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“The General”

The ending of this story sort of takes the wind out of the sails of our canny and wise protagonists. It’s exactly as Barr said; the Foundation was, through the engineering of psychohistory, fated to succeed. And, to prove Asimov’s point, the individuals that we followed had pretty much nothing to do with the downfall of The General, which was reliant on the politics of the Empire.

Foundation and Empire is split into two, longer stories. The framework is similar to the original foundation - some 40 or so years have advanced since the end of the first book - and the chapters still have Asimov’s staggered pacing. It’s good, though, to know that we aren’t closed to finished after this first 50 pages.

“The Merchant Princes”

What happens when your atomic cult is dreaded by the rest of the galaxy for its exclusivity, with no one wanting to become dependent on your say-so for the continued operation of its technology? Ditch religion, of course, and worship the almighty dollar! The frame job is the most compelling part of this particular story, the longest in the first collection.

“The Traders”

How do you deal with a system whose ruling government is religiously opposed to nuclear technology? Well, by appealing to their greed and blackmailing them so that they have a vested interest in making nucleics legal, of course.

“The Mayors”

How does the infant second galactic empire safeguard itself from being swallowed by the neighboring kingdoms that are desperate to control its technological prowess? By relying on their ignorance so that science can become one with religion, thus ensuring that your faux-priest technicians hold all the cards with regard to the control of the technologies that you have gifted.

“The Encyclopedists”

Okay. This is a pretty good twist, though this story is almost entirely political. The world of the Foundation has been sort of cut off from the Empire and most of the people in charge are more concerned with Encyclopedia Galactica than what do do when they are inevitably occupied by a new Galactic Kingdom.

“The Psychohistorians”

So, the Foundation series is a sequence of collected short stories that are all related. This one establishes the premise - that a collection of mathematicians / sociologists / scientists are attempting to reduce the impact of the inevitable fall of the galactic empire, reducing the resulting dark age from 30,000 years to 1,000.

Way back when I bought this and Dune, I was more daunted by Dune. In hindsight, Dune was a fantastic read. Most of what I have read about this, a collection of the first three novels in Asimov’s Foundation series, is that it was landmark for sci-fi, but doesn’t really hold up the same way that Dune did. Which, after reading I, Robot, I’m not entirely surprised.

“The Dart of Rafasa”

I came here with a simple dream, a dream of reading all of Clark Ashton Smith’s fiction. And this is how it must end? This is by the numbers sci-fi pulp complete with completely naked heroine and neither the author nor his couple of space explorers can work up any excitement for their predicament. This is so guileless that it reads like deadpan, unwinking satire.

“The Symposium of the Gorgon”

Uh. This is a farce, where a drunk teleports to a wild party being thrown by the Gorgons mere moments before Perseus arrives. The narrator catches some side-eye from Medusa’s head - an important plot point - before being carried by Pegasus to an island in the South Sea where a tribe of cannibals ATTEMPTS to cook him alive after fattening him up.

“The Theft of the Thirty-Nine Girdles”

Hey hey Hyperborea! This is the third story of Satampra Zeiros. Good parts: The dude talks about his time spent with a female accomplice, Vixeela. She is a woman who escaped a prostitution cult and this heist is also, for her at least, a strike back. She even brains the head priest! She could have definitely had a bigger part, though. Veezi steals almost the whole story.

“Phoenix”

pulp, Bradbury-like sci-fi with a light romantic subplot. This is an “end of the sun” world but, rather than AK-ish Zothique, it’s eternal winter. Scientists from one of the surviving nations has developed and implements an interstellar payload to rekindle the dead sun and thus rejuvenate the Earth. The romantic subplot, well, it doesn’t take a genius to anticipate no mission survivors.

“Monsters in the Night”

Okay I was prepared to breeze through this flash fiction but it’s delightfully fun, marinating in the thought process of a werewolf who is looking for a kill. He finds his target, but! Surprise! It’s a fucking android??? Just some fun horror / sci-fi.

“Schizoid Creator”

A goofy Diabolist story where a psychiatrist tries to summon the devil because he believes that the devil is merely another aspect of God and he has schizophrenia, and he wants to cure him. The satirical follow-through is that the man gets the wrong devil but he’s not entirely incorrect about God and Satan. Unfortunately for him, God / Satan isn’t the least bit schizophrenic.

“Morthylla”

The last Zothique story 😭and it’s pretty perfect and VERY CAS. Poet is bored with the excesses of life; his patron jokingly suggests he visit a necropolis where the lamia Morthylla is said to live. He goes there and does indeed meet a woman who claims she is the lamia. The two twists that follow make this tight prose poem one of my favorite Smith fantasies.

“The Master of the Crabs”

Seafaring sword and sorcery in Zothique. This one references the necromantic isle of Naat and, uh, has Smith’s preoccupation with shark-toothed, dark-skinned cannibals. It’s a fair enough minor adventure story where the heroes succeed in their mission, a rarity in Zothique. It also has several lethal cases of crabs… which you may have gathered from the title.

“Nemesis of the Unfinished”

A goofy semi-autobiographical story about a writer who can’t finish his stories and all of the unfinished manuscripts rebel, finishing themselves in a style that is far more akin to Smith’s personal style with regard to word-choice and detailing. His ego can’t take any of this, and so he dies in a battle with the piles of paper. Huh.

“Double Cosmos”

A scientist conjectures that the hallucinations that drug-users experience are actually glimpses into aspects of reality that we cannot ordinarily perceive. So he makes a super-drug and opens up his mind to the fourth dimension. It’s way less gnarly than your average extra-dimensional Smith adventure.

“The Enchantress of Sylaire”

This is a rewrite of his “The End of the Story”, but with more sex. “Indeed, he proved it so lengthily and in such detail that the sun had fallen below the horizon before Séphora could draw a full breath and speak again.” I guess that there is a werewolf ex-boyfriend sorcerer and… idk what was going on with the Mirror of Reality but it reflected poorly on Dorothée!!!!!!!!

“Strange Shadows”

This is recognizably Smith in how he describes the titular shadows, but the tone is… different? Jones the alcoholic feels like one of Smith’s more fully-realized characters, a dude who spuriously gains access to the shadows cast by living things, with the actions of these shadows betraying something of the true nature of the people who cast them.

“The Great God Awto”

This is one of those satires where archaeologists pick over the remains of contemporary culture and come to bizarre conclusions. Smith is mad at automobiles and depicts the perception of present-day America as a death-cult of, as Bruce Springsteen once sang, “suicide machines”. The notes here are indispensable in adding the context of Smith as something of a Luddite.

“The Garden of Adompha”

A tale of bizarre debauchery in Zothique, where a warped king and his sorcerer graft the body parts of courtiers onto plants that feed off of the buried bodies. It’s pretty gross, even if the king gets his comeuppance in the end. If you think that you killed a sorcerer in Zothique, well, don’t stick around wherever he died!!!

“The Mother of Toads”

UMMMMM

OKAY

Dude is drugged into having sex with the toad-witch-woman and then wakes up, completely grossed out. He tries to escape but… a tidal wave of toads sends him back to her hut, and… when he spurns her second advance, calling her a fat toad, she lets him go… only to drown him in the bog, smothering him under her huge titties.

I had no idea something like this was coming