Clark Ashton Smith's "A Star-Change" aka "The Visitors from Mlok" (short story, free): Being appropriately human considered better than being more than human

Lemuel Sarkis, unhappy with life, is taken by two aliens to their world, Mlok. A world in a galaxy so distant its light is yet to reach earth!

Only problem is: local lights & sounds are hard on humans senses, & make Sarkis sick. So aliens treat his senses so he'll be comfortable.

Later, Sarkis needs to be returned to earth in a hurry because of a local emergency. And he discovers his altered senses now find earth's normal sensations unbearable...

See also.

1. C L Moore's "The Bright Illusion": A man, with altered senses, falls in love with an alien "women" on a world whose light & sounds will be unbearable to humans.

Fact sheet.

First published: Wonder Stories, May 1933.
Download full text from Eldritch Dark.
Rating: B.
Related: Stories of Clark Ashton Smith.

Clark Ashton Smith's "Xeethra" (short story, fantasy, free): From goat-herd to king & back to goat-herd

Some other reviewers see the moral of this story as "ignorance is bliss": in a dying world, the ultimate curse is the memory of old days of glory. I personally didn't see it like that, & read the story literally.

Story summary.

Xeethra of title is a young orphan boy, a goatheard in a parched land, raised by his maternal uncle. One day, he discovers a kind of oasis among his pastures - a vast underground garden reached by a cave recently opened. He has an adventure there, tastes a strange local fruit, & is finally chased out by giant guardians.

Ah - tasted the forbidden fruit! That stirs up memories of a past life when he was a king centuries ago, only he doesn't think it was in the past - he thinks he is the king now.

Thus begins the quest for his kingdom. He will find the kingdom, now in ruins. He will rule again, after making a deal with the Demon who will recreate the kingdom through sorcery. But he makes an incompetent king, & will finally be back to ruins after failing a deal he'd made with the demon...

Fact sheet.

First published: Weird Tales, December 1934.
Download full text from Eldrtich Dark.
[via John R Fultz]
Rating: B.
Related: Stories of Clark Ashton Smith.

Clark Ashton Smith's "Phoenix" (short story, free): Reigniting a dead sun

Several millennia back, sun suddenly cooled & died - "in a term of years historic rather than geologic." Earth is now a frozen world - even the air is frozen. Descendants of the few survivors, now numbering only thousands, live in vast underground caverns.

Someone gets the bright idea of reigniting the sun! Drop a few carefully chosen ancient nuclear bombs at strategic locations on the sun, hopefully restarting the old chain reactions!

Team of 6 that flies to sun to execute the project will die because of a technical error, but sun (& hence earth) are reborn.

See also.

1. Fritz Leiber's "A Pail of Air" (download text, MP3 reading, & MP3 of dramatization): A dark sun visiting Sol has stolen the earth, turning it into a frozen world as it moves away on its own path away from Sol.
2. Fred Hoyle & Geoffrey Hoyle's "Rockets in Ursa Major": Strategic bombing of sun so it would produce more deadly radiation to drive away the alien raiders of earth!
3. Hal Clement's "Half-Life": All life on earth is in crisis & is dying out, as if it's the natural end - a theme that briefly appears in "Phoenix" & is the starting point for the mad project of reigniting the sun.

Fact sheet.

First published: August Derleth (ed)'s "Time to Come" (anthology, 1954).
Download full text from Eldritch Dark.
Rating: A.
Related: Tuesday Classics; fiction from 1950s.

Free fiction: Short stories of Clark Ashton Smith

Large collection at Eldritch Dark.

"Wonder Stories", Vol 4 No 3 (August 1932) (magazine, free): Annotated table of contents

It's one of the Hugo Gernsback's magazines, & scans in CBR format are online at Crosseyed Cyclops.

Table of contents.

1. Richard Tooker's "Tyrant of the Red World": "With ruthless power he would dominate the ne world ... But from the depths of that eerie planet ..."
2. Clarke Ashton Smith's "Flight into Super-Time": "Facing each other, the two mechanical monstrosities from alien parts of the universe ..."
3. A Rowley Hilard's "The Space Coffin": "Suspended between heaven & earth, he saw the stars go wheeling by ..."
4. George B Beattie's 'The Platinum "Planets"': "The solar system he combed in search of that priceless relic ... & when he found it ..."
5. [serial - part 2 of 3] Otfrid von Hanstein's "In the Year 8000": "Mercilessly he opened the switch to pour destruction upon the helpless city. But than fate entered."