT).

The Empire of the Necromancers

In this story Smith introduced what Brian Stableford has called “the most dramatically appropriate”¹ of his secondary worlds, Zothique. Will Murray,² Steve Behrends³ and Jim Rockhill⁴ have all discussed the origins of this series in some depth, tracing its origins as far back as Smith’s 1911 poem “The Last Night”⁵ and a brief sketch “Account of an Actual Dream—1912.”⁶ CAS described it to L. Sprague de Camp as “the last inhabited continent of earth” where the “science and machinery of our present civilization have long been forgotten, together with our present religions. But many gods are worshipped; and sorcery and demonism prevail again as in ancient days.”⁷ The first use of the name occurs in a synopsis for “Vizaphmal in Ophiuchus,” a never-completed sequel to “The Monster of the Prophecy,” where it referred to a world in another solar system, that he plotted in April 1930.⁸ In February 1931 he came up with the idea of “Gnydron, a continent of the far future, in the South Atlantic, which is more subject to incursions of ‘outsideness’ than any former terrene realm; and more liable to the visitation of beings from galaxies not yet visible; also, to shifting admixtures and interchanges with other dimensions or planes of entity”.⁹

Also in 1930 CAS scribbled an idea about the exploitation of the dead by the living, which he called “The Empire of the Necromancers:” “Two sorcerers, who raise up an entire people from the dead, in order that they may reign over them. The dead, however, revolt against being brought back to life”.¹⁰ The idea laid dormant, much like the people of Cincor, until he developed the plot further in August or September 1931:

A story told by a man centuries dead—the prince of a perished people. He and all his subjects are raised up from death to be the slaves of two necromancers greedy of dominion and power. These people, living a ghostly, hollow, shadow-like existence, are driven to toil for the necromancers, are tortured for their sadistic pleasure, made to serve their necrophilic lusts. The prince, learning the secret of their power, and throwing off their spell in a measure, resolves to rescue his people from this terrible doom. He contrives that the necromancers shall themselves die, to awaken at a stated time and find themselves among the living dead. Then he and his people, freed from their slavery, seek the oblivion of a second death by flinging themselves into the subterranean fires beneath the kingdom.

¹¹

Smith worked on it at the same time as, and possibly as an antidote to, “The Invisible City” and “The Immortals of Mercury,” completing it on January 7, 1932. “There is a queer mood in this little tale; and, like my forthcoming, ‘The Planet of the Dead,’ it is muchly overgreened with what H. P. once referred to as the ‘verdigris of decadence’.”¹² HPL called it “great—one of the best things I’ve seen lately—& I’m immensely glad to learn that it has landed with Wright”.¹³ “The Empire of the Necromancers” was the most popular story in the September 1932 issue of Weird Tales. It was collected in LW and RA. This text is based upon two carbon copies of the typescript, one at JHL forming part of Smith’s papers, and another presented by CAS to Lester Anderson, a Bay Area science fiction fan, that incorporates some holograph changes that do not appear on either the JHL copy or the published text . This presentation copy was purchased by the Bancroft Library a few years ago as part of a large lot of Smith’s letters, manuscripts and other ephemera.

1. Brian Stableford, “Outside the Human Aquarium: The Fantastic Imagination of Clark Ashton Smith,” In FFT 161.

2. Will Murray, “Introduction” to Tales of Zothique by Clark Ashton Smith (West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1995), p. 7-12.

3. Steve Behrends, chapter 2, “Zothique,” Clark Ashton Smith, Starmont Reader’s Guide 49 (Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1990), pp. 24-37.

4. Jim Rockhill, “As Shadows Wait Upon the Sun: Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique,” In FFT 277-92.

5. The Star-Treader and Other Poems (San Francisco: A. M. Robertson, 1912), p. 31.

6. SS 245.

7. CAS, letter to L. Sprague de Camp, November 3, 1953 (SL 374).

8. ES 266.

9. SS 165.

10. SS 158.

11. SS 170.

12. CAS, letter to AWD, January 9, 1932 (ms, SHSW).

13. HPL, letter to CAS [postmarked January 28, 1932] (ms, JHL).

The Seed from the Sepulcher

If we use the number of times a story has been anthologized as an indication of its popularity, then “The Seed from the Sepulcher,” at eight times (not counting different editions of the same anthology), is Smith’s most popular story, beating “The Return of the Sorcerer” (five times), “The City of the Singing Flame” (four times), “A Rendevous in Averoigne” (four times), and “The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan” (three times)—and it wasn’t even included in one of his collections until after his death!

Timeus Ashton-Smith (1855-1937), the father of Clark Ashton Smith, was the son of a wealthy British industrialist who used his patrimony for travel and gambling. Based upon accounts received from his friend, H. P. Lovecraft described Timeus as “something of a soldier of fortune [who had] travelled in many odd corners of the earth, including the Amazon jungles of South America. Clark probably derives much of his exotic taste from the tales told him by his father when he was very small—he was especially impressed by accounts of the gorgeously plumed birds and bizarre tropical flowers of equatorial Brazil”.¹ These stories undoubtedly were on Smith’s mind when he conceived of this story.

Steve Behrends, in his notes to Smith’s story-ideas published in Strange Shadows, identifies this plot germ, originally called “A Bottle on the Amazon” (later changed to “Orinoco”) as the genesis of “The Seed from the Sepulcher:”

A whisky-bottle floating in the ^Orinoco^ [Amazon] is picked up near the river’s mouth, and is found to contain a ms. which details the adventures of two explorers in an untrodden country of Venezuela. Here one of the two men is bitten by a monstrous fanged vegetable growth ^having a vague, distorted likeness to a human figure^, and shortly after, begins to show signs of an appalling transformation. Little by little he is turned into a replica of the thing that had bitten him. Finally, he takes root in the jungle—and stings the narrator of the story, just as the other is about to abandon him in horror and despair.