Leigh Brackett (1915–1978)

This collection features planetary romances set on Venus and Mars, with a few that are set on Earth, where the aliens come to us. Brackett’s main characters—disillusioned losers, loners, anti-heroes—have inner lives, fears and desires, often broken dreams, and behave altruistically despite themselves, giving these stories depth and making them a cut above most pulp SF I’ve read.

I’m no stranger to Brackett’s fiction, having been a fan for a number of years – ever since reading the collection, Sea-Kings of Mars, in the Fantasy Masterworks series, in fact. The stories in that collection are not fantasy, of course. But Sea-Kings of Mars was not the only book in the Fantasy Masterworks series that was actually science fiction. There are ten stories in The Best of Leigh Brackett, and they’re all, well, typical Brackett. Some I had read before. They’re set on show more planets and moons of the Solar System which share names with the planets and moons we know but otherwise bear no resemblance – Mars is a desert world, inhabited by ancient dying races; Venus is a jungle world, also, er, inhabited by dying ancient races; the moons of Jupiter are inhabited; as is Mercury… In fact, Brackett pretty much turned every planet and moon on the Solar System into the sort of exotic location used in a Humphrey Bogart movie. It’s always the same – a dying race, a dead culture, a degraded society, and a jaded hero from Earth – pretty much always the US – who overcomes local taboos and superstitions to win the prize. It’s pure Hollywood, so it’s no surprise Brackett worked extensively in movies, her best-known scripts being Rio Bravo (my favourite western) and The Empire Strikes Back. Leigh Brackett and CL Moore were female pioneers in sf – not the only ones, by any means, and it could be argued Gertrude Barrows Bennett was more of a pioneer – but Moore and Brackette were big names in the genre fiction back in the 1940s, and while their style of science fiction is no longer popular, there’s no doubt they were very good at what they did. Perhaps too good, in some respects – some of stories in The Best of Leigh Brackett are dismayingly misogynist. It’s nothing unusual when you compare it to, say, EE ‘Doc’ Smith (it continues to amuse me that ‘Doc’ is always presented in quotes), but I’d expected better of Bracket – and she has indeed done better in other stories. Despite the title, The Best of Leigh Brackett does not contain any of her more celebrated stories, except perhaps ‘The Jewel of Bas’ – but since those stories appear in plenty of other Brackett collections, that’s to its advantage. I’d also dispute the stories here were her best – I thought the aforementioned Sea-Kings of Mars a better selection. Nonetheless, Brackett is always worth reading. show less

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The Long Tomorrow reminds me of the excellent The Wild Shore, Kim Stanley Robinson’s debut. Both a coming of age story about a boy, both set in a rural America decades after nuclear annihilation, with knowledge of the past not forgotten but not completely understood either. And like Robinson’s, Brackett’s characters ponder questions about which life is better: tech city life with its destructive dangers, or primitive small town farming? Like Robinson, Brackett doesn’t give show more answers. Instead she focuses on the desire of some humans for knowledge and change, and the fear of it in others.

The characters ostensibly dualistic archetypes on these matters, Brackett manages to turn things on their heads, and keeps the reader engaged with main characters that transcend the binary. There are other themes too: family, educating children, religion as a product and a source of societal change, the brazen arrogance and naivety of youth, and the non-existence of free will.

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Full review on Weighing A Pig show less

Leigh Brackett's golden age planetary romances are some of the most enjoyable science fiction adventure stories ever written. In the later Skaith trilogy, here bound as a single volume, she revived her character Eric John Stark, a "mercenary specializing in the small wars of remote peoples fighting for survival against stronger opponents" (466). The original stories had Stark, "an Earthman out of Mercury," on Brackett's Barsoom-like Mars, but here he is set in the expanded context of a show more Galactic Union, and the three books detail his exploits on the planet Skaith, which lies outside the Union. Readers who enjoyed the earlier stories are pretty much conscripted by the author into whatever retconning will make Skaith follow Mars.

Skaith is a largely exhausted planet under a declining star, and the story here thus partakes of the atmosphere and contents of the "Dying Earth" subgenre, without actually being set on Earth. The human natives of Skaith have thrown off mutated branches to cope with the changes to their world, but they never achieved space travel, and are still mostly isolated from the interstellar comity. The senescent cultures of Skaith include human sacrifice, cannibalism, suicide cults, and other sanctioned depravities, but the largest political and economic organization consists of the government of Wandsmen, administrators under the semi-mythical Lords Protector, who use mercenary troops to maintain order in the cities of the planet's fertile belt, while organizing subsistence for the great masses of "Farers" -- hippy vagrants who form destructive mobs at the behest of the Wandsmen.

The positing of the Wandsmen and Farers as the villains in this tale seems to insert something like an Objectivist right-wing political morality into the narrative, but the heroes from the Galactic Union have a left-heroic ambience: the guerilla revolutionary Stark, and his mentor the technocratic diplomat Ashton. The culpability of the Lords Protector consists of their narrow vision and refusal to allow the possibility of outside assistance to undermine their inherited power.

The book club edition I read was cheaply made, and otherwise offered the following features of note: Each of the three component books begins with a beautiful little map of the portion of Skaith in which most of its action takes place. The artist for these is uncredited. The dust jacket art by Don Maitz is not so commendable. It depicts what was intended to be a terrifying Northhound as an outsized puppy with bared teeth, and makes the black Stark look like a tanned white man. (To be fair, he's downright pale in most of the paperback cover art for the books.) The imperturable seeress Gerrith -- who wasn't present for that scene in the book -- is shown as a frightened girl. There is also a "Guide to Characters and Locale" as an appendix, which seems quite superfluous, and has the tone of notes made by Brackett in her original drafting of the story. It might have been useful as an appendix to the second or third book if read separately from the first.

Reading The Ginger Star, The Hounds of Skaith and The Reavers of Skaith in a single go is certainly the way to enjoy them. Each of the first two arrives at a point of dramatic resolution, but with nothing like an overall success or failure of Stark's mission on Skaith. They read quickly: Brackett is an efficient and effective storyteller. But the mood of decline pervades them, whether rooted in the mid-1970s atmosphere of the US (palpable in some instances), the fact that Brackett's brilliant pulp efforts were long behind her, or simply the chosen scenario of a planet circling closer to its demise. They don't quite measure up to her earlier Martian and Venusian yarns. Still, an imaginative reader can relish many of the characters, scenes, and episodes offered here. show less