The Double Shadow: A Clark Ashton Smith Podcast

Episode #16: “A Voyage to Sfanomoë”

A transcription of this episode is available.

This week, we escape the sinking continent of Poseidonis on A Voyage to Sfanomoë.”

Voyage is the second of Smith’s Poseidonis stories and the first we’ve had so far in the podcast with scientists instead of magicians or necromancers. It was published in the August 1931 issue of Weird Tales, just over a year after “The Last Incantation.” Lovecraft’s “The Whisperer in Darkness” was published in the same volume.

Join us next time, as we release our self-titled(????) episode, “The Double Shadow!”

Music by: Erdenstern

Tagged as: ,

  1. bluecthulhu says:

    Doing a google search for “John Parsons and Clark Ashton Smith”, I came across a book ‘The Necronomicon Files: The Truth Behind the Legend’ which says that they were both acquainted with the same people.

    Regarding the brother’s choice to flee the planet instead of just relocating to another continent, perhaps the seismic chaos that would sink Atlantis would also be making the other continents inhabitable.

  2. Genus Unknown says:

    Maybe the other continents were already inhabited, and hostile. The Atlanteans seem like dicks, so maybe they had enemies.

  3. Odilius Vlak says:

    The first element that struck me when I read this story was the mind-blowing concept of men from a mythical civilization like Poseidonis, traveling to the outer space. Really, I’ve never heard of this before. And to me, that idea opened a whole universe of especulation and imaginary possibilities. Is the answer of the weird fiction to the acient astronaut theory so cherished by Erich Von Daniken, but in an inverted way. If apart from Hotar and Evidon, others Atlantean jumped out the earth’s atmosphere (for “There are many marvellous tales, untold, unwritten, never to be recorded or remembered, lost beyond all divining and all imagining, that sleep in the double silence of far-recessive time and space.”)… Then, the whole cycle goes like this: A)-Smith’s space voyagers going to far off points of the universe from those legendary lost continents. B)- Then coming back biologically changed and evolved -to the point to be the “aliens” of Daniken- to make first contact with the backward survivors of the ancient geologic catastrophes and teach them their science and arts.

  4. John says:

    I wonder if Lucian’s TRUE HISTORY provided Smith some inspiration for this tale…I know it is generally considered the first work of science fiction in the history of ever, I just find it interesting.