{"id":6645,"date":"2015-03-19T08:10:45","date_gmt":"2015-03-19T13:10:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=6645"},"modified":"2015-03-19T08:10:45","modified_gmt":"2015-03-19T13:10:45","slug":"the-view-from-outside","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=6645","title":{"rendered":"The View From Outside"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"post-title entry-title\"><a href=\"http:\/\/thearchdruidreport.blogspot.ca\/2015\/03\/the-view-from-outside_18.html\">The View From Outside<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>Recently I\u2019ve been reacquainting myself with the stories of Clark Ashton Smith. Though he\u2019s largely forgotten today, Smith was one of the leading lights of\u00a0<em>Weird Tales<\/em>\u00a0magazine during its 1930s golden age, ranking with H.P Lovecraft and Robert Howard as a craftsman of fantasy fiction. Like Lovecraft, Howard, and most of the other authors in the\u00a0<em>Weird Tales<\/em>\u00a0stable, Smith was an outsider; he spent his life in a small town in rural California; he was roundly ignored by the literary scene of his day, and returned the favor with gusto. With the twilight of the pulps, Smith\u2019s work was consigned to the dustbin of literary history.\u00a0\u00a0It was revived briefly during the fantasy boom of the 1970, only to sink from sight again when the fantasy genre drowned in a swamp of faux-medieval clich\u00e9s thereafter.<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s no shortage of reasons to give Smith another look today, starting with his mastery of image and atmosphere and the wry humor that shaped the best of his mature work. Still, that\u2019s a theme for another time, and possibly another forum. The theme that\u2019s relevant to this blog is woven into one of\u00a0\u00a0Smith\u2019s classic stories,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.eldritchdark.com\/writings\/short-stories\/35\/the-dark-age\">The Dark Age<\/a>. First published in 1938, it\u2019s among the earliest science fiction stories I know of that revolves around an organized attempt to preserve modern science through a future age of barbarism.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The View From Outside Recently I\u2019ve been reacquainting myself with the stories of Clark Ashton Smith. Though he\u2019s largely forgotten today, Smith was one of the leading lights of\u00a0Weird Tales\u00a0magazine during its 1930s golden age, ranking with H.P Lovecraft and Robert Howard as a craftsman of fantasy fiction. Like Lovecraft, Howard, and most of the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[4283,4282,341,1758,705,4281],"class_list":["post-6645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-barbarism","tag-dark-age","tag-future","tag-john-michael-greer","tag-science","tag-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6645"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6645\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6646,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6645\/revisions\/6646"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}