Who Goes There?

Last time I reviewed a Tanith Lee piece, and Lee is one of the two returning authors from last October; the other is Clark Ashton Smith. Of the big three (or four, if we count C. L. Moore) voices of Weird Tales during its 1930s heyday, Smith might be my favorite just in terms of how pleasurable he is to read on a paragraph-by-paragraph level. Whereas Robert E. Howard was a master of action, Lovecraft a master of atmosphere, and Moore a sort of jack of all trades, Smith had an intimidating capacity to conjure raw imagination through his prose, which is often hypnotic, colorful, and occasionally hard to grasp without a thesaurus on hand. His style of writing is a bit divisive. Isaac Asimov was outspoken about disliking Smith’s writing, which makes sense since Asimov handled prose like a mechanic would handle his tools while Smith thought himself a poet first and foremost. The result is that his stories often read like dark-hued prose poems.

Between 1929 and 1934 Smith wrote a truly staggering amount of short fiction (and it was always short fiction, since except for a novel he wrote as a teenager he never wrote longer than novelette-length), which resulted in several series. Today’s story, “The Door to Saturn,” takes place in Hyperboria, a mythical continent that’s set in a distant alternate past—one where prehistory and wizardry coexist. It’s also here that we’re met with the sorcerer Eibon, which should ring a bell if you’re into the Cthulhu mythos since the Book of Eibon is one of those fictional texts that gets cited there. Eibon is Smith’s creation and one of several examples of Smith and Lovecraft influencing each other, although as far as I can tell “The Door to Saturn” is the only story where he’s a main character.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the January 1932 issue of Strange Tales, which is on the Archive. I’ll be honest, I partly chose this story because I needed an excuse to pull up Wesso’s cover for this issue, it being one of my favorite covers for any pulp magazine. As for other appearances, “The Door to Saturn” has never been anthologized in English, but it’s made a pretty steady number of appearances in Smith collections over the years, including Lost Worlds in 1944, Hyperborea in 1971, The Emperor of Dreams in 2002, and The Door to Saturn: Volume Two of the Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith in 2007. It was also printed in the November 1964 issue of Magazine of Horror (available on the Archive), which is funny to me because it’s really not a horror story; on the contrary, this is a planetary romance that sees Smith at his most upbeat and humorous.

Enhancing Image

Morghi, an inquisitor and zealot of the elk-goddess Yhoundeh, has come to Eibon’s pentagondal abode with a posse, with the intent of bringing the dark wizard to justice. It’s a surprise raid, which makes Eibon’s absence all the more surprising. Where the hell could the bastard have gone? He could not have known about the raid in advance, except maybe by consulting his god, the ape-like Zhothaqquah. As the zealots search every corner and crack of the tower, Morghi finds a series of paintings, sculptures, and works of pottery on the highest floor, all of them seemingly ancient, many of them depicting Zhothaqquah in some way.

On each of the five walls there hung one of the parchment paintings, all of which seemed to be the work of some aboriginal race. Their themes were blasphemous and repellent; and Zhothaqquah figured in all of them, amid forms and landscapes whose abnormality and sheer uncouthness may have been due to the half-developed technique of the primitive artists. Morghi now tore them from the walls one by one, as if he suspected that Eibon might in some manner be concealed behind them.

(This is a fairly concise paragraph by Smith’s standards.)

But curiously, behind one of these paintings is a metal panel large enough to fit a person and which seems to function like a door, opening outward on its hinges; problem is that it would open into the outside where one would fall into the sea. This is assuming it’s a normal panel, which it’s not. It’s at this point that we flash back to Eibon’s POV, sometime before the raid, in which he has a chat with Zhothaqquah—as you do. Zhothaqquah had made a deal with the dark wizard in which Eibon is granted one means of escape, in the event that the fuzz come for him and he wouldn’t be able to elude them by natural means, or even with the power of his sorcery. The panel on that topmost floor is a portal, opening to Cykranosh, known to us as Saturn, millions of miles away, with the likelihood of anyone else going through it and finding Eibon being practically 0% (making Morghi’s subsequent entry pretty miraculous!). The catch is that this is a last resort: once you go through the portal, returning to Earth is basically impossible.

Shifting POVs in a short story can be tricky, but here I think the shift early on from Morghi to Eibon (before taking on an omniscient perspective) was called for, even if it treats the portal as a mini-twist. Smith was never a great plotter and so the opening scene reads more like a necessary evil than anything, so that we can get to the good stuff; it’s the weakest part of the story, but it’s brief enough as to not be a grind. Once we’re on Saturn (I’m calling it that and not Smith’s name for it because I prefer to use words that could feasibly exist), the game is afoot. The bad news for Eibon is that it doesn’t take long for Morghi to find him; the good news (for Eibon anyway) is that arresting him is now pointless since they’re both stuck here. They have to work together to survive, and in Eibon’s case he has to find connection here, since Zhothaqquah had gone through Saturn and indeed there’s an abundance of intelligent life here.

This, of course, is not the Saturn we know: it’s not a gas giant, evidently, and the air is breathable for humans. Mars or Venus would’ve made more sense in the context of ’30s SF (indeed “The Door to Saturn” qualifies as what we now call science-fantasy, sort of in the Edgar Rice Burroughs mode), but I think Smith wanted an even more exotic locale which is farther away from Earth and more unusual in appearance. Saturn is famous for its rings, but Smith goes the extra mile to present even its terrain as unusual, using his knack for language as a tool to accomplish this. A common tip for writing is “Don’t use a two-syllable word when a one-syllable word will do,” or something like that, but Smith always heads in the opposite direction. It’s not enough for there to be rivers of liquid metal, they have to be rivers of “liquescent” metal. The sky is “greenish-black” and “was over-arched from end to end with a triple cyclopean ring of dazzling luminosity.” “Sulphurescent” is apparently not a real word, but it conveys well the harsh smell of the planet’s air. Here, Smith uses alien language to describe an alien place.

(Worth mentioning that word processors really hate Smith, given the exotic names of his own invention along with made-up words that sound like they might be real but aren’t, not to mention vice versa.)

Speaking of which, the main alien race of the story are the Bhlemphroims, a hairy bipedal race with their heads fused to their upper abdomens such that they lack necks, and who bear a resemblance to Zhothaqquah; indeed they are related, but the Bhlemphroims no longer worship that god, nor any god to speak of. A race of unbelievers. When Eibon tries to persuade them with a phrase Zhothaqquah had passed on to him, they don’t react, but they do thank Our Heroes™ for having (unwittingly) returned one of their livestock—a reptilian beast with dozens of tiny legs, so enormous that when Eibon and Morghi encounter it they don’t even see its head from ground level. The Bhlemphroims, being a docile and unimaginative race, give Our Heroes™ a warm welcome, even offering them up as husbands for the lead female, who needs mates and is not discerning as to the race.

This proves to be a huge problem. For one, the “national mother” is what you would call a looker, being a ginormous and gelatinous creature, having been selected out of the many females and fed over time so as to be able to give birth to a whole generation of Bhlemphroims. The prospect of mating with such a creature is horrifying. “Thinking of the mountainous female they had seen, Morghi was prone to remember his sacerdotal vows of celibacy and Eibon was eager to take similar vows upon himself without delay.” That’s right, you’re seeing a joke in a Clark Ashton Smith story; and I’ll be honest, this particular one cracked me up. There are actually several jokes made through the third-person narrator, who proves to be a bit snarkier than what you’d expect for an old-school weird tale. “The Door to Saturn” is a planetary adventure, but it’s also a surprisingly effective comedy.

An even more severe problem than the prospect of making love to a mountain of alien flesh is that the national mother, like the female praying mantis, devours her mates after copulation. The Bhlemphroims are a peaceful race, but they also see getting eaten by the national mother as a profound honor. Lovecraft was probably asexual, and refrained from bringing up sex even implicitly in his fiction (with one or two exceptions), but Smith had no such qualms, with his male characters experiencing temptation and jealousy, and with flowers often symbolizing attraction (but also malicious deception). In this case the national mother is a stand-in for a deeply unattractive woman whom Our Heroes™ want to avoid. Now, rejecting their obligations to the Bhlemphroims and getting the hell out of Dodge will prove to be quite the challenge, right? Sounds like a recipe for adventure.

There Be Spoilers Here

It’s pretty easy, as it turns out.

There are several moments of playful irony in “The Door to Saturn” that help make it considerably less self-serious than the usual Smith story. Subverting what was already a well-worn pulp trope of the time (the alien race being akin to violent savages), the Bhlemphroims are so peaceful that they just let Eibon and Morghi go on their merry way, simply uncomprehending as to why such men would deny the national mother. When they meet the Ydheems, who are also related to Zhothaqquah and who are, unlike the Bhlemphroims, still true believers, Eibon uses the phrase Zhothaqquah had bestowed on him—a phrase that, unbeknownst to Eibon, simply means “Be on your way.” The saying ends up saving both Our Heroes™ and the Ydheems, as it convinces them to move out of their village just as an avalanche (of giant mushrooms) is about to decimate it. There’s irony in that Eibon accidentally saves a race of people (just as Our Heroes™ had before accidentally saved one of the Bhlemphroims’ livestock), but also there’s the implication that Zhothaqquah had basically told his most devoted human disciple to fuck off. It’s funny to think about.

The irony continues when we’re informed at the end that, since Morghi had vanished into the portal and was never seen again, his minions took to thinking he had been in cahoots with Eibon the whole time, and as a result the cult currounding Yhoundeh collapses; this is all right before an Ice Age comes over Hyperboria, no doubt leading to a mass extinction event. Life on Saturn ain’t easy (although being a savior to the Ydheems grants a few luxuries), but Eibon and Morghi remain blissfully unaware that they have it better on such a desolate planet than in their homeland, which is about to become nigh uninhabitable. At first “The Door to Saturn” seems like it might be a straightforward weird tale, the ironies start to snowball so that by the end it has become a grim but playful comedy. This is all uncharacteristically fun-loving for Smith, but I’m not complaining.

A Step Farther Out

Of the three Smith stories I’ve reviewed so far, this one is my favorite. Whereas “Vulthoom” (review here) was largely mediocre because it reads as Smith trying to write an “accessible” SF story of the time, “The Door to Saturn” is 100% Smith, which means some will find it impenetrable. I don’t mind because I tend to like Smith’s style, but this is also a fun yarn. The way Eibon and Morghi play off each other is entertaining on its own, but their adventure on a Saturn that never was, coming across some pretty inventively envisioned alien races, is where the fun is really at. If anything this is a story I would recommend to people who are curious about Smith that at the same time doesn’t water down what makes him unique—even if it doesn’t give one the impression that he normally skews towards horror.

See you next time.