Why You'll Love This
Lost for decades and hunting by collectors like buried treasure, this recovered Clark Ashton Smith novella finally exists — and it was worth the wait.
- Great if you want: pulp-era sci-fi from a master of ornate weird fiction
- The experience: short, strange, and steeped in early 20th-century cosmic atmosphere
- The writing: Smith's prose is dense and jeweled — style over velocity, always
- Skip if: you prefer character depth over atmosphere and adventure
About This Book
Clark Ashton Smith built his reputation on dark fantasy and cosmic horror, but the Captain Volmar stories reveal a different register of his imagination — one turned outward toward the stars, toward alien worlds rendered with the same hallucinatory intensity he brought to Zothique and Averoigne. At the center of this collection is the long-lost novella "Red World of Polaris," a work so elusive it became legend among Smith's devoted readers before a surviving copy finally surfaced. That provenance alone lends the book a charged quality, the sense of reading something that nearly vanished forever.
What distinguishes this as a reading experience is the collision of pulp adventure energy with Smith's unmistakably ornate sensibility. He was incapable of plain prose, and even in science fiction mode his language carries weight and color that most genre writers of his era never approached. The Volmar stories are compact and propulsive, but they're threaded through with strange beauty and an atmosphere that lingers. Readers who know Smith only from his horror fiction will find these pages genuinely surprising — and those coming to him fresh will encounter a writer with a voice unlike anyone else working in the field.