Leigh Brackett Archives - Martin's Booklog

The Nemesis from Terra — Leigh Brackett

Published on January 18, 2015Leave a comment

Cover of The Nemesis from Terra

The Nemesis from Terra
Leigh Brackett
150 pages
published in 1961

One of the disadvantages of the exploration of the Solar System that got started up in the middle of the 1960s is that it destroyed the cozy picture science fiction had build up over the decades. Gone were the humid jungles of pulp Venus, the night and day sides of Mercury and of course most famously, the Martian channels and any hope that it may yet be a habitable planet. Though I was born well after the pulp sf ideas about the Solar System had been shown to be false, I still like reading about it, as long as it’s not some hideously reactionary re-imagination of it but the real deal. Leigh Brackett of course always satisfies and it’s no different here.

Rick Urquhart is space scum, kicked off his last ship’s crew for slugging the first mate and currently running away from the press gangs sweeping through the ancient Martian city of Ruh, looking for fresh bodies to use in the mines of the Terran Exploitations Company. When he stumbles into one Martian hidey hole, the old crone living in it, suggests she tells his future, to kill the time, hoping no more than to hypnotise Rick and shove him outside. Much to her surprise however she finds out his shadow will hang over Mars unless she kills him now. Rick struggles and kills her, then flees only to run into another press gang. For somebody prophesied to be the new ruler of Mars, he has remarkable little luck…

As Rick is stewing in the mines, he keeps looking out for chances to escape to fullfill his destiny to rule Mars, which is how he interprets the crone’s prediction. He’s not the only one: his killing of her is the catalyst for a Martian uprising. For the first time, the city states stand as one in a conspiracy to throw the Terran Exploitations Company off Mars, preferably with all other humans. And they’re not the only ones after the TEC: there’s also the Union Party, full of Terran do gooders wanting to raise the Martian living standard and make it an independent planet. One of them, Mayo McCall, has infiltrated the TEC and is present when Rick tries to escape.

Her cover is blown in the attempt and she and Rick flee into the mine tunnels, in the most harrowing part of the novel. Pursued by the company’s watch dogs they move deeper and deeper into the mine, coming out in the tunnels dug by one of Mars’ natural tunnellers, a giant worm like creature, whose carcass they have to move through to get to the surface. More dead than alive they reach another of Mars many half ruined cities, where Rick and Mayo are looked after by Kyra, one of the last surviving members of an ancient Martian race. These tend to crop up a lot in Brackett’s work.

Meanwhile, TEC’s second in command, Jaffa Storm, has taken over the company and crushed the first Martian rebellion, but not before Rick had been taken prisoner by them and tortured on behalf of the son of the woman he’d killed. With the leaders of the rebellion now dead and Rick’s destiny still playing in the back of his head, he persuades Mayo and Kyra to help him organise a new one, using Mayo’s contacts in the Union Party, his own among the spacer community as well as the indigenous Martians, already organised. Together they beat TEC, but Storm escapes while Rick is betrayed. It all comes to a climax in the abandoned city of yet another Martian race as Rick has to chose between power and love…

The Nemesis from Earth started out as “Shadow over Mars”, originally printed in the Fall 1944 Startling Stories. With such a pulp background it’s no surprise it packs a lot of action in its 150 pages, with the characters being a bit twodimensional. What is surprising though is the relative sophistication of the politics. This is no simplistic story of heroic natives rising up against an exploitative company; the Martians have their faults, TEC itself has some good points and the Union Party is willing to use realpolitik to achieve its goals. It’s all rooted in a mid twentieth century understanding of colonial politics; it could’ve been set in an African or Central American country except, you know, for the mind powers and such.

In the end The Nemesis from Terra is a minor Brackett story, not as refined or interesting as her later Mars stories. But it’s a quick read and the action is fat enough to keep your attention.

The Halfling and other Stories — Leigh Brackett

Published on July 31, 20111 Comment

The Halfling and other Stories

The Halfling and other Stories
Leigh Brackett
351 pages
published in 1973

The Halfling and Other Stories is the sixth book I’ve read in the Year of Reading Women challenge I set myself after I’d noticed last year how few female written science fiction books I read. I had chosen this because it was something I hadn’t read before and I always liked Brackett. Unfortunately it turned out this was one of her lesser collections. The stories don’t fit well together, there’s no real theme to the collection and some are decidedly on the weak side.

It doesn’t help that the first two stories are basically the same. In both there’s the hardbitten protagonist falling for a mysterious beautiful alien girl who he knows is trouble yet can’t help himself but get involved with, who then turns out to be evil. Worse, in both stories this girl is shown to be representative of her race, their evil part of their biology. It’s a bit …uncomfortable… shall we say, but unfortunately these sort of assumptions are build into the kind of planetary romances Leigh Brackett wrote.

As a genre planetary romance has always been a bit dodgy, an evolutionary offshoot of the Africa adventure story, with a lot of the same racist and colonial assumptions build in. So you have cringing Gandymedian natives, mysterious jungles and alien drums, crazed halfbreeds and all those other tropes recycled from Tarzan. Just because the native races are now Martian or Venusian and coloured green or red instead of black or yellow doesn’t make the assumptions behind them any less racist. There’s still the idea that the various alien races encountered have existential qualities that each and every member of such a race shares. Leigh Brackett is usually better than this, with those tropes present in her stories but never this blatant as in these first two stories. Her writing style and sense of atmosphere are still present, but the execution is pedestrian, unlike the Eric John Stark story also present.

It isn’t all planetary romance in this collection. In fact most of the stories here are rather classic sf puzzle stories, something I don’t really associate with Brackett. These stories are okay, but nothing special. The same goes for the whole collection. There aren’t any bad stories in here, but apart from Enchantress of Venus, the lone Stark story, there’s nothing really outstanding here either. Something for the completists.

The Halfling (1943)
A beautiful alien dancer joins John Greene’s circus. And then the murders start…
The Dancing Girl of Ganymede (1950)
A Terran adventurer down on his luck rescues a strange dancing girl from her would be assassins; his native helper does not like this. Only when he meets her brothers does he realises what a mistake he made…
The Citadel of Lost Ages (1950)
A twentieth century New Yorker is ressurrected in the far future, once the Earth has stopped revolving around its axis and the mutated people from the nightside reign over the Earth…
All the Colors of the Rainbow (1957)
One of the better stories in the collection, this tale of two funny coloured alien visitors lost in an unreconstructed Southern town is not very subtle, but it is interesting to see a science fiction story of this vintage openly treating racism.
The Shadows (1952)
A small expedition lands on a newly discovered planet and finds the ruins of the once dominant intelligent species that lived there, but who killed them? And what does their disappereance have to do with the strange shadows that start to hang around the expedition?
Enchantress of Venus (1949)
An Eric John Stark story and the best in the anthology, as Stark comes to a half legendary city on the edge of the Venusian ocean in search of revenge. Leigh Brackett’ s pulpish stylings are always at their best when she’s doing a Stark story and this holds up with the best of them.
The Lake of the Gone Forever (1949)
His father came back half mad from the planet Iskar, now Rand Conway is back to see the terrible secret his father left behind — and get rich exploiting it.
The Truants (1950)
When Hugh Sherwin’s daugher and other children start skipping school to play with the “angels” and their “spaceship” in the forest on Sherwin’s land, he’s determined to get to the bottom of this. What he finds surprises him, though perhaps not the reader.

The Sword of Rhiannon — Leigh Brackett

Published on June 6, 20111 Comment

Cover of The Sword of Rhiannon

The Sword of Rhiannon
Leigh Brackett
141 pages
published in 1953

You may think you don’t know Leigh Brackett or read any of her stories, but you’re wrong. If you think The Empire Strikes Back is the best of the real Star Wars movies, you have her to thank for it, as she wrote the original screenplay, just before she died. This is no fluke either, as her screen writing career is almost as old as her science fiction career. She started off on The Big Sleep together with William Faulkner and has worked on other well known movies like Rio Bravo and The Long Goodbye. And with her long She knew her way around a film script; combine that with her long experience writing science fantasy for pulp magazines like Planet Stories and you know why Empire is so much better than any of the other Star Wars movies.

If you liked Empire than the good news is that Leigh Brackett is even better when working on her own stories. Though she wrote other science fiction, she’s best known for writing planetary romances (or science fantasy) in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Her best stories are set on the Mars of Burroughs and dozens of pulp imitators, a dying world turned into a worldwide desert as its seas dried up, with a highly evolved but degenerated civilisation clinging to life through an elaborate system of canals, now turned into a new version of the Western frontier as Terran adventurers and never do wells come to try their luck. Brackett’s Mars is more than just a pulp adventure setting though. Her best stories leave you with a sense of melancholy and loss, perhaps nowhere more so than in The Sword of Rhiannon, “a hymn to the lost past of a Mars that never was” as Nicola Griffith put it in her introduction to a recent reissue.

People of the Talisman – Leigh Brackett

Published on May 4, 2009

Cover of The People of the Talisman

The People of the Talisman
Leigh Brackett
126 pages
published in 1964

This is the flipside of the same Ace Double that also had The Secret of Sinharat, again starring Leigh Brackett’s greatest hero, Eric John Stark. It’s the longest of the two novels, a whole 126 pages long and a reworking of an earlier story Brackett wrote for the pulp magazine Planet Stories as Black Amazon of Mars. I found it to be slightly less immediately engaging as The Secret of Sinharat, but that’s only a minor quibble.

Interestingly enough, the opening of the story is the same as in the other tale: Eric John Stark is on the run from his enemies, but this time he’s with a friend, the thief Camar. They’re riding through the northern polar wastes of Mars attempting to reach Camar’s home city Kushat before he dies of his wounds. When it becomes clear he isn’t going to make it, he tells Stark of his secret shame, having stolen the Talisman that kept his city safe from the barbarian tribes roaming the wastelands and forces Stark to swear to return this talisman, which is hidden in Camar’s belt. Holding this belt to his head, Stark hears strange voices coming from it.

The Secret of Sinharat – Leigh Brackett

Published on May 2, 20091 Comment

Cover of The Secret of Sinharat

The Secret of Sinharat
Leigh Brackett
94 pages
published in 1964

Back when I was twelve I discovered a novel starring a brave Earthman transported to ancient Mars, a dying world of grand canals and encrouching deserts, populated by noble and barbarian races slowly sinking in decadence. I’m of course talking about Leigh Brackett’s pulp Mars stories rather than Edgar Rice Burroughs Barsoom series, which I never read until much later. But that Leigh Brackett novel was my first exposure to both Brackett and that grand pulp idea of a dying Mars filled with ancient secrets and half forgotten ruins of a greater past. To this day I still like Brackett better than Burroughs, not just I encountered her first, but because she’s the better writer.

If Leigh Brackett sounds familiar but you’re sure you’ve never read any of her stories, it might just be because you remember her name from the credits of The Empire Strikes Back, the second and best Star Wars novel. You see, apart from writing some of the best pulp science fiction ever, Brackett also had a long and distinguished career as a Hollywood script writer, working on such movies like The Big Sleep, Rio Bravo and The Long Goodbye. But it’s her science fantasy I like best.

Science fantasy is that subgenre of science fiction that has all the trappings of science fiction, –aliens, other planets, blasters and aircars — but which actually read a lot like sword and sorcery in disguise, with strapping barbarian heroes fighting degenerate warlocks using superscience of an earlier age that they barely understand. It’s very romantic, not very plausible or much concerned with realistic science. Science fiction in that grand pulp tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs. And like Burroughs had his John Carter, Brackett has Eric John Stark, the outlaw with a twenty year Moonprison sentence on his head, raised by a strange non-human tribe on Mercury, (in)famous on three planets as a barbarian and renegade, but also as a man with his own code of honour.