Northwest Smith

Some of C. L. Moore's earliest stories, all but one from Weird Tales between 1933 and 1936. These hardly strike me as being science fiction anymore. We now know so much more about Mars, Venus, and the moons of Jupiter as real places that these places in Northwest Smith's universe can seem no more that the stuff of dreams. That said, it does not really detract much from the stories, which are very much stories of dream states and epic battles fought in dreams.
I fell in love with C. L. Moore's writing years ago reading No Woman Born. The writing here is not in the same league with that, but is still engaging. In the earlier stories, I detected Lovecraftian elements: over-the-top, non-concrete descriptios of horror (and beauty); oblique hints about ancient gods and strange geometries recalling the Cthulhu Mythos. Doing a little research, I discover why. In 1935, Moore was one of a group of writers in the Weird Tales group that contributed to a round robin story in the Cthulhu Mythos titled The Challenge from Beyond, published in September, 1935 issue of Fantasy Magazine.
The stories tend to be formulaic: our anti-hero encounters one or more exquisite femme fatales in a mind-numbingly exotic locale, falls into an epic, sexually tinged dream state battle with the otherworldly being running the show, and either triumphs or escapes by dumb luck. This is not a spoiler. The end of the journey is not a suprise. There are other stories later on in the book. It is the journey that is important. We are in it for the ride. And, generally, the ride is pretty entertaining. Nothing is quite as it seems.