Search results
Xiccarph is a collection of fantasy and science fiction short stories by American writer Clark Ashton Smith, edited by Lin Carter. It was first published in paperback by Ballantine Books as the forty-first volume of its Ballantine Adult Fantasy series in February 1972.
Jan 1, 2001 · Xiccarph can not be considered a single saga, but is a composite series of short stories, all set in alien planets, inhabited by civilizations decadent and monstrous creatures, governing in a despotic manner, making use of their subordinates and practicing human sacrifice.
- (144)
- Mass Market Paperback
People also ask
Who wrote Xiccarph?
How does Smith describe Xiccarph?
Is Xiccarph a real planet?
Did Xiccarph have a unified backdrop?
- By Ryan Harvey
- “The Last Incantation”
- “A Voyage to Sfanomoë”
- “A Vintage from Atlantis”
- “The Double Shadow”
- “The Death of Malygris”
- “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis”
- “The Dweller in The Gulf”
- “Vulthoom”
- “The Maze of The Enchanter”
Location, location, location…that might have been Clark Ashton Smith’s motto for fantasy writing. Where most continuing fantasy sagas center on the adventures of specific heroes, such as Conan, Tarzan, and Imaro, Smith elevated milieu over character. Smith’s dark ironies and bleak fates made continuing characters unlikely, and his writing style cle...
This is one of the earliest works from Smith’s productive five-year period of short-story writing. It is the second story logged in the “Black Book” where he maintained a record of his fiction. “The Last Incantation” is a nearly plotless sketch, but contains an emotional coda that even readers unaccustomed to Smith’s Byzantine style can appreciate....
In his second Poseidonis story, Smith seems uncertain exactly how he wants to portray this final vestige of Atlantis. “The Last Incantation” shows a world of sorcery, but here the backdrop shifts toward science fiction. One of the popular tropes in Atlantis fiction, which originates with Plato, is that Atlantis was the most technologically advanced...
This is an associational tale of Poseidonis that occurs in historic time, probably in the early eighteenth century during the golden age of piracy. Smith uses a device that appears in a number of his stories where the protagonist receives a memory implant of a lost era and feels compulsively and fatally drawn into it. This “false memory” plot works...
The events of this story, one of Smith’s finest, occur two generations after the wizard Malygris ruled Susran with his necromantic terror. Malygris’s final surviving pupil, Avyctes, has withdrawn from the world to content himself with scholarly studies in a marble mansion above the sea. His own student, Pharpetron, narrates the tale of the fate tha...
The dark sorcerer Malygris returns, an uncommon feat for a Clark Ashton Smith character — although appropriately he returns already dead. Malygris’s adversary, King Gadeiron’s arch-sorcerer Maranapion, suspects that the tyrannical necromancer in his castle above Susran has died and kept his corpse intact to fool everyone into believing he still liv...
In a science-fiction pulp magazine like Planet Stories, this would have a title like “Brain-Sucking Leeches of the Red Planet.” It is an accurate plot description, but Smith’s customarily bizarre title, hinting of fantasy with the name “Yoh-Vombis” and horror with the mention of a vault, shows his eccentric approach to the Martian setting. The stor...
Farnsworth Wright at Weird Tales rejected this story, which Smith originally titled “The Eidolon of the Blind,” as too sickening for his readers, and Smith eventually had to sell it to Wonder Stories, a science-fiction magazine edited by Hugo Gernsback. Wonder Storieshad provided a steady market for Smith’s more overtly science-fiction offerings li...
Once again, human explorers find weirdness beneath the rocks of Mars; this time, the mystery isn’t found in the taboo wastelands, but beneath its major city, Ignarh. Bob Haines, a former assistant pilot sacked from his job, and Paul Septimus Chanler, a science fiction writer, venture into the older area of the city out of curiosity in the exotica o...
Smith held this story in high regard, since he had his unedited version printed in his self-published volume when he had difficulty selling it. The edited version that eventually appeared in Weird Talesmakes a few deletions and changes, but is not significantly different. Either version counts as one of the author’s best and strangest works of fict...
Release date 1972 | Collection of science fantasy tales set on the planet Xiccarph and others. Edited, with an introduction and notes by Lin Carter. Contents: ...
- (1)
- Clark Ashton Smith
Jun 21, 2019 · Xiccarph - Clark Ashton Smith (Ballantine Adult Fantasy series) (1972) (LennyS-aMouse) Publication date. 1972. Topics. Science Fiction, Fantasy, Weird Tales, Pulps, Pulp Magazines, Xiccarph, Clark Ashton Smith, Ballantine Adult Fantasy, Gervasio Gallardo. Collection.
Amongst Smith's science fiction tales are stories set on Mars and the invented planet of Xiccarph. His short stories originally appeared in the magazines Weird Tales, Strange Tales, Astounding Stories, Stirring Science Stories and Wonder Stories.
Jan 1, 1972 · Xiccarph. Paperback – January 1, 1972. by Clark Ashton Smith (Author) 5.0 4 ratings. See all formats and editions.
- Paperback
- Clark Ashton Smith
