CLARK ASHTON SMITH, so often our Muse and Guide in surveying the Cosmos from our preferred angle. In many ways, his life was a modest affair. He was born and lived the majority of his life in Auburn, California, before it ever became a decent-sized town-- in Smith’s early years a settlement of approximately one thousand people. It is difficult today to visualize just how rural, how remote a place Auburn was at the turn of the 20th century. Educational opportunities of any kind were more than ordinarily limited. And following primary school, Smith, a lifelong autodidact, opted not to continue on to high school, feeling he could better educate himself at the local library, an assessment with which his understanding parents agreed. In his productive youth and young manhood, his early poetic creations led Smith to contact with the contemporary poet George Sterling, known then as the "Keats of the West." A signal influence on Smith, Sterling championed the younger man’s work and was responsible for exposing him to Baudelaire’s poetry, which would become another important source for his work. Despite having been considered a significant American poet during his lifetime, associated with a group of California-based writers including Ambrose Bierce and Jack London, Sterling is largely forgotten by contemporary literary and cultural studies, perhaps even overshadowed at this point by his former protégé. The culmination of this phase of Smith’s writing was his 1920 blank verse poem, The Hashish Easter, or The Apocalypse of Evil (A self-taught artist, Smith created an extensive set of illustrations to accompany the poem which have never been published alongside it, arousing hope that a print edition of the poem combining pictures and text may yet be published). One should take note of his developing epistolary friendship with H.P. Lovecraft. This coincided with the start of his career as a published fiction writer, pretty much all of which occurred before Lovecraft’s death in 1937. (Smith had written novels as a youth, but they remained unpublished until well after his lifetime.) In part, the reason for Smith’s turn to prose was practical: he needed money in order to look after his aging parents. At the same time, his stories were not divorced from the material of his poetry; rather, they were a new way of approaching the same concerns. And it’s for his fiction that Smith has remained best known. Many of Smith’s stories are set in one of several invented locales: the prehistoric realms of Hyperborea and Poseidonis, the imaginary medieval France of Averoigne, and the far future world of Earth, called Zothique. Then there were narratives set on utterly alien locales far beyond these. It is not unsafe to say that the characters in these stories, driven by complex and human motivations, brought a more complicated psychology into the pages of the pulp magazines in which they were published. The playful letters Smith and Lovecraft exchanged led to an equally playful sharing of elements from one another’s stories; though Smith was not Lovecraft’s disciple. Rather, he was an artistic equal engaged in exploring his own concerns through occasionally shared material. Distinguishing it all is its repeated focus on characters who pursue a goal that simultaneously promises to fulfill their desires and to result in their destruction.