Tales of Science and Sorcery

This collection is a mixture weighted more towards the author's science fictional tales with the addition of some of his supernatural stories set in medieval France, and a few satirical or other stories with a dark humour. The memoir at the beginning was interesting. This was by E Hoffman Price who told of a number of visits he made to Smith over the years and which reveal among other things the stereotypical views of women common at the time: on one visit, Price's wife accompanies him but of course ends up in the kitchen with Smith's mother, even though Smith's mother actually did a lot of the marketing of her son's early books and therefore surely had something to add to the conversation!

The science fiction is mainly of the Edgar Rice show more Burroughs type, in that people can actually live on Mars, Venus or even Mercury, and such planets are populated not only by plants, but often by sentient lifeforms of various types. The characters are not really characters, but really vehicles for the action, and the real interest is in the strange settings and peculiar forms of life which were Smith's speciality.

Some stories, such as 'The Great God Awto', a skit based on a future civilisation's mistaken ideas of the place of the motor car in 20th century life, are rather heavy handed in both moral and humour, and I preferred the lighter touch of 'The Theft of Thirty-Nine Girdles' where an aged thief looks back on one of his favourite heists which he and his now deceased love carried out. I especially liked this story for being one of the few where the female lead is not relegated figuratively or otherwise to the kitchen. A pity that the author never seems to have tackled other such stories featuring this pairing, but I have now read all the collections I possess of this author's so it seems to have been a one-off. By contrast, 'The Root of Ampoi' centres around a misogynistic character - who, if the women in the community he intrudes into had not been eight feet tall, would have knocked his wife about to bring her into line.

Like many Smith stories, there are a fair share where the protagonist is either passive or else doomed or both, and after so many of those, it becomes quite a monotonous refrain. So given the mixture of good and bad, and the presence of at least one or two stories I liked, I can only rate this at 3 stars. show less

A collection of te stories of Clark Ashton Smith --the first hardcover publication in most case of stories published in Wierd Tales and similar outlets. Some are strictly science fiction, others are fantasy, many have a horror aspect, and a few, notably The Theft of Thirty Nine GIrdles, are almost pure humor --a sort of comic takeoff of Conan in his early thief mode. That is easily my favorite in this collection.