THE DEEP ONES: "The Planet of the Dead" by Clark Ashton Smith

"The Planet of the Dead" by Clark Ashton Smith

Discussion begins February 9, 2022.

First published the March 1932 issue of Weird Tales.



BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?62560

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

The End of the Story: Volume One of the Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith
A Rendezvous in Averoigne: The Best Fantastic Tales of Clark Ashton Smith
Lost Worlds

ONLINE VERSIONS

http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/167/the-planet-of-the-dead
http://sffaudiomediacan.s3.amazonaws.com/pdfs/ThePlanetOfTheDeadByClarkAshtonSmi...

ONLINE AUDIO VERSIONS

https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/vintage-sci-fi/the-planet-of-the-dead-a-qUE...

MISCELLANY

https://www.blackgate.com/2017/03/11/clark-ashton-smith-collected-fantasies-end-...
http://www.eldritchdark.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clark_Ashton_Smith
https://tinyurl.com/2y8a7wa9

The story may be seen as a reworking of CAS' 1917 prose poem "From the Crypts of Memory", online here.

I'll go old school with a 1975 UK paperback containing half of Lost Worlds.

I suppose the story of Zhuangzi and the butterfly lies at the back of this tale, athough with differences that are more apparent the more they are pondered on. As the essay where I found the correct spelling of "Zhuangzi" points out, the story as it's presented gives the reader no reason to doubt that butterfly Zhuangzi is the dream version, and Doaist philospher Zhuangzi reporting his dream to his auditors in the waking world, is the real one. There is no parallel tradition where the butterfly is reporting his strange experience.

Not the same situation in Smith's tale, as the star is physically present in the night sky. I'm slightly wary of saying "in our reality". Was the notion that "nebulas" were actually galaxies still fresh and something people had to grapple with? I have the phrase "island universe" in my head from somewhere. So I'm wondering if there was a popular idea of other universes similar to the multiverse today - only separated by nothing but immense distance, still in the same spacetime.

So could mentally projecting across light years be pretty much the same as visiting a dreamland, as far as Smith was concerned?

Another angle on it perhaps, is something I read in the collection of Smth's ans HPL's correspondence from Hippocampus Press - a controversy in, I think a fanzine rather than in Weird Tales, or maybe another pulp - between writers and fans that got pretty headed. From the perspective of nearly a century later it seemed to boil down to fans of adventure who basically wanted to export their western and pirate and frontiersmen and explorer tales to the solar system and beyond on one side; and Smith and (to an extent HPL) who wanted to ephasize the disorienting strangeness and well alienness, of the rest of the universe beyond Earth. Again, outer space becomes a dreamland.

The idea that (some) nebulae were island universes, or other galaxies in modern terms, had been around for quite a while but wasn’t definitely established until the 1920s.

I don’t know if the story succeeds very well in suggesting the alienness of an immensely distant world. We’re told they have some physical differences from earthly humanity, but it’s not dwelt upon and makes no apparent difference to the story.

I started to ramble on about more than just this one story. Agreed, this one doesn't present us with an alien planet that is as disorientating as, for example, Yellow Submarine* (some of Smith's stories do, when he's pushing that Alien-is-truly-alien idea. This story presents a world much like the lost worlds of Earth's past and future that Smith is probably best known for.

* some people viscerally can't cope with the slightest hint of psychedelia or general "weirdness". For example, my sister can't even stomach the opening titles of Ironside!

I've read this three times over the years. But, since the previous time I read it, I've been exposed to a bit of French Decadent literature.

This time I was struck how much it fits in that tradition. There is the ennui, the sense of enjoying life in a doomed world (here literally with the sun predicted to stop giving light and heat in a month), the vision of inevitable death and the “leering skull of death”, a vision to be escaped from with all distractions. There are even multiple references to opiates. The lovers Antarion and Thameera literally spending their last days in the ruins of a necropolis in a dead land by a lake that was once the sea. That and King Haspa and his designs on Thameera, which the lovers flee from, strikes me as an element of the Orientalism that French Decadents liked.