Articles with the Tag science fantasy

People of the Talisman – Leigh Brackett

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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.

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The Secret of Sinharat – Leigh Brackett

science fiction
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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.

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