"The Maze of Maal Dweb" by Clark Ashton Smith (1933)
"The Maze of Maal Dweb" is a well-written sword and sorcery story full of wild images and atmosphere, but with a pretty simple and straightforward plot and a downbeat, fatalistic tone.
Planet Xiccarph has four moons, three suns, a surface dominated by dangerous plants and for a ruler the tyrannical wizard/scientist Maal Dweb. Once or twice a year Maal Dweb summons to his palace, which is surrounded by all manner of traps and organic and golem-like guardians, one of the planet's most beautiful women, and she is never seen again. (The communities of those who refuse suffer devastating bombardment from the air, so refusals are rare.)
The latest woman to be called to the mountaintop palace is the lovely virgin Athle, who received the summons when one of her many suitors, Tigali the hunter, was away on a hunt. When Tigali learns of the tragedy, another of her suitors, the warrior Mocair, is no where to be found--presumably he has left for the palace on a desperate mission to rescue Athle and slay the tyrant. Over the years many men have pursued such missions, without success, and Tigali joins their number.
Smith describes the many obstacles Tigali faces, and the equipment, strategies and tactics he employs to overcome them. Among the monsters guarding Maal Dweb's demesne are ape-like bipeds, but they don't molest Tigali because he has covered his body in a foul-smelling goop derived from one of Xiccarph's many noxious plants. In the palace Tigali discovers a room in which are many super-realistic statues of beautiful young women, representing all the different ethnic groups of the planet. The wizard Maal Dweb survives Tigali's attempt to assassinate him, and forces Tigali into his famous maze, telling him Athle and Mocair are already in the maze. Tigali encounters another of those ape creatures in the labyrinth, and then is seized by some monster plants; these plants drool a fluid on him that starts turning him into an ape-creature, and it becomes apparent that those ape monsters are those doomed heroes who preceded him into the palace, the one he just saw being Mocair. Tigali's feet, then legs, are transformed into those of a simian brute, and as the process continues he is afforded by Maal Dweb a view of Athle as she comes upon a magic mirror and, upon looking at herself within it, is turned into a statue.
Maal Dweb admits that he is growing bored with preserving beautiful women and turning heroes into ape monsters, and so decides to mix things up a little today by allowing Tigali to retain his human brain and face--below the neck he is all simian, though. As the story ends we are permitted to cherish a hope that Tigali will be able to escape the maze and live whatever kind of life might be within reach of a man who is now only half human and has lost the woman he loves.
This is a good story, but I found it leaned almost entirely on elaborate descriptions of its exotic setting and offered very little human feeling; Tigali, Mocair and Athle have almost no personality, and it is notable that Smith devotes far more ink to examining the psychology of Maal Dweb than to any of his innocent victims. Another curious fact is how Smith sets his story on an alien world, but still employs classical references like Daedalus and Laocoön.
"The Maze of Maal Dweb" AKA "The Maze of the Enchanter" has been reprinted many times, including in Lin Carter's The Young Magicians.
"The Other Gods" is part of Lovecraft's Dream Cycle, and mentions Ulthar and its famous cats. I tend to not like these fairy-tale style stories as much as Lovecraft's stories set in modern times, and only rate this story as OK; I will say it has the virtue of being quite short and to the point, however.
Earth's gods don't like to deal with humans, and so lived atop mountains. As men became bolder and bolder, and scaled higher and higher peaks, earth's gods retreated to increasingly tall mountains, and then finally moved to Kadath, the location of which no man knows. But earth's gods miss their former homes, and sometimes return for a visit--humans know when they do, because at those times the mountain peaks are shrouded in cloud. At such times the cautious avoid the mountains.
The wisest man in the region is not cautious, however. An expert on earth's gods, he wants to see them frolicking, and so climbs the peaks just when he expects earth's gods to be there. Arrogant, he begins to feel he is wiser and greater than earth's gods, but his hubris is punished by the "other gods," those who protect earth's gods, and he suffers a terrible fate, being pulled up into the sky and never seen again.
As we expect with any Lovecraft fiction, this story has been reprinted a million times. Perhaps most interestingly, L. Sprague de Camp included "The Other Gods" in his anthology The Fantastic Swordsmen.
"The Oldest Story in the World" by Murray Leinster (1925)
Our narrator is in Rangoon (we're supposed to call it "Yangon" now) when a drunk accosts him and tells him what he calls "the oldest story in the world." This story is about an unscrupulous white man who, thousands of years ago, fled his people after committing a murder, and lived among Orientals, learning their ways, their languages, their secrets. He was supported by an Eastern woman, a dancing girl, who loved him, and then he left her in the lurch to travel to the decayed kingdom of Kosar, a place of ruins and abject poverty, ruled by a raja who wore a collection of rubies of tremendous value.
In Kosar the disreputable white man prospered by exploiting some of the secrets he had learned, passing himself off as a priest of the god Khayandra, a god who, if properly propitiated, ensure a woman gives birth to a son. Approached by the raja's wife (the "ranee") he contrived to get access to the carefully concealed hiding place of the raja's rubies. He murdered the ranee and a guard, and then fled to another kingdom, Barowak. Pulling off the Kosar ruby job having given him confidence, he tried to seduce the ranee of Barowak, only to be captured by the raja of Barowak, a man with a reputation for having a peculiar sense of humor. The white man may have learned all about the culture of the East, but this raja had learned some of the culture of the West, having read from a book of Arthurian legends and a history of the Spanish Inquisition, and he proposed to try some Western tortures on the false priest of Khayandra. The white man tried to buy his freedom with the rubies, but the raja's people declared they were no more than costume jewelry!
An additional twist, one which has been foreshadowed from early on, is that the drunk is telling his own life story, not that of a man from thousands of years ago; he is the murderer of a white man, a ranee and an Asian guard, and the victim of torture at the hands of the raja of Barowak. The surprisingly tame torture was what we generally call "Chinese water torture," but which I guess the raja learned about from the book on the Spanish Inquisition. The raja imprisoned the ruby thief in a room furnished and decorated entirely in red, and the water dripped on his head was also dyed red, and he today suffers a pathological fear of the color red. The final zinger of the story comes when a waiter accidentally spills a drop of red liquor on his noggin as he sits with the narrator, having just finished his story, and is driven totally insane.
This is acceptable filler. One of the interesting things about "The Oldest Story in the World" is that, while he appeals to Anglophone readers' sense that the mysterious East is dirty and dangerous and its people are bloodthirsty and corrupt, Leinster repeatedly engineers parallels that suggest white people are little better than the Orientals.
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Three respectable stories by three important members of the speculative fiction community of the early 20th century. We cross our fingers in hopes that everything we dig up in our future expeditions into the world of SF will be so digestible.
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