A Vintage From Atlantis (63 page)
Read A Vintage From Atlantis Online
Authors: Clark Ashton Smith
Tags: #Fantasy Fiction, #Comics & Graphic Novels, #General, #Fantasy, #American, #Fiction, #Short Stories
The next year Smith was approached by Universal Pictures regarding whether he had any stories that might be suitable for adaptation as screenplays.
4
Smith offered “The Colossus of Ylourgne” and “The Dark Eidolon.” Apparently the studio expressed interest in these properties, since Smith asked Wright to release the motion-picture rights, which he did on October 11, 1935,
5
but the Laemmele family lost control the next year, and the new management may not have cared for such unconventionally imaginative material.
1.“Excerpts from the
Black Book
,”
The Acolyte
(Spring 1944), reprinted in
BB
77.
2.
BB
item 57.
3. CAS, letter to DAW, May 4, 1932 (ms, MHS).
4. Universal Pictures (Edward Churchill), letter to CAS, August 21, 1935 (ms, JHL).
5. FW, letter to CAS, October 11, 1935 (ms, JHL).
The God of the Asteroid
T
his story is yet another testament to Gernsback’s proclivity for changing the titles of stories without first consulting the authors. First published in the October 1932 issue of
Wonder Stories
under the title of “Master of the Asteroid,” and receiving a fine cover illustration by Frank R. Paul, all contemporary references to the story by Smith use the present title, which dates back to a listing of possible story titles he recorded in late 1929 or early 1930.
1
For instance, he refers in a letter to the Lovecraft-revised story “The Man of Stone” by Hazel Heald as “a story in the Oct. Wonder Stories (which featured my ‘God of the Asteroid’) ….”—after he had learned of the title-change to “Master of the Asteroid.”
2
A synopsis titled “The God of the Asteroid” was found among Smith’s papers: “A space-ship manned by three terrestrial explorers is wrecked on an asteroid. One of the three survives, and is worshipped as a god by the grotesque inhabitants. He goes stark mad, but lives for years, still revered and tended as a deity”.
3
The present story was completed on June 9, 1932. Smith received forty dollars for the story.
Smith refers in the story to Mohammed’s coffin, which was supposed to have been suspended between Heaven and Earth. He had written another story, “Like Mohammed’s Tomb,” that unfortunately has not been located and may not survive.
The first indication that Smith had resigned himself to the name-change was when he allowed the story to be reprinted as “Master of the Asteroid” in August Derleth’s anthology
Strange Ports of Call
(Pellegrini & Cudahy, 1948). This might have been due to purely commercial considerations, since under the published title it was a well-known and popular story. Sometime in the late 1950s Smith’s wife Carol prepared a new typescript using the
title given to the story by
WS
, and it is under this title that it was collected posthumously in
TSS,
and later in
RA
.
Surprisingly, in light of the praise lent the tale by Ray Bradbury in his foreword to the unpublished paperback collection
Far from Time
, Smith did
not
include this story in that book.
1.
SS
182.
2. CAS, letter to AWD, December 24, 1932. (
SL
198).
3.
SS
155.
A
PPENDIX
T
WO:
T
HE
F
LOWER-
D
EVIL
(The Poem that “The Demon of the Flower” Was Based Upon)
I
n a basin of porphyry, at the summit of a pillar of serpentine, the thing has existed from primeval time, in the garden of the kings that rule an equatorial realm of the planet Saturn. With black foliage, fine and intricate as the web of some enormous spider; with petals of livid rose, and purple like the purple of putrefying flesh; and a stem rising like a swart and hairy wrist from a bulb so old, so encrusted with the growth of centuries that it resembles an urn of stone, the monstrous flower holds dominion over all the garden. In this flower, from the years of oldest legend, an evil demon has dwelt—a demon whose name and whose nativity are known to the superior magicians and mysteriarchs of the kingdom, but to none other. Over the half-animate flowers, the ophidian orchids that coil and sting, the bat-like lilies that open their ribbēd petals by night, and fasten with tiny yellow teeth on the bodies of sleeping dragon-flies; the carnivorous cacti that yawn with green lips beneath their beards of poisonous yellow prickles; the plants that palpitate like hearts, the blossoms that pant with a breath of poisonous perfume—over all these, the Flower-Devil is supreme, in its malign immortality, and evil, perverse intelligence—inciting them to strange maleficence, fantastic mischief, even to acts of rebellion against the gardeners, who proceed about their duties with wariness and trepidation, since more than one of them has been bitten, even unto death, by some vicious and venefic flower. In places, the garden has run wild from lack of care on the part of the fearful gardeners, and has become a monstrous tangle of serpentine creepers, and hydra-headed plants, convolved and inter-writhing in lethal hate or venomous love, and horrible as a rout of wrangling vipers and pythons.
And, like his innumerable ancestors before him, the king dares not destroy the Flower, for fear that the devil, driven from its habitation, might seek a new home, and enter into the brain or body of one of the king’s subjects—or even the heart of his fairest and gentlest, and most beloved queen!
A
PPENDIX
T
HREE:
B
IBLIOGRAPHY
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.
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.
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PP.
Table of Contents
The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan
The Empire of the Necromancers
Appendix Two: The Flower-Devil
Table of Contents
The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan