In the city of strange wonders, the lure of the flame drew them on and on… destruction loomed ahead… The City of Singing Flame by Clark Ashton Smith, that’s next on The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast.

Today marks the debut of Clark Ashton Smith on our podcast. Smith was born in California in 1893. He was an insatiable reader with a photographic memory. He read an unabridged dictionary word for word, studying the definitions of the words and their origins. He read the complete 11th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica at least twice.

He started writing at 11. By 14 he had written a short adventure novel titled The Black Diamonds which was lost for decades until was published in 2002 more than 41 years after his death.

Smith was poor most of his life and often did manual labor jobs like fruit picking and woodcutting to provide for himself and his parents. To say he was a prolific writer of horror and science fiction would be a huge understatement. Between 1929 and 1934 he wrote more than a hundred short stories. He began corresponding with Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft and the three of them became friends although they never met.

Clark Ashton Smith was praised by his peers, H. P. Lovecraft said, “in sheer daemonic strangeness and fertility of conception, Clark Ashton Smith is perhaps unexcelled” and Ray Bradbury said that Smith, “filled my mind with incredible worlds, impossibly beautiful cities, and still more fantastic creatures”. You are about to discover what Lovecraft and Bradbury were talking about.

Turn back the clock 93 years and go to page 202 in Wonder Stories magazine, July 1931, The City of Singing Flame by Clark Ashton Smith…

Next on The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast, It lay silent and dead under the cold desert moon, but what strange race inhabited the abyss beneath those cyclopean ruin? The Nameless City by H. P. Lovecraft.

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