Background of Study
Introduction:
Leigh Brackett was born and grew up in Los Angeles, California. On December 31, 1946, at age 31, she married Edmond Hamilton in San Gabriel, CA, and moved with him to Kinsman, Ohio. She died in 1978.
Brackett was first published in her mid-twenties. Her first published science fiction story was “Martian Quest”, which appeared in the February 1940 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Her earliest years as a writer (1940-1942) were her most productive in numbers of stories written; however, these works show a writer still mastering her craft. The first of her science fiction stories still attempt to emphasize a quasi-scientific angle, with problems resolved by an appeal to the (usually imaginary) chemical, biological, or physical laws of her invented worlds. As Brackett became more comfortable as an author, this element receded and was replaced by adventure stories with a strong touch of fantasy. Occasional stories have social themes, such as “The Citadel of Lost Ships” (1943), which considers the effects on the native cultures of alien worlds of Earth’s expanding trade empire.
Brackett’s first novel, No Good from a Corpse, published in 1944, was a hard-boiled mystery novel in the tradition of Raymond Chandler. This led to her first major screenwriting assignment. At the same time, though, Brackett’s science fiction stories were becoming more ambitious. Shadow Over Mars (1944) was her first novel-length science fiction story, and though still somewhat rough-edged, marked the beginning of a new style, strongly influenced by the characterization of the 1940s detective story and film noir. Brackett’s heroes from this period are tough, two-fisted, semi-criminal, ill-fated adventurers. Shadow’s Rick Urquhart (reputedly modelled on Humphrey Bogart’s shadier film characters) is a ruthless, selfish space drifter, who just happens to be caught in a web of political intrigue that accidentally places the fate of Mars in his hands.
In 1946, the same year that Brackett married science fiction author Edmond Hamilton, Planet Stories published the novella “Lorelei of the Red Mist”. Brackett only finished the first half before turning it over to Planet Stories’ other acclaimed author, Ray Bradbury, so that she could leave to work on The Big Sleep. “Lorelei”‘s main character is an out-and-out criminal, a thief called Hugh Starke. Though the story was well concluded by Bradbury, Brackett seems to have felt that her ideas in this story were insufficiently addressed, as she returns to them in later stories—particularly “Enchantress of Venus” (1949).
Brackett returned from her break from science-fiction writing, caused by her cinematic endeavors, in 1948. From then on to 1951, she produced a series of science fiction adventure stories that were longer, more ambitious, and better written than her previous work. To this period belong such classic representations of her planetary settings as “The Moon that Vanished” and the novel-length Sea-Kings of Mars (1949), later published as The Sword of Rhiannon, a vivid description of Mars before its oceans evaporated.
With “Queen of the Martian Catacombs” (1949), Brackett found for the first time a character that she cared to return to. Eric John Stark is sometimes compared to Robert E. Howard’s Conan, but is in many respects closer to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan or Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli. Stark, an orphan from Earth, is raised by the semi-sentient aboriginals of Mercury, who are later killed by Earthmen. He is saved from the same fate by a Terran official, who adopts Stark and becomes his mentor. When threatened, however, Eric John Stark frequently reverts to the primitive N’Chaka, the “man without a tribe” that he was on Mercury. Thus, Stark is the archetypical modern man—a beast with a thin veneer of civilization. From 1949 to 1951, Stark (whose name obviously echoes that of the hero in “Lorelei”) appeared in three tales, all published in Planet Stories; the aforementioned “Queen”, “Enchantress of Venus”, and finally “Black Amazon of Mars”. With this last story, Brackett’s period of writing high adventure ended.
Brackett’s stories thereafter adopted a more elegiac tone. They no longer celebrated the conflicts of frontier worlds, but lamented the passing away of civilizations. The stories now concentrated more upon mood than on plot. The reflective, retrospective nature of these stories is indicated in the titles: “The Last Days of Shandakor”; “Shannach — the Last”; “Last Call from Sector 9G”.
Literature Review
This last story was published in the very last issue (Summer 1955) of Planet Stories, always Brackett’s most reliable market for science fiction. With the disappearance of Planet Stories and, later in 1955, of Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories, the market for Brackett’s brand of story dried up, and the first phase of her career as a science fiction author ended. A few other stories trickled out over the next decade, and old stories were revised and published as novels. A new production of this period was one of Brackett’s most critically acclaimed science fiction novels, The Long Tomorrow (1955). This novel describes an agrarian, deeply technophobic society that develops after a nuclear war.
But most of Brackett’s writing after 1955 was for the more lucrative film and television markets. In 1963 and 1964, she briefly returned to her old Martian milieu with a pair of stories; “The Road to Sinharat” can be regarded as an affectionate farewell to the world of “Queen of the Martian Catacombs”, while the other – with the intentionally ridiculous title of “Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon” – borders on parody.
After another hiatus of nearly a decade, Brackett returned to science fiction in the seventies with the publication of The Ginger Star (1974), The Hounds of Skaith (1974), and The Reavers of Skaith (1976), collected as The Book of Skaith in 1976. This trilogy brought Eric John Stark back for adventures upon the extrasolar planet of Skaith (rather than his old haunts of Mars and Venus).
Most of Brackett’s science fiction can be characterized as space opera or planetary romance. Almost all of her planetary romances take place within a common invented universe, the Leigh Brackett Solar System, which contains richly detailed fictional versions of the consensus Mars and Venus of science fiction in the 1930s–1950s. Mars thus appears as a marginally habitable desert world, populated by ancient, decadent, and mostly humanoid races; Venus as a primitive, wet jungle planet, occupied by vigorous, primitive tribes and reptilian monsters. Brackett’s Skaith combines elements of Brackett’s other worlds with fantasy elements.
The fact that the settings of Brackett’s stories range from a rocket-crowded interplanetary space to the superstitious backwaters of primitive or decadent planets allows her a great deal of scope for variation in style and subject matter. In a single story, Brackett can veer from space opera to hard-boiled detective fiction to Western to the borders of Celtic-inspired fantasy. Brackett cannot, therefore, be easily classified as a Sword and planet science fantasy writer; though swords and spears may show up in the most primitive regions of her planets, guns, blasters and electric-shock generators are more common weapons.
Though the influence of Edgar Rice Burroughs is apparent in Brackett’s Mars stories, the differences between their versions of Mars are great. Brackett’s Mars is set firmly in a world of interplanetary commerce and competition, and one of the most prominent themes of Brackett’s stories is the clash of planetary civilizations; the stories both illustrate and criticize the effects of colonialism on civilizations which are either older or younger than those of the colonizers, and thus they have relevance to this day. Burroughs’ heroes set out to remake entire worlds according to their own codes; Brackett’s heroes (often anti-heroes) are at the mercy of trends and movements far bigger than they are.[1]
Screenwriter
Shortly after Brackett broke into science fiction writing, she also wrote her first screenplays. Hollywood director Howard Hawks was so impressed by her novel No Good from a Corpse that he had his secretary call in “this guy Brackett” to help William Faulkner write the script for The Big Sleep (1946).[2] The film, starring Humphrey Bogart and written by Brackett, William Faulkner, and Jules Furthman, is considered one of the best movies ever made in the genre. However, after her marriage, Brackett took a long break from screenwriting.
When she returned to screenwriting in the mid-1950s, she wrote for both TV and movies. Howard Hawks hired her to write or co-write several John Wayne pictures, including Rio Bravo (1959), Hatari! (1962), El Dorado (1966) and Rio Lobo (1970). Because of her background with The Big Sleep, Robert Altman hired her to write his deconstruction of Raymond Chandler’s stories, The Long Goodbye (1973).
The Empire Strikes Back
Brackett worked on the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back. The movie won the Hugo Award in 1981. This script was a departure for Brackett, since until then, all of her science fiction had been in the form of novels and short stories.
The exact role which Brackett played in writing the script for Empire is the subject of some dispute. What is agreed on by all is that George Lucas asked Brackett to write the screenplay based on his story outline. It is also known that Brackett wrote a finished first draft which was delivered to Lucas shortly before Brackett’s death from cancer on March 18, 1978. The screenplay was revised for filming by Lucas and Lawrence Kasdan, and both Brackett and Kasdan (though not Lucas) were given credit for the final script.
Many reviewers believed that they could detect traces of Brackett’s influence in both the dialogue and the treatment of the space opera genre in Empire.[3] However, Laurent Bouzereau, in his book Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays, states that Lucas disliked the direction of Brackett’s screenplay and discarded it. He then produced two screenplays before turning the results over to Kasdan, who did not work directly with Brackett’s script at all. By this scenario, Lucas’ assignment of credit to Brackett was a mere courtesy or mark of respect for the work she had done during her illness.[4] Support for this view comes from Stephen Haffner, owner of the press that printed Martian Quest: The Early Brackett, who has read Brackett’s script, and claims that—outside Lucas’ storyline—nothing of Brackett’s personal contributions survives in the finished movie.
Brackett’s screenplay has never been published. According to Haffner, it can be read at the library of the Eastern New Mexico University in Portales, New Mexico, but may not be copied or borrowed off-site.
“Black Amazon Of Mars” was the last Eric John Stark adventure Leigh Brackett published until 1974 (The Ginger Star, being the first volume of the Book Of Skaith trilogy), though it appears to occur before the 1949 Stark novella “Enchantress Of Venus” (review forthcoming), and also before the unpublished-until-2005 novella “Stark And The Star Kings,” which was written in 1973 (review also forthcoming). This is mostly because Stark is still on Mars in the story, which is where we left him at the end of “Queen Of The Martian Catacombs”/The Secret Of Sinharat. He’s made his way from the deserts of the Drylands up into the snowy expanses of the Norlands. There’s no pickup from the previous story, but we’re informed that Stark has been carrying on guerrilla warfare with some of the Dryland barbarian tribes featured in the previous story, and a few times he mentions he’s been to Valkis – whereas it was made clear in Sinharat that it was his first time visiting that Martian city.
When we meet up with Stark this time he’s in the rugged, snowy expanses of north Mars, on his way to the sequestered kingdom of Kushat along with a Martian friend named Camar. But Camar is dying, presumably from wounds in the guerrilla fighting. Camar is from Kushat, and apparently only a few people have ever left the city. Camar actually fled, having stolen the sacred Talisman of Ban Cruach, a Martian who saved Kushat around a million years ago, taking some sort of power from the Gates of Death, ie the unexplored, hellish region which looms beyond Kushat, the titular “Gates” being a pass through the black mountains outside the city. The talisman is a lens in a leather boss that Camar has hidden on his belt; Stark vows to take the talisman on to Kushat, as a favor to his dying friend.
But there’s more to the talisman than meets the eye; when Stark exploringly puts it on his forehead, he sees visions that appear to come from Ban Cruach’s actual experiences, all those millennia ago. The talisman is the fabled protector of Kushat; whatever it was that Ban Cruach found out there, the promise was that if ever Kushat was in trouble, the talisman would provide its people with the means of overcoming it. Given this, Kushat has never been conquered, and the superstitious Martians have given it wide birth. Now, without its protective talisman, the city is unprotected.
Posthaste Stark is captured by “the riders of Mekh,” a barbarian tribe that roams the wilds outside Kushat. They take his few belongings – a recurring bit is that Stark is basically penniless everytime we meet him – but leave the cheap belt which was once Camar’s, and now rests on Stark’s waist, because it looks so worn and worthless. The barbarians take Stark to their leader, a badass warrior in black armor, who wields a black war axe and wears a black mask that appears to be inspired by samurai armor:
His head and face were covered by a thing that Stark had seen before only in very old paintings – the ancient war-mask of the inland Kings of Mars. Wrought of black and gleaming steel, it presented an unhuman visage of slitted eyeholes and a barred slot for breathing. Behind, it sprang out in a thin, soaring sweep, like a dark wing edge-on in flight.
This is the Lord Ciaran, ruler of the riders of Mekh, on his way to sack Kushat – something that’s never been attempted at this time of year, where it seems to be a gentleman’s agreement that no battles will be waged in the dead of winter. The expansion features a big gaffe of omission – sitting by Ciaran is an old pile of rags named Otar, a crazed old runaway from Kushat, and he is not introduced in the expansion as he is in the novella. Yet Stark abruptly refers to him by name. Clearly Brackett (or was it her husband Edmond Hamilton who did the ghostwriting for the expansion?) overlooked the fact that she’d edited out his intro from the novella. Not that it matters; Otar eventually disappears from both the novel and the novella.
One thing fixed up in the expansion is that here no one promptly assumes Stark has the talisman, as they do in the novella – they just demand to know if Stark knows where it is. He’s strung up on a rack and whipped, but breaks free thanks to his Tarzan-like abilities, getting the jump on some riders who think he’s passed out. He takes up a spear and lays into his captors – “He killed, and was happy.” Stark escapes on one of those lizardlike “mounts” which Brackett has yet to describe, and gradually loses the Mekh riders, ending up in Kushat.
This is another of those fallen Martian cities, though not so depraved as Valkis was in the earlier story. No one believes Stark’s story that barbarian riders are about to storm the wall that surrounds Kushat, and he also soon discovers that the rulers of Kushat are lying to their people that the Talisman of Ban Cruach is still here. A waif-like girl from the Thieves’s Quarter named Thanis argues with young soldier Lugh and company compander Lord Rogain(!) that she be given responsibility for Stark, as they plan to throw him in prison for his “lies.” Thanis takes Stark back to her apartment in the Quarter, which she shares with her brother Balin.
The Secret Of Sinharat that some of Stark’s bad-assery had been whittled out, in the transition from novella to novel. The same thing happens here; to put it plainly, Stark gets laid in “Black Amazon Of Mars,” but he doesn’t in People Of The Talisman. This is due to the character revision Thanis experiences; in the novella she’s a sultry vixen who promptly throws herself on Stark, referring to him lovingly as “animal” afterwards, yet in the novel she is much more naïve and innocent, and has what amounts to a big brother sort of love for Stark.
The magazine Planet Stories was published from 1939 to 1955. It specialized in stories known as planetary romances, tales that focused on the exotic setting of another world rather than on the science of getting there. The magazine never appeared in my house while I was growing, which is too bad, because from what I have seen, I would have enjoyed it. I suspect that my dad, who subscribed to Analog and Galaxy, liked a little more rigor in his science fiction; I also suspect that the lurid covers would not have met with my mother’s approval.
Eric John Stark: Outlaw of Mars
The book Eric John Stark: Outlaw of Mars is pretty much the old Ace Double from 1964 printed in a traditional single cover format, with only the table of contents indicating that the volume contains two separate works. The volume does not have a very compelling cover, especially compared to those that appeared on the earlier incarnations of the tales. I bought it because I recognized Brackett’s name from the Skaith books, and from her work on The Empire Strikes Back.
“The Secret of Sinharat” opens with Stark losing ground to a group of pursuers as his mount fails. Stark has been summoned by a troublemaker named Delgaun of Valkis for a mercenary job, but it now appears he will not finish the journey. The pursuers, however, are led by interplanetary policeman Simon Ashton, the man who rescued Stark when the aboriginal tribe that raised him was murdered. Since then, Simon has been the closest thing Stark has had to a father. Ashton offers him a deal: Delgaun plans to upset the political order on Mars to plunder the cities and set himself up as ruler. Stark is facing charges and jail time, but Ashton offers him clemency if he disrupts Delgaun’s efforts. Had it been anyone else asking, I suspect that Stark would have refused. But he agrees, and heads on to join Delgaun and his followers.
Stark is introduced to Kynon, a man who claims to have rediscovered the ancient Martian device of the people known as Ramas—a device that can transfer a mind from an old person to a younger one. They “demonstrate” the device to their followers, but in private, Stark accuses them of being frauds, which they admit. Stark sees a mysterious woman, Berild, who is part of the cabal that is leading the uprising. Stark is sent to retrieve one of Delgaun’s minions from the local equivalent of an opium den, when he encounters Fianna, Berild’s attractive servant girl, who warns Stark that he is heading into a trap. The trap proves insufficient to defeat a man like Stark, however, and he returns with the minion slung over his shoulder.
The rebels head out in a caravan, and during a sandstorm Stark is again betrayed, and ends up stranded in the desert with Berild. They suffer greatly, but she shows an uncanny ability to navigate the lost cities they encounter. Stark starts to wonder if ancient legends might be true. After the treachery he has seen, he has no aversion to disrupting Delgaun’s plans, and soon all concerned will find that the ancient legends of Mars are not to be scorned, and that the old powers might still be stirring.
“The People of the Talisman” opens with a dying friend entrusting Stark with a talisman hidden in a belt buckle. The talisman reputedly can protect the city of Kushat by bringing a mysterious force through the ominously named Gates of Death. The dying man makes Stark promise to return it. Stark finds that holding the talisman opens his mind to unsettling images and voices. He is soon captured by an army led by the enigmatic Lord Ciaran, who always appears in full armor and enclosed helmet, carries a giant axe; the army is heading to attack Kushat. They torture Stark for information, but he breaks free, and after an epic battle where his savage nature comes to the fore, he makes his escape.
Stark arrives at Kushat to find a city in turmoil. The authorities are hiding the fact that the talisman is missing, although many in the city already suspect the truth. Stark is taken to well-meaning but ineffective military leaders, who ignore his warnings of an invading army. He doesn’t trust them enough to turn over the talisman, and they are considering jailing him when a woman called Thanis vouches for him, and offers to take him in. It turns out that she and her brother are friends to Stark’s late companion, and eventually he trusts them enough to reveal the talisman.
The attack comes just as Stark had warned, and there is a brutal battle for the city. Stark meets Lord Ciaran and during their combat, he knocks off the ever-present helmet to reveal a secret: Ciaran is a striking woman with flowing red hair. As that reveal is spoiled by the Planet Stories cover and title of “Black Amazon of Mars,” I suspect many reading this review have already figured that out. Stark and Ciaran are separated by the fighting, and soon Stark and his friends find that only the talisman can save the city. But the secrets lurking beyond the Gates of Death prove to be a danger to everyone, and soon enemies become allies in a desperate struggle for survival…