The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis

I took a pic of this 1974 edition of some Clark Ashton Smith short stories, not so much to highlight the camp nature of the cover art work, but rather to help draw attention to the fact that it clearly predates the film "Alien". The book was given to me, along with a random bunch of other titles, around 25 years ago, and since then it has pretty much just sat around my parents' house, without me paying any attention to it. I just happened to walk past the bookshelf the other day and noticed the title, and couldn't remember what it was, so I picked it up.

I mention it on this blog because the volume turns out to be a superb distillation of many of the personal obsessions of Acheron's contributors. Although a contemporary of H.P. Lovecraft and a fellow contributor to Weird Tales, Smith grabs your attention with his recurrent themes of obsessed individuals who unwittingly destroy themselves and others when they attempt to act on their interests. More in the vein of a satire of capitalism's fixation on the market for rare commodities, than a pious morality tale, Smith intimates a viable alternative when his dispossessed characters learn to cross species/cultural barriers and forge new forms of solidarity. I can only wonder at this stage how much of a potential influence on readers this may have been, who were later drawn to later writers such as Samuel Delaney for whom such themes were of paramount importance.

I also have yet to research any of the journals dedicated to Smith, whether "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis" (first published 1932) has ever been identified as a precursor to "Alien". The setting is basically that of the astronauts at the beginning of Scott's film, who are exploring the derelict spacecraft on Acheron. Smith describes the discovery of a mummified alien, reminiscent of the Space Jockey, which shows signs of a parasite having attached itself to its face. Further exploration of the cavernous vault soon leads to an encounter with the parasite, which indeed attaches itself to the face of its victim, and proves difficult to dislodge:

"He moved back, but not quickly enough to evade me, when I stabbed with the four -inch blade at the black turgescent mass that enveloped his whole upper head and hung down over his eyes....a great slug, with neither head nor tail, nor apparent organs...Out of it there gushed a sickening torrent of human blood, mingled with dark, filiated masses that may have been half dissolved human hair, and floating gelatinous lumps like molten bone, and shreds of a curdy white substance" (p180).

Incredible stuff, and the resemblances even extend to the description of the architecture where the extinct race of Martians are housed. I have no idea if there was any actual influence exerted upon the likes of H.R. Giger or Dan O'Bannon, but I am sure that Smith presents as a more worthy precursor than the much cited "It! The Terror From Beyond Space".

Moreover, I feel that if Smith corpus proves consistent enough to be understood as critically dystopic, then there is also an imaginative, utopian streak running throughout. Indeed, with culture mediating between structure and agency in this way, one has another means of navigating back to the focus on creativity that has arisen in recent social theory, as well as in strands of cultural studies (the turn to Gramsci; Jameson's interest in science fiction etc). It is only those who fail to grasp this who can speak solely in terms of "schlock" produced by the "culture industry". Fueled by ressentiment, and ministering to a misearble congregation in the manner of a hellfire preacher, the lack of imagination in such an approach unsurprisingly in effect amounts to the reduction of Gramsci's maxim to, "pessimism of the intellect, pessimism of the will".

It will also be interesting to discover if even in Smith's "dying world" stories, where not even science and technology as featured in some other apocalyptic fiction is available, he still maintains the creative "optimism of the will". Imagine the possible comparison then to some of the "First Hundred" characters in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy (in addition to his more recent ecologically themed works). This coud validate my point, not least because Robinson studied under Jameson, and Jameson in turn has written about Robinson's fiction.....