The Door to Saturn by Clark Ashton Smith
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This is the second in five omnibus editions collecting Clark Ashton Smith's fantasy, horror, and science fiction stories. The collections are presented chronologically by time of writing and with copious textual and scholarly notes. For the uninitiated, CAS was one of the "big three" authors of early weird fiction along with Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft, and was hugely influential on later writers in the space like Ray Bradbury, Jack Vance, and Michael Moorcock. Here, in the second volume, we see Smith starting to hit his stride with some more memorable fiction, although several of the pieces in this collection, while workmanlike, are not exceptional.
When the stories gel and focus on the fantastical, it's easy to see why CAS was so influential on subsequent horror and fantasy. Necromancers escaping through hidden doors to Saturn, ectoplasmic hellhounds, Pyrrhic bargains with graveyard ghouls, Sir John Mandeville buried alive, an interdimensional alien bug zapper, the repeated trial and execution of an unkillable serpent man, and a first memorable visit to the cursed realm of Averoigne (much of which was incorporated wholesale into early Dungeons and Dragons). Add in a few peculiar time travel tales and you've got a really eclectic mix of stories that gives a foretaste of his best work. At minimum, if you get nothing else from reading CAS, you will learn new words (I learned at least 25 from this volume alone).
But, while I've enjoyed the collection, the work is not without its faults. The book has some racial preoccupations and commentary that, while not quite Lovecraft-quality racism, has nonetheless aged horribly. It manifests most frequently in his space explorers tentatively trying to apply race science to entirely alien races, although there are occasional real world racial stereotypes that feature prominently in a few of the stories. Beyond that larger problem, there are some smaller ones too. The science fiction stories (several of which follow the adventures of the aethership Alcyone) tend towards tedium and aren't particularly memorable, but do at least hit most of the expected golden age, Flash-Gordonian notes.
Because this is a complete collection with an apparatus criticus, this is probably not the best place to start reading CAS (I'd recommend the penguin classics collection The Dark Eidolon and Other Stories for a good first anthology), but if you're a CAS fan or a completist this is easily the best place to go.