: As for Smith and Lovecraft...saying the Spider Queen and Skrael were
: "borrowed" is something of a stretch, because those concepts are
: fairly generic...except when you take into account the rest of the Unholy
: Trinity borrowings. In that light, then yeah, it’s pretty viable.
Yes, I've no doubt that those concepts descended through Ashton/Lovecraft/Howard...but as you say, they became such staples of fantasy thereafter that it's hard to tell whether they were borrowed directly from those authors or just taken from the genre as a whole. Just as hundreds of of budding fantasists will write elves as tall, wise and beautiful without consciously copying Tolkien, because hey, that's just what elves are supposed to be now.
: (I'm right now reading Smith's "Poseidonis," and have finished an
: interesting tale about a relic from the age of the lizard guys...)
I always halfway wanted to do a far future/far past/dreamworld Myth conversion based on that stuff. But only halfway, because I could never get past their themes being so un-Mythy...the survival of humanity (or a specific human society) just isn't the point. You wouldn't see Conan or Malygris or Randolph Carter conducting a war for the fate of the world. Still, there oughta be a way. Maybe for Myth IV, or Phoenix.
--SiliconDream
