Zothique (collection)
Zothique is a collection of fantasy short stories by Clark Ashton Smith, edited by Lin Carter. It was first published in paperback by Ballantine Books as the sixteenth volume of its Ballantine Adult Fantasy series in June 1970. It was the first themed collection of Smith's works assembled by Carter for the series. The stories were originally published in various fantasy magazines in the 1930s, notably Weird Tales.
Background
The book collects one poem and all sixteen tales of the author's Zothique cycle, with an introduction, map, and epilogue by Carter. They are an example of the Dying Earth genre, being set on the Earth's last continent in a far distant future. They were originally written and published between 1932 and 1951. Most were written in a tar paper and wood cabin in Auburn, California. All were first published in the magazine Weird Tales with the exception of "The Voyage of King Euvoran" which first appeared in the 1933 book The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies and later republished under the title "The Quest of Gazolba" in the September 1947 issue.Setting
Clark Ashton Smith himself described the Zothique cycle in a letter to L. Sprague de Camp, dated November 3, 1953:Zothique, vaguely suggested by Theosophic theories about past and future continents, is the last inhabited continent of earth. The continents of our present cycle have sunken, perhaps several times. Some have remained submerged; others have re-risen, partially, and re-arranged themselves. Zothique, as I conceive it, comprises Asia Minor, Arabia, Persia, India, parts of northern and eastern Africa, and much of the Indonesian archipelago. A new Australia exists somewhere to the south. To the west, there are only a few known islands, such as Naat, in which the black cannibals survive. To the north, are immense unexplored deserts; to the east, an immense unvoyaged sea. The peoples are mainly of Aryan or Semitic descent; but there is a negro kingdom in the north-west; and scattered blacks are found throughout the other countries, mainly in palace-harems. In the southern islands survive vestiges of Indonesian or Malayan races. The science and machinery of our present civilization have long been forgotten, together with our present religions. But many gods are worshipped; and sorcery and demonism prevail again as in ancient days. Oars and sails alone are used by mariners. There are no fire-arms—only the bows, arrows, swords, javelins, etc. of antiquity. The chief language spoken is based on Indo-European roots and is highly inflected, like Sanskrit, Greek and Latin.Darrell Schweitzer suggests the idea of writing about a far future land may have come from William Hope Hodgson's novel The Night Land, noting that Smith was an admirer of Hodgson's work. However, this theory was conclusively disproven by Scott Conner in a scholarly journal devoted to Hodgson.
Contents
- "About Zothique, and Clark Ashton Smith: When the World Grows Old" by Lin Carter
- "Zothique"
- "Xeethra"
- "Necromancy in Naat"
- "The Empire of the Necromancers"
- "The Master of the Crabs"
- "The Death of Ilalotha"
- "The Weaver in the Vault"
- "The Witchcraft of Ulua"
- "The Charnel God"
- "The Dark Eidolon"
- "Morthylla"
- "The Black Abbot of Puthuum"
- "The Tomb-Spawn"
- "The Last Hieroglyph"
- "The Isle of the Torturers"
- "The Garden of Adompha"
- "The Voyage of King Euvoran"
- "Epilogue: The Sequence of the Zothique Tales" by Lin Carter