Zothique

Zothique is the fantasy realm that Clark Ashton Smith developed most fully, and many of his best-known tales unfold there. Its far-future world combines faded luxury, strangeness, and sensuality. Smith kept returning to it across the years from 1932, when "The Empire of the Necromancers" appeared, to 1956, when he wrote the short play The Dead Will Cuckold You. Each new tale adds something to the setting.

The sun is dying, and civilization has collapsed under the threat. Rather than advancing, society has slipped back into a world of kings, superstition, and sorcery. Smith wrote in deliberately old-fashioned language and built his settings to match. Some of his most sorrowful fiction takes place here, including "The Dark Eidolon" and "Xeethra," where the supernatural is bound up with grief and loss.

Other stories take different directions. "The Weaver of the Vault" and "Necromancy in Naat" dwell on mortality. "The Witchcraft of Ulua" and "Morthylla" center on desire and eroticism, and "The Voyage of King Euvoran" is darkly comic. The cycle ends with "The Last Hieroglyph," which depicts the realm's final destruction.

Zothique gave Smith the greatest freedom of any of his story cycles, and this volume gathers his work in the setting across prose fiction, drama, and poetry. Ron Hilger, a leading Smith scholar, prepared the texts, and Donald Sidney-Fryer contributes a new introduction.