Clark Ashton Smith Review: The God of the Asteroid

This is another of Smith’s stories that follow his formula of someone vanishing but later a document is discovered that explains what happened.

“The God of the Asteroid” is set in 2030, looking back to first manned rocket to the asteroid belt in 1980. By 1980, “a dozen voyages had been made to Mars.” Unfortunately, the colony of astronauts in the Mars base began to experience psychological issues being so far from home.

A group of three astronauts abandoned Mars for the moons of Jupiter. However, midflight, one of the astronauts calculated that their fuel would run out about midway through their journey.

Smith wasn’t a physicist and before WWII, most readers wouldn’t have considered that in frictionless space, unless you change your course over and over or accelerate and decelerate, you don’t use fuel.

NASA launched Voyager II in 1977. It flew by Jupiter decades ago, finally escaped the Sun’s heliosphere in 2018, and is still flying at 35,000 mph. It’s in no danger of using up all it’s fuel because it isn’t using any now.

Well, I think I exhausted that tangent. After fuel runs out and two of the astronauts die violent deaths, the ship crashes on an asteroid, leaving the single survivor trapped.

In a reverse “Abominations of Yondo,” strange aliens parade to the crashed ship, worshipping the Earth man as a god. Finally, a deadly new alien arrives, ending the human worship for good.

As with most of Smith’s stories of this type, the introduction is written in third-person but switches to first-person when the explanation for the disappearance begins. This gives Smith the opportunity for the best of both worlds although this story doesn’t deliver like “City of the Singing Flame” (wow, that’s two links to the same story in a single post!)

“The God of the Asteroid” ends like Lovecraft’s “The Haunter of the Dark” with an tentacled monstrosity coming through the ship’s window with the astronaut continuing to write about it.

Monty Python mocked the whole write-until-death scenario in Holy Grail with “Castle of Aaargh,” but in fairness, it’s a standard of horror stories anymore.

Ray Bradbury was a great fan of this story but Smith himself was less enthusiastic. It’s not bad but largely is a rehash of elements of Smith’s older works.