Clark Ashton Smith: "Marooned in Andromeda," "The Amazing Planet" and "The Eternal World"

Let's read three early 1930s stories by that titan (or as we might start saying after today, Anakim) of the weird, Clark Ashton Smith, the California-based poet, short-story craftsman, sculptor and painter.  Today's stories debuted in Hugo Gernsback's magazine of prophetic fiction, Wonder Stories, so these might be more like science fiction stories than actual weird tales, but we'll see to what extent Smith puts his own weird stamp on these tales of life beyond mother Earth.

Note that I am reading the magazine versions of these stories, which may well be quite different than later book versions.  Here find links to the very scans of the magazines that I will be reading:

Wonder Stories, October 1930  

Wonder Stories Quarterly, October 1931

Wonder Stories, March 1932

"Marooned in Andromeda" (1930)

Here we have the first of two stories about a Captain Volmar published in Smith's lifetime.  The two published Volmar stories later appeared together in the Smith collection Other Dimensions, in an Italian Smith collection with a Boris Vallejo cover, and in the 21st-century volume Red World of Polaris, which compiles five Volmar tales, three of which were never before published.

Volmar is in command of Earth's second mission beyond the solar system.  The crew of his starship consists of only the finest physical specimens, each of whom has a superior intellect and an extensive education.  But after five years in the barrenness of space, three of these superior men can't take it any more and launch an ill-fated mutiny.  Volmar and the loyal members of the crew quash their uprising, and the three traitors are deposited, without weapons or supplies, on an alien planet in the Andromeda region. 

I like the start of "Marooned in Andromeda."  Smith's poetical verbosity conveys the glory and terror of a long space trip and Volmar has personality and motivation.  But the story becomes sort of tedious on the planet, as the three mutineers lack any character or goals, and are just passive spectators who observe the native flora and fauna and meteorological events.  Smith describes the stuff they see at length, for example the one-eyed reptile-riding native pygmies who capture the mutineers, but these long descriptions don't generate emotion in the reader; in fact, sometimes Smith's creatures seem a little silly.  The monsters Smith comes up with here are obviously more creative than the monsters you might find in a Robert E. Howard story, but we readers immediately know how to feel about a giant snake or a giant ape, while a man with two mouths and an elephant-like proboscis and a knife with a knob at one end is just too strange to inspire an immediate, visceral reaction beyond bewilderment.  Also, a Howard protagonist fights the monsters he encounters, while Smith's three indistinguishable scientists (who, by the way, don't use their science knowledge for anything) are at the mercy of Smith's monsters. 

Captured by these pygmies, the three humans are briefly put to work and then suffer one outrageous horror after another, horrors they are powerless to resist.  The pygmies try to sacrifice them to their god, an aquatic worm with many eyes and five mouths, each slimy orifice big enough to swallow a man whole.  By luck the marooned spacemen escape, to be carried along a subterranean watercourse which debouches into a lake on the planet surface, where they are captured by a colossal avian with a pelican-like pouch.  They share the pouch with giant eels over a flight of hundreds of miles.  The flight ends when kaiju-sized carnivorous plants seize the monstrous bird.  One of the mutineers is eaten by a plant, but the plants turn out to be allergic to Earth-food and eject the two survivors from their writhing jungle.

The two survivors stagger across a dried sea bed and come to an island covered in ruins where they are attacked by a swarm of insects, each the size of a crow.  Then Captain Volmar's ship appears.  An accident has killed some crew members, leaving Volmar short staffed, so he is willing to forgive the two surviving mutineers if they will help operate the ship.

"Marooned in Andromeda" is a shaggy dog story with almost no plot; it is just a list of horror scenes featuring wacky aliens concocted by Smith.  Some of the monsters are interesting, and there are some amusing bits of dead pan humor and black humor, but the story as a whole is not good.  We're grading this one acceptable.  

"The Amazing Planet" (1931)

This story, in 2003's Red World of Polaris and in 2007's The Door to Saturn, appears under the title "A Captivity in Serpens," but the 20th-century reprintings, like in the Winter 1951 Fantastic Story Quarterly, bore the title under which it debuted in Wonder Stories Quarterly, "The Amazing Planet."

"The Amazing Planet," especially in its first half, is much like "Marooned in Andromeda," a shaggy dog story in which humans are subjected to a series of horror scenarios in which they have little or no agency.  Volmar's ship approaches a planet that, like Mercury was believed to when Smith penned this tale, has one side that permanently faces its sun, leaving the other in permanent darkness.  Simply because the spacers need a break from the monotony of shipboard life, Volmar lands in the narrow twilight zone between the planet's two extreme environments.  Volmar chooses one crewman with which to go off alone; somewhat oddly, to my mind, Volmar selects one of the men whom, in the last episode, he called "rubbish" and set down on a deadly planet as a punishment for mutiny.  Go off alone into the wilderness with a man who has a record of breaking the rules and now has a reason to get revenge on you?  Sure, why not?  Smith, in today's three stories, puts very little effort into making the characters' motivations and behavior believable.

Volmar and the mutineer quickly get mixed up in a confrontation between native hunters and their monstrous prey, and get captured by the hunters.  These aliens sell the humans to more advanced aliens who are visiting this planet by space ship.  The scientifically minded aliens carry Volmar and friend to their world, to a metropolis where the humans are subjected to medical examination.  After the exam, the aliens draw their Earth blood and inject it into members of their own lower class--the humans watch as the alien guinea pigs die in agony, swelling up and turning purple.

Volmar and pal think they are about to be euthanized, and "The Amazing Planet" becomes a somewhat more conventional adventure story as the humans fight their way out of the lab and flee across the city, fighting off efforts to ambush them on a perilously high skybridge between two skyscrapers, then climbing the seemingly endless internal stairway of a tower to its top, an observatory.  The aliens attack the observatory again and again, but they are short and, apparently, are not trying to kill the humans but merely capture them, and their attacks are repulsed repeatedly.  Many aliens are slain.  Finally, the aliens overwhelm the observatory, capturing Volmar.  His companion escapes, and we get more chase scenes and more monsters and more horror scenes before he is also captured.

Again, the behavior of Smith's characters is hard to credit.  The aliens are ruthless enough to kill two of their own kind (albeit those of a lower social class) but they won't kill humans, even after those humans have killed scores of their comrades?  Maybe the aliens are afraid to shed human blood because they think it might pollute their atmosphere?  

Reunited, the men wake up tied to an anti-gravity platform that begins ascending to outer space, the aliens apparently being finished with them but not wanting to kill them outright.  Luckily, the crew of Volmar's ship spotted the captain and his comrade being carried off from the Mercury-type planet and followed the aliens to this planet, and have been orbiting above the city.  Their fellow spacemen spot the rising platform and rescue our guys before they can freeze to death.

"The Amazing Planet" has more action, but is not really any better than "Marooned in Andromeda."  As I have told you many times over the course of this blog's history of over 1500 postings, I prefer a story in which the plot is driven by and resolved by characters' personalities, goals, abilities, and decisions.  These two Volmar stories feature random stuff happening to nonentities who live or die based on factors over which they have no control.  The survivors don't survive because they are brave or strong or smart, but because they are lucky.  They don't do much of anything, and when they do do something, it doesn't matter--Volmar and his fellow spaceman manage to escape captivity and in the course of evading pursuit kill many aliens, but ultimately they end up right back where they started, as captives, all those pages of mayhem having not moved the narrative forward an iota.

The descriptions of the alien city are pretty good, and the defense of the observatory isn't bad, so we'll call this one acceptable. 

"The Eternal World" (1932)

Chandon is an inventor who lives among beautiful mountains.  He has discovered and developed "negative time-force," an energy that can negate "the positive energy of time, that fourth dimensional gravity which causes and controls the rotation of events."  Now, considering he has mastered the negative time-force, you might think the vehicle he has devised, a metal cylinder with a glass upper portion, is a time machine and so Chandon will be travelling to the past to deal with Romans and dinosaurs or the future to deal with people with oversized heads.  But you would be wrong!  Amplified negative time-force, in fact, "would not permit of travel into the past or future, but would cause an instant projection across the temporal stream that enfolds the entire cosmos in its endless, equal flowing."  What?

Chandon climbs into his machine and activates it, and after some surreal passages ("It seemed as if the barriers of his brain had been extended to include the whole of the cosmic flux") finds himself in a world where nothing changes, a world of crystalline marble megaliths "beyond time."  

He had projected himself beyond time into some further cosmos where the very ether, perhaps, was a nonconductor of the time-force, and in which, therefore, the phenomena of temporal sequence were impossible. 

Is Chandon trapped here for all eternity, unable to breathe or move at all, and thus unable to truly live, but also unable to die?

No, because another invader of this eternal world of timelessness appears, this one able to move.  A huge space craft that extends a mechanical arm and collects three megaliths, which Chandon senses are living entities in statis, like himself.  Then it collects Chandon's cylinder--when he is inside the space ship, time exists for him again; his heart resumes beating, his lungs breathing.  He sees through the glass of his machine the crew of the ship, people with spherical bodies and lots of tentacles, some of which end in eyes.

The megalithic people awake, change shape, growing eyes and appendages of their own.  They shoot rays at the crew, and the crew use a paralysis device on them, and on Chandon, when they notice him moving about within his machine.  

The space ship arrives on the globe-people's planet, landing in a city of astoundingly tall buildings made of black material.  The globies have to turn off the paralysis rays to move the megalith people out of their ship, and the megaliths become super powerful, shattering the ship.  One of the giants sets Chandon's cylinder on its shoulder.

As Chandon watches, a ferocious battle ensues, a battle of psychic powers as well as rays.  The megalithic people of the timeless world grow to a height that rivals the black skyscrapers, and use ray to destroy the towers and their occupants.  The little globe people, who had shanghaied the timeless ones in order to enslave them and employ them in a war against some other community, are humiliated and then annihilated, their city and then their entire planet consumed.  Smith describes this apocalypse at great length, hitting us readers with classical (Laocoon, the Cyclops) and Biblical (Sodom, the Anakim) similes and metaphors. 

Finally, having destroyed the globe people's planet and grown to cosmic size, the three timeless beings travel the universe, along the way depositing Chandon and his machine back on Earth in Chandon's own laboratory among the mountains.

This is the third of today's stories in which the main character is more of a spectator than an actor, in which the threadbare plot is just an opportunity for Smith to present to us his surreal visions, and is probably the most extreme example, with the craziest visions and the most ineffectual protagonist.  The wild scenes of entire cities and planets being destroyed, the bizarre aliens, the mind-bending theories about time and space, mean little to me when there is no human element, no suspense.  We'll call "The Eternal World" acceptable.

"The Eternal World" has been reprinted in Smith collections, and included in a Spanish magazine, Delirio.

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I'm not the customer for stories that are just a bunch of psychedelic visions, even if they include crazy words you rarely see like "lustrum" and "Anakim."  In my opinion, these three stories are among Smith's weakest work.  His strongest work?  I would suggest "The Testament of Athammaus," "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis," and "The Dweller in the Gulf."  

We'll leave you with an example of Smith's prose from "The Eternal World."  'Til next time, fellow adventurers!