Leigh Brackett

“Lorelei of the Red Mist”

marzaatLeave a comment

This is kind of this week’s piece of weird fiction – several months ago. But I finally located the relevant volume in the numerous boxes of books from my “recent” move.

Review: “Lorelei of the Red Mist”, Ray Bradbury and Leigh Brackett, 1946, 1958.

Cover by Richard Powers

 The Science Fiction Encyclopedia says this story was first published in 1946 in Planet Stories and revised in 1953 and that seems the version I read. Supposedly, Bradbury finished this short novel for Brackett, and it dates from their first decade as published writers.

I suspect Brackett is the one, given her history of writing in multiple genres, for making this a mix of crime story, western, and historical tale. Given their later stories (in Brackett’s case I’m mostly basing this on the Science Fiction Encyclopedia entry for her) on a romantic Mars, it’s hard to say where all the startling, romantic (and, at times, erotic) decadent details of this version of Venus come from. 

The story starts out as a combination of crime story and western as hero Hugh Starke, a robber, is fleeing the agents of the Terra-Venus Mines, Incorporated after a heist. The western element comes as he draws near to the mysterious Mountains of White Cloud on Venus. His ship crashes there with a million credits of gold. 

He wakes up and knows he is dying. He sees a woman on a fur covered chair watching him. Her skin is very white, her dusted nipples are “pale-green”, and her hair and eyes are “sea-green”.  She tells him he is dying, but that he won’t die. He will reawaken in a new body and to not be afraid and let her mind guide him. 

He falls unconscious and then, when awakening, sees an image of the woman in his mind.  Again, she tells him he will not die but will awaken in a strange body and not to be afraid. He is laying on a bed of dirty straw. And he does have a new body, tall, muscular one quite unlike his original one which was stunted by malnutrition when young. He is glad to see it is at least a human body. Thus Bradbury and Brackett begin an interesting treatment of the bodyswitching theme. Though he curses the woman he saw, he has to admit he got the best of the trade. 

The room has lots of weapons on the wall and a fire in a fireplace. There are two men in the room with him. This is a disorienting scene for the reader as well as Starke as we learn more about them. One is a giant of a man, a superb physical specimen, very tall, and wearing only a leather kilt. He is scarred across the eyes and obviously blind. Starke knows that he was once a man who enjoyed life, women, and song and now feels the cruelty of pain and uselessness. The other is a “swamp-edger”, an albino with a harp. 

Outside the room are the sounds of battle. Then Starke realizes that he has a collar around his neck (he’s been chained before and served time in prison) and is chained to the floor. He has worn the collar long enough for it to gall his skin. A messenger from someone named Beudag says that they are still holding the Gate though the enemy has driven them back. 

Continue reading →

“Lost Sorceress of the Silent Citadel”

marzaatLeave a comment

This week’s piece of fiction being discussed by the Deep Ones over at LibraryThing isn’t really weird, but we cast our net wide. And the story is definitely worth reading.

Review: “Lost Sorceress of the Silent Citadel”, Michael Moorcock, 2002.

This one is a homage to Leigh Brackett, her hero Eric John Stark, and the lovely, romantic – but no longer fashionable – idea of a dying Mars and its aborigines.

In the introduction to the story in The Space Opera Renaissance, Moorcock talks about his admiration of Brackett and her influence on him and other prominent science fiction authors.

The story’s main strength is not its plot, but the back story of MacShard, Moorcock’s literary allusions, and the descriptions of this Mars.

MacShard is a loner, a survivor, an outlaw. Born of a human man and a Martian woman with the blood of kings in her veins, he was orphaned on Mercury and survived. There his name was Tan-Arz. He – along with Northwest Smith, Dumarest, and Eric John Stark – are the only four men who can wield the legendary Banning Weapon.

On Mars, a merchant prince named Morricone needs MacShard to rescue his daughter, kidnapped by the Thennet, degenerate humans descended from a ship of crashed politicians, who like to torment and then kill their victims. “The longer the torment, the sweater the meat.”

To do that, he will have to cross the Paradise zone of killer plants and venture into the hills of Mars.

Continue reading →

“Edmond Hamilton and Leigh Brackett”

marzaat5 Comments

Review: “Edmond Hamilton and Leigh Brackett: An Appreciation”, Brian Stableford, 1978, 1995.

Hamilton died in 1977 and Brackett died in 1978, and the occasion of this appreciation was the publication, by Del Rey, of best-of collections for both. 

Stableford notes they were the last of the writers who got their start in pulp science fiction, a tradition distinct from the one fostered by John W. Campbell. 

Stableford addresses the central problem that sf has in its fantasies. 

On the one hand, it pretends to believe the worlds it depicts could or might happen in a natural world. But the most exciting possibilities and imaginative concepts undercut the masquerade of plausibility an author has to create. 

A writer has two ways around this: stay with core ideas that can be most effectively disguised or “exchange subtlety for deliberate and flamboyant overstatement” – adopt a moody, token disguise that serves the purpose of the moment. 

Continue reading →

The House of Rumour

marzaat1 Comment

I was, in retrospect, too hard on this novel when I reviewed it on March 25, 2013. It’s better than I made it sound.

I’ve thought of it from time to time since then and fondly.

It also seems, in its way, comparable to Edward Whittemore’s Quin’s Shanghai Circus which I’ll be reviewing shortly. That’s why you get this retro review now.

Review: The House of Rumour: A Novel, Jake Arnott, 2013.

House of RumourIf you are under 40, like conspiracy theories, and don’t recognize two or more of the following names, you will probably want to read this book:

Ian Fleming, spy and novelist
Aleister Crowley, the “wickedest man alive”
Jack Parsons, rocket scientist and black magician
L. Ron Hubbard, novelist and messiah
Rudolph Hess, Nazi
Jim Jones, messiah
Nation of Islam, saucer cult

Arnott, in a narrative arranged thematically around the Tarot deck, gives us a secret history that ranges through most of the 20th Century and up to 2011 and back and forth in time from the death of a former MI5 employee and a transvestite hooker in 1987 to a cabal of 1941 science fiction writers in Los Angeles. Here many a character real and imagined have parts, but mostly it’s the story of the fictitious science fiction writer Larry Zagorski and the real Nazi Rudolph Hess. The supporting characters are more ideas and events than people: Hess’ flight to England, the Cuban Revolution, Scientology, black magic, saucer cults, monster movies, utopia and the moment – like a collapsing quantum wave function – the promise becomes disillusionment. And, through it all, is the unrequited love of Larry for a woman.

Part of me suspects that this sort of novel is written starting with a list of historical events and people and then a plot thought up for connecting all the characters and events. But that’s ok. The whole aesthetic of a good conspiracy theory comes from how the dots are linked and how many you work with. Continue reading →

The Ghost of a Review of White Mars

marzaatLeave a comment

Hindenburg

Oh, the humanity!

I know I promised a review of Brian Aldiss’ White Mars. I know I promised to compare it to Finches of Mars.

I just can’t. I just can’t make myself argue and list its politics. I just can’t talk about its literary values.

Two Martian utopias. Two bad Martian utopias. I just … I just can’t.

I can’t make myself go back. I can’t relive it.

Glimpses really. Just glimpses.

A consortium of Europeans, Asians, and the U.S. send a bunch of scientists and their aides to Mars to science and look for the Omega Smudge. Things collapse on Earth. A moving mountain shows up. A new consciousness arises in the Crusoe Martians. Time travelers show up.

I can steal.

I can steal others’ work.

This article says its a response to Kim Stanley Robinson and tells you its place in the history of 1990s works on Mars.

John Joseph Adams puts in the time line of Martian novels.

John Clute and David Pringle say it’s “narratively congested“.

I can let Paul Wesson, theoretical physicist, discuss its shortcomings.

I can’t do a review though.

I can rant.

About the cheap, teleological mysticism of stating the universe “needs consciousness  to fully exist”.

That environments are not “sacrosanct”. There’s no Big Man, Big Woman, Big Alien in the sky who sad so. Impersonal forces may punish your trashing of the environment, but no Cosmic Priest made that rule.

That particle physics is the only boring science there is.

That Aldiss indicts the “folklore of interplanetary” science fiction and names Edgar Rice Burroughs, Leigh Brackett, and Kim Stanley Robinson as co-conspirators.

That you can’t complain about nations being bad and yet think that local values should not be subsumed by global culture. Nations are what keep and preserves local values.

That the Martian society of no money still looks like it has something that does the same thing as money.

That the ending is as utterly implausible as H. G. Wells’ magic utopia-by-comet-gas In the Days of the Comet.

A MOVING SENTIENT MT. OLYMPUS!, Oh, excuse me, Chimborazo.

But I can not review this book.

I can be kind.

Aldiss and Penrose at least spare us the curse of most utopias — some smug person condescendingly saying “As you know, that’s always been a problem. But here …” (“Or you f’ing retard, of course it’s a problem!!)

A few characters are more than names.

I like the idea of ending universal suffrage.

I agree antibiotic resistance is a problem.

Women maybe would like to be alone for birthin’ those babies.

But I can not review this novel.

I can be a bureaucrat.

I can give you little bullet points for these two books:

  • Aliens: White Mars ludicrous, Fin … (oh, just F and M. My fingers don’t want to even make extra strokes for this book.) Anyway, plausible aliens for F.
  • Corrupt Institutions: W — all those countries, F — Universities and Colleges (Oh, sure Aldiss doesn’t seem to realize, at least in America, that both are perfect monopolies, jack up their costs above inflation, price fix, get the Feds to keep the student loans a’coming, and the bankruptcy laws to keep those payments from stoppin’)
  • Problems: yeah, climate change for both and the usual gripe about capitalism and not spending enough on education and welfare. (You might want to check out what the UK did with all those oil funds from the North Sea yet its underclass persists. Americans can check out the Kansas City experiments.)

But I can’t rant any and respond any more. These books will influence no minds anyway.

I can’t review this book.

I can write rotten doggerel about it but not a review.

I will not put it in a box.

I will not talk about it a lot.

I cannot join the refrain

When these Martians complain.

The characters are too many,

The crawling mountain too funny.

The talk of particles and sentience

Bored me, left me without patience.

Scientists get to play

While others have to pay

No god for Mars, but Mars a temple

Because red worship is so simple.

For God there is no apologetics,

But worship for Nature’s aesthetics.

 A Modern Utopia was nary so dull

Though its spine was crammed more full.

But I can not review Brian Aldiss’ and Roger Penrose’s White Mars from 1999.

 

Actual reviews of fantastic fiction are indexed by title and author/editor.