Three 1949-50 tales by Leigh Brackett from Thrilling Wonder Stories

I enjoyed my recent look at the 1950 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories with Leigh Brackett's "The Dancing Girl of Ganymede" and Henry Kuttner's "The Voice of the Lobster," so, to take a break from my rereading of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, I propose spending some time reading more stories by Brackett and Kuttner from Thrilling Wonder (we might end up checking out some Thrilling Wonder contributions by Brackett's husband, Edmond Hamilton, as well.)

Today we'll just focus on Leigh Brackett, with three stories that appeared in TWS (as we fans call it) in 1949 and 1950.  If you are really in the mood for some Brackett TWS action, you can also read my scribbles about an earlier Brackett story from TWS, 1944's "The Veil of Astellar."  (Even better, read all four magazines at the internet archive.) 

"Quest of the Starhope" (1949)

"Quest of the Starhope" appears in the same issue of TWS as Hamilton's memorable "Alien Earth" and Ray Bradbury's "Concrete Mixer," which I am making a mental note to read soon.

Bert Quintal is a man driven by ambition, a man without a heart!  He was born in the slums of Chicago, signed on to the crew of a space ship at thirteen, and has fought his way to fame and fortune, never having made a friend, never having felt love!  He made his money and won his reputation by capturing alien creatures on Venus and Mars and shipping them back to Earth for display to what Brackett calls "gaping mobs."  This is a dangerous career, but early on Quintal found his ace in the hole, a tiny little alien with psychic powers.  Quintal threatened to kill this little guy's wife, so the little guy, whom Quintal calls Butch, became his lieutenant.  Butch can sense and read minds at long range, and send telepathic messages at short range, so he sits on Quintal's shoulder, hidden under Quintal's hood, and helps Quintal sneak up on creatures, avoid ambushes, and talk to aliens.  Butch has saved Quintal's life many times, and made possible the ruthless trapper's string of successes.

Quintal is not satisfied by wealth and fame--he is restless, always looking for new creatures to capture.  So today he is anxious, worried, even scared, as it looks like he has captured every worthwhile creature on Venus and Mars, and current technology isn't sufficient to take a ship beyond the asteroid belt.  With no more goals to pursue, life is going to be miserable.

But wait!  Quintal, flying over the desolate surface of Mars in his one-man scout ship, the Starhope he spots something moving in one of the old abandoned cities that dots the Martian landscape.  Once, Mars was the home of numerous highly advanced civilizations, but a series of catastrophes, earthquakes and the like, caused their downfall long ago.  Quintal lands to find that this city is half buried in sand and inhabited by the short and barbaric descendants of one of those highly advanced races.  Quintal plans to capture some of these degenerate Martians to put in cages and display to those mobs back on Earth, but when he explores a buried factory, he discovers a far greater boon--those ancient hi-tech Martians had just developed a process to produce anti-gravity metal when the environmental cataclysm buried their cyclotron and foundry!  If Quintal can get the factory working again he can build a ship that will enable him to fly to Jupiter, to seek out new life and new civilizations to put in cages to bring back to Earth!

With the essential aid of Butch, he uses trickery and threats to get these Martians, who are scared to go into the factory because it might get buried again at any moment, to put the cyclotron and foundry back into operation and to modify his one-man ship so he can fly it to Jupiter.  They are almost finished with this task when a sandstorm comes and kills most of the Martians, just as they had feared!  Butch is guilt-ridden, and works with the few surviving Martians to overpower Quintal.  They paralyze the hunter, and then send the freshly upgraded Starhope on a one-way mission to deep space, a trip on which the immobile Quintal will soon die of dehydration.  The factory being buried again, it will be a long time before anybody from Earth will be able to get his hands on some anti-grav metal, pushing back the day on which the people of Jupiter and the rest of the outer planets will run the risk of being enslaved and humiliated by Earthmen.

This story isn't bad.  I speculate that it is this kind of anti-imperialist story, with sympathetic alien victims of Earthmen's exploitation and the suggestion that technological breakthroughs lead to oppression, that lead Michael Moorcock to gush about Brackett and dub her "one of the true godmothers of the New Wave."  (See Moorcock's essay 2000 essay "Queen of the Martian Mysteries."
               
"Quest of the Starhope" was republished in a 1964 reprint magazine, Treasury of Great Science Fiction Stories, and in a 2007 volume from Haffner Press, Lorelei of the Red Mist: Planetary Romances.

"The Lake of the Gone Forever" (1949)

On the cover we see depicted the tragedy of
Rand Conway's parents

Rand Conway is a man driven by ambition!  His ambition is to get to Iskar!  When he was ten years old, Rand's father committed suicide--Dad's last words were "I can never go back to Iskar, to the Lake of the Gone Forever."  Iskar is a planet the elder Conway, some kind of space prospector, discovered, and now, over a decade after his death, he is still the only Earthman ever to step on its surface.  Rand has worked his way up the ranks as a spaceman, and is now a master pilot.  In order to get the resources he needs to get to Iskar, he has worked to interest an ethnologist, Peter Esmond, in the planet, because Esmond is betrothed to Marcia Rohan, daughter of important businessman Charles Rohan, the kind of guy who has a spaceship named after himself manned by a big professional crew.  As our story opens the big day is almost here: the Rohan is approaching Iskar, Rohan curious to open trade with a new race, Conway eager to study this as-yet-unsurveyed population, and Conway eager to get rich--he has been telling people he just wants to solve the mystery of his father's life and suicide, but he has reason to believe there is something on Iskar that will make him richer even than the Rohans, something he wants to keep all for himself!

When our protagonists get to the White City on icy Iskar, the native Iskarians, tall beautiful people armed with spears who hang skins in front of the doorways of their homes because there is no wood on Iskar, aren't too happy to see them.  In fact, when Rand, Esmond and Charles Rohan are standing before the city gate, the natives, in the halting English they learned from Rand's pater, threaten to kill them if they don't leave.  Esmond and Rohan want to negotiate their way in, just what you'd expect from an academic and a businessman, people who make their way in the world via words and horsetrading, but Rand, like the Iskarians, knows the way the universe really works.  He tells the Iskarians that their ship is armed with high tech weapons, and if anything happens to them, the ship's crew will raze the whole city!  This gets the three of them in, but all the crewmen and Marcia are left behind, along with most of their firearms (Rand keeps a stunner secreted in a concealed holster.).

The natives act like they are going to lynch the three Earthers, but their leader, an old geez ("cragged" and "gnarled," and "strong as a rock") called Krah stops them.  Apparently Rand Conway's father did something to piss them off, and they have not forgotten it.  Luckily, Rand and company don't let on that Rand is the descendant of the man the Iskarians call "Conna."

The people of the White City have very strong ideas about gender norms; Brackett tells us "Conway noticed that the women and children did not mingle with the men," and provides other stark examples.  Conway, Esmond and Rohan are given sleeping quarters in Krah's house, and during the night Marcia Rohan, all by herself, worried about them, comes to the city, and the women of the city, seeing a woman in mannish clothes walking around unchaperoned, stone her!  Fortunately, Krah intervenes before Marcia is maimed or killed.

In Krah's household is an attractive woman, Ciel, who tries to make contact with Conway--this chick remembers "Conna" with admiration and sees how Marcia acts among the Earthmen, as if she is their equal.  Ciel wants Rand to take her to Earth, a place where women, she believes, "[are] proud like man....Free."  (It seems that one reason the Iskarians are resentful about "Conna" is that he put ideas of gender equality into the heads of a few women like Ciel.)  Besides this, Ciel is smitten by the rough and tough Rand, who makes bookworm Esmond and merchant Rohan look like wimps--Rand is almost like an Iskarian himself!

Conway smiled.  He liked her.  They were the same kind, he and she--nursing a hopeless dream and risking everything to make it come true.

Rand agrees to take Ciel to Terra if she'll help him sneak off in stolen native clothes to find the Lake of the Gone Forever his father talked about.  Cunning Krah, however, knew Rand was Conna's son all along, and he and his five sons are watching.  They follow Rand and Ciel to the black lake that lies on the other side of some challenging terrain.  By the Lake, Conway and we readers come to learn the truth of Conway's life.

The Lake has strange powers--if you look upon its black surface it records your moving image, and if later some person comes to the Lake and gazes on it while thinking of you, he will see that recorded reflection run like a movie.  Conway's father, "Conna," and fell in love with a woman--Krah's daughter--and tried to settle down in the White City, but the potential financial value of whatever mysterious substance gives the Lake its crazy psychic influence gnawed at his mind and finally overcame all his inhibitions.  Conway watches a recording of his father's disastrous attempt to gather a sample from the Lake--disastrous because Rand's mother, trying to stop Dad from defiling the sacred Lake, fell in and was lost forever.  Brokenhearted, Conway's father left Iskar with his son, never getting over his loss and his guilt.

Conway came to Iskar to do what his father failed to do--steal a sample of the Lake himself and thus get rich.  But seeing the story of his mother's death, realizing he is half-Iskarian, and falling in love with an Iskarian woman just like Dad did, he decides he wants to stay on Iskar and marry Ciel and live like  a barbarian, throwing aside his career as a guy who pilots spaceships for a career hunting beasts with a bone spear in year-round subzero temperatures.  Krah--his maternal grandfather-- accepts his repentance and everybody lives happily ever after.  Even Ciel accepts this, even though just a few hours ago she was saying she would murder Rand if he went back on his promise to bring her to Earth.  I guess she figures an Earthborn husband will treat her more as an equal than would a native-born Iskarian husband.

(Conway has kept the Lake a secret from the rest of the expedition, so I guess there is no risk of the Rohan clan trying to steal a sample from the Lake.)

Obviously "The Lake of Gone Forever" has the same sort of anti-imperialist themes we saw in "Quest of the Starhope"--the less these Isakarians have to do with Earthpeople and their technology and culture, Brackett suggests, the better.  But this story is more nuanced and more complicated, bringing in other themes.  The main points of the story seems to be that your rightful place in the universe is in your native culture--not the culture you grew up in, necessarily, but the culture of your blood (again and again Brackett gives hints that Rand is in tune with Iskar, even though he grew up on Earth)--and that you shouldn't tinker with your culture's rules or disaster will result.  Brackett seems to side with the barbaric sexist culture of Iskar over the capitalistic, scientific, liberal culture of Earth represented by businessman Rohan, egghead Esmond, and liberated Marcia--for the crime of being women who act independently, Iskarians beat Ciel in one scene and stone Marcia in another, and Brackett doesn't portray those who performed this violence being punished in any way.  In the end Rand chooses to abandon high tech and liberal Earth and embrace the low-tech savage culture of his mother's civilization, while Ciel, who wanted to escape the sexist culture she was born into after learning there existed a less sexist one, decides to stay.  Damn!

I have to say the themes of this story have me shrugging my shoulders--I certainly wouldn't want to spend my life wearing animal skins instead of my J. Crew sweaters and catching my food with a bone javelin instead of a credit card.  And I was cheering on Ciel for wanting to ditch home and build a life of her own, and was kind of let down to see her stuck in that ice-covered city where there was no wood or paper or pizza place.  Brackett's attitude doesn't comes as a surprise, though.  In preferring barbarism to civilization she is following in a long tradition of which her antecedents in the sword fighting adventure game Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard are exemplars.  Maybe her romanticizing of the embrace of one's ethnic heritage is a response to what some have seen as the alienation and deracination attendant with modern urban life, depicted, for example, in T. S. Eliot's early work.  As for the gender role stuff, we saw Brackett sympathizing with traditional ideas about gender roles in Alpha Centauri or Die!

I have to respect Brackett for not sugarcoating her message and having Iskar be some kind of utopia--remember when Chad Oliver had a guy leave a spacefaring civilization to join a Plains Indian tribe?  Old Chad made that hard-to-swallow choice go down a little easier by telling us that the Indians had (somehow) achieved immortality!  Cripes, that was lame.  Brackett here doesn't come up with some totally bogus reason that living like a savage is better than living like a city slicker--she tells you should embrace the ways of your people because they are the ways of your people, even if your people's ways suck.

There are some little plot oddities to "The Lake of the Gone Forever" that had me scratching my head.  Conway's father somehow got to Iskar all by himself, but his son felt the need to get the support of a rich guy?  (Obviously Brackett needs the nerd, the lucre-lover and the women's libber there to serve as contrasts to the Iskarians, but you sort of have to wonder why Rand didn't just go to Iskar himself if his father had the means to do so.)  Another thing is that the men of the White City are all described as tough warriors, and it is implied they have a whole tradition of honor based on fighting with spears, but who are they going to war against?  We never hear about any other polities on Iskar, or bandits or whatever.  Maybe Brackett should just have said they were tough hunters. 

(I've given up wondering why Earth people in these old SF stories can have children with aliens, something I used to complain about; in particular I recall grousing about this in Chad Oliver stories--I guess I kind of use poor Chad as a punching bag on this here blog.  Now when I read these stories in which Earth people and aliens have the hots for each other I just assume what some of them make explicit, as Hamilton does in the Captain Future stories, that humans are not native to Earth, that long long ago some aliens seeded the galaxy with human spores or there was once a human empire that spread across the galaxy but decayed leaving no trace of their existence or something like that, and so people from different solar systems are as genetically compatible as people from different Earth continents.)

Whatever you might think of this story's politics, it is thought-provoking and a decent read, and it has lots of stuff about icy scenery and Rand's dreams and psychology that people might like.  Perhaps because of its provocative look at an intersection--one might say a collision--where modern attitudes about imperialism and gender norms meet, it has been included in two different anthologies of SF by women which have gone through multiple editions, Pamela Sargent's More Women of Wonder and Richard Glyn Jones and A. Susan Williams's The Penguin Book of Modern Fantasy By Women.

"The Citadel of Lost Ages" (1950)

"The Citadel of Lost Ages" appeared in an issue of TWS whose editorial is a long celebration of women SF authors and how they have improved the SF field and how things are so much better today in 1950 than in the benighted past when there was so much sexism in the SF field.

A dude wakes up in a tiny dark room with a little slit of a window.  He doesn't remember his name or where he is or what is going on!  He looks out that window and sees a vast city of stone, wood, and mud buildings, of market squares and throngs in the streets riding horses and leading other beasts.  Somehow he knows, though, that this city once had towering metal skyscrapers.  Another weird thing--the Sun in the sky doesn't move, and he somehow knows it should!

A pretty girl with a face somehow reminiscent of a cat's opens the heavy metal door on our dude's cell and he grabs her, covers her mouth, threatens to kill her if she cries out.  (Brackett's work is full of this kind of sexualized violence.)  She is disappointed that he doesn't recognize her, and gives him and us readers tantalizing clues about the crazy world in which he finds himself--she is a temple slave, offers that she hates the "Numi," and is going to help him escape!

The young woman, Arika, leads our dude, whom she calls "Fenn," through the secret doors and passages of this huge stone building, the temple in which she is forced to work.  Along the way we learn that the Numi are a semi-human people who have somehow conquered the Earth.  They are tall and furred and muscular--when Fenn spies some of them Brackett tells us they are "beautiful," their bodies "more like the bodies of lions than men," but not at all beast-like, in fact "they seemed to Fenn to be above men like himself as he was above the brutes."

Hiding in the temple's tomb, Arika and Fenn listen as the queen of the Numi comes by to talk to her dead husband, who is encased in a crystal column.  She complains that "the human cattle" are growing insolent.  After she leaves, Fenn has to kill a Numi priest who stumbles on our heroes, and we get more sexualized violence as Fenn grapples with the muscular cleric, rolling around on the floor with him, "his thighs locked tight around his loins," the Numi scratching and drawing blood, Fenn biting the priest and tasting his alien blood as he struggles to crush the life out of him.  Zoinks!

Arika leads Fenn out of the temple into the slum of huts where live the humans who are the Numi's cattle and the half breeds like Arika, whose father was a Numi, who are their slaves.  (Like Rand Conway in "The Lake of the Gone Forever," Arika here in "The Citadel of the Ages" is a half breed who embraces her maternal ethnicity and rejects her father's imperialistic people.)  The Numi have all kinds of mental powers, and half-breeds like Arika have similar, though weaker powers.  Arika uses her powers and drugs to revive Fenn's memory, and we learn the astonishing truth of the fate of Earth in the 1980s!

Like in a 1929 Edmond Hamilton story, in the '80s a black star passed through the solar system, causing civilization-destroying events on Earth, earthquakes and tsunamis and so on--the Earth's speed of rotation even changed, so that it always shows the same face to the sun.  The eggheads saw the dark star coming, and knew it would make a mess of this big blue marble, and so the authorities built a Citadel in the Palisades that would survive the cataclysm and stored within it the knowledge and power with which to rebuild society!  Over a thousand years later the Numi heard legends about it, and one of their head priests, RhamSin, used his mental power on a captive human to reach back through his racial memory and pull forward the consciousness of a 1980s New Yorker named Fenway who had been in the Citadel just after it was completed.  But Arika has beaten RhamSin to the punch, extracting the location of the Citadel from Fenn before the Numi priest had an opportunity to do so!

"The Lake of the Gone Forever" and
"The Citadel of Lost Ages" both appear in
The Halfling and Other Stories

Fenn, Arika, and Arika's brother Malech steal horses and escape the city into the desert waste, headed towards New Jersey and the Citadel.  Before his consciousness was changed to that of a 20th century city slicker, Fenn was a desert outlaw, and he still has all his horseriding and arrow-shooting skills.  If you are wondering why the Numi ride horses and fight with swords and spears instead of riding hover bikes and fighting with plasma guns, we eventually learn that they are not space aliens, but evolved Europeans, "the New Men" who adapted to the cold and dark that hung over the Old World after the passage of the dark star, and then came across the sea to conquer the New World and enslave their unadapted brethren.  In this story Brackett doesn't just unleash the time-honored "cat people" trope on us but "homo superior" as well.

Malech looks like a Numi and has lots more trouble passing than does she when the three meet some outlaw humans and need their help.  Presumably Brackett based Malech's tragic life of being rejected by both humans and Numi on the plight suffered by multi-racial Americans who were never fully accepted by the communities of either of their parents.  Over a dozen of the desert outlaws join Fenn's party as they ride cross country towards the East Coast, and as the days and weeks pass, Malech becomes more and more alienated from the group.  At the same time, an expedition led by RhamSin is pursuing them and gradually closing the distance.

The expedition crosses into the zone of darkness where the sun never shines, a place of cold and ice.  The men are amazed by the sight of the stars, which they have never seen before.  This strange milieu challenges their sanity, and the cold threatens their health--only half the adventurers make it to the Atlantic coast where Fenn opens up the Citadel, a vast subterranean warehouse with more square feet than the Empire State Building full of books and films and models, all the knowledge and art built up by man over the centuries before the destruction wrought by the dark star.  But those who stocked the Citadel decided to leave out the machine guns, grenades, and flame throwers their descendants could have used to overthrow the Numi--idealistically, they left no weapons in this monument to humanity's culture and learning! 

RhamSin's party lays siege to the Citadel, and Malech betrays the humans and his sister--RhamSin has promised to accept him as a full Numi if he helps them take the Citadel.  There is a bloody fight, but in the end Fenn remembers something about the Citadel that gives the humans an edge in the fight.  As the story ends, we can be confident that, with the knowledge in the Citadel, mankind will throw off the tyranny of the Numi and build a new civilization.  If you are some kind of optimist, maybe you can tell yourself that the relationship between Fenn and Arika presages some kind of reconciliation and decent modus vivendi between us mundanes and our cat-like betters.

A pretty good story.  Besides in a few American Brackett collections, "The Citadel of the Ages" has also reappeared in some foreign anthologies.

 
**********

These are entertaining adventure stories about driven men, men who are on their own and trying to make a life for themselves in the universe, trying to bend the universe to their wills and not always doing the right thing.  The stories all include fun SF elements like anti-grav, lost races, and weird mental powers, as well as tense violence, and Brackett adds levels of psychological, political and sociological interest by introducing issues of cultural and ethnic identity, issues she resolves in ways liberal and libertarian types won't necessarily find congenial.  Thumbs up for all three, though the first I read, "Quest of the Starhope," is not as complex or effective as the later two, "The Lake of Gone Forever" and "The Citadel of Lost Ages."

More TWS in our next episode!   

Thrilling Wonder Stories from 1950 by Leigh Brackett and Henry Kuttner

In our last episode we read a story by Ray Bradbury from the February 1950 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories, as well as a letter therein by Marion Zimmer Bradley.  I remarked that this issue presented a surfeit of attractive material, so today, seeking insight into the world of SF from 70 years ago, we take a closer look, focusing in particular on stories by two of our faves here at MPorcius Fiction Log, Leigh Brackett and Henry Kuttner.  (We've already read the story in the issue by beloved detective novelist John D. MacDonald.)  You should feel free to read along at the internet archive, that indispensable resource for arts and entertainment for all of us who are boycotting the 21st century.

The inside cover of the magazine is an ad for a Mickey Rooney film in which Rooney plays a race car driver.  A Lina Romay is listed in the credits but maybe not the Lina Romay you are thinking of--the Spanish Lina Romay from all those Franco movies took her stage name in honor of the Mexican singer who worked with Xavier Cugat and Droopy. 

The editorial space of this issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories is devoted to promoting Fantastic Story Quarterly, a new magazine that we are told will reprint SF classics from earlier decades (it was published from 1950 to 1955, changing its title along the way to Fantastic Story Magazine) and to a gushing book review by Robert Heinlein of The Conquest of Space, a book of Chesley Bonestell paintings with science text by Willy Ley.  This book is available at the internet archive, and some of the color reproductions, like those of Saturn as seen from Titan, Mimas and Japetus, are pretty terrific.   

"The Dancing Girl of Ganymede" by Leigh Brackett

"The Dancing Girl of Ganymede" would go on to be included in several Brackett collections as well as 1966's Award Science Fiction Reader and a French anthology of stories from Thrilling Wonder.  Here in Thrilling Wonder it gets a good illustration by Virgil Finlay.

On a plateau a thousand feet above the jungle, under a sky half-filled by Jupiter, sits the city of Kamar.  Low on funds, close to the point of having to steal food, Earthman Tony Harrah approaches the Street of Gamblers in hopes of improving his financial status by gambling.  There is music in the square ahead, and a crowd, and something, a smell perhaps, that sets the aboriginal forest dwellers of Ganymede, people little more advanced than apes, to flight--before scampering away, Harrah's aboriginal friend Tok warns him that in the square lie evil and death.

Ignoring his friend's warning, Harrah steps up to the crowd and finds they are watching four space gypsies, a mongrel people with the blood of every intelligent race in the solar system flowing through their veins.  Three gypsy men play musical instruments, to which a gypsy woman, the most beautiful Harrah has ever seen, dances.  Her body is warm and sensuous, but her black eyes are cold and full of hate.

Kamar is a dirty city of mazy streets and dark ways, and home to packs of feral dogs abandoned by spacemen.  These dogs don't like the smell of the dancing girl and set upon her!  In the chaos that ensues as the maddened dogs attack gypsy and non-gypsy alike, Harrah helps the girl, carrying her off to safety.  Fascinated by this woman, who in the fighting as in the dancing proved herself incredibly fast and surprisingly strong, who calls herself Marith (it means "forbidden") and says she hates all men and all women, he asks her to come home with him, and she agrees.  But on the way home three men, one Earther, one Venusian, one Martian, hold them up at gunpoint and take the girl away.

"We want the--the girl, not you."  His slow, deep voice hesitated oddly over that word, "girl."

The three gypsy musicians show up--they are Marith's brothers.  Using their physical strength to dominate Harrah, and their psychic powers to summon Tok (the gypsies can control Tok's primitive people with their minds in ways they can't a human being) they shanghai our heroes into helping them rescue Marith and kill the three kidnappers.

After this killing, Brackett throws us a curveball--Marith and her "brothers" are not multi-racial gypsies, that is a disguise--they are androids, artificial people!  Androids were built among the Inner planets, given super strength and good looks and other abilities so they could perform difficult and dangerous tasks and to provide entertainment, but normal humans' fear of being supplanted by the vastly superior androids has lead to them being rounded up for destruction, and a secret underground war people beyond the asteroid belt haven't heard about yet.  There are fewer than forty androids left, and they have mad their way to almost lawless Ganymede, but anti-android teams, like the one that Mirath's comrades just massacred, are on their trail.

Harrah has to choose between staying loyal to his own born-of-woman people, or joining the factory-built androids.  Of course, seeing as the superstrong androids can kill him out of hand, and he has, against his better judgement, fallen in love with Marith, he hasn't got much choice.

The group climbs down the plateau, which is easy for the monkey-like Tok and the superstrong androids, but impossible for Hannah, so the male androids effortlessly carry him.  Throughout the story the inferiority of all-natural and organic humankind is thrown in Harrah's face by these artificial superbeings.  Harrah is taken to the secret jungle base where the last of the androids are building a factory so they can mass produce an invincible army with which to take over the solar system.  Lacking lust, greed, hunger, and fear, the androids are sure they will be better rulers than emotional and corrupt mankind has been.

But wait!  Tok has sneaked away and rallied the aboriginal villagers!  The ape-like natives of the Ganymedean jungle fear the emotionless androids as much as humans do, and have set the jungle on fire!  All the androids will be burned to destruction--and Harrah along with them!  Mankind is saved!  Marith tells Harrah that she has learned to love from him, and the two embrace each other as the fire approaches, enjoying a moment of happiness before she is permanently deactivated and he is burned to death.

This is an entertaining story.  I didn't know where Brackett was going from one minute to the next with this story, which in some ways resembles C. L. Moore's famous "Shambleau;" would Harrah die, would the androids take over, would Harrah and Marith be able to make peace between humanity and humanity's creation?  The ending feels legit, though, with primitive and passionate natural man saved from emotionless advanced artificial man by people even more primitive and irrational, with a sad note, as the love between Marith and Harrah suggests it didn't have to be this way, that maybe there really was a choice besides slavery and extermination.  The ambiguous approach taken here by Brackett, in which there is some kind of nuance to how both the humans and nonhumans are portrayed, and both sides are seen to be acting in an understandable way, is far more interesting and entertaining than what Ray Bradbury does in this same issue of Thrilling Wonder, in "Payment in Full," with its monstrously violent humans and oh so perfect goody two shoes Martians.  Thumbs up.

"The Voice of the Lobster" by Henry Kuttner

Terrence Lao-T'se Macduff is a con man who travels the galaxy making a living through selling snake oil and gambling, smoothing the way for such activities by administering drugs, hormones and hypnosis to weaken people's sales resistance and by bribing corrupt officials.  As the story begins Macduff is on Aldebaran Tau, a planet inhabited by plant people, and he is in trouble--the city is in an uproar because one of his frauds has been exposed and the Mayor is implicated.  The streets are full of vengeful mobs.  In the course of making his getaway, Macduff cheats a lobster-like Algolian at dice--the Algolian owns a Lesser Vegan, a slave girl who, like all Lesser Vegans, is dim-witted but protected by a psychic vibration she emanates that disarms people, putting them at ease, and Macduff acquires her.  When Macduff, Lesser Vegan in tow, gets on a space liner he finds that the irate Algolian, now aware he has been cheated, is already aboard.

The Algolian is himself a card sharp and conman, and Macduff learns the lobsterman is involved in some industrial espionage, having stolen from Aldebaran Tau a plant whose seeds are of great value in the making of perfume; he has been paid to smuggle the plant to the liner's next port of call, planet Xeria, whose citizens have long tried, without success, to break the Aldebaranean monopoly on this valuable resource.  As a stowaway, Macduff will be left off on Xeria along with the lobsterman.  Macduff is also forced to work to pay for his passage, and he uses the access this provides him to the ship's inner workings to sabotage the valuable plant, making it useless to the Xerians in hopes that, in their rage at the lobsterman, they will side with Macduff should the lobsterman try to get revenge on him.  A byproduct of this scheme is an opportunity for Macduff to make a lot of money--with the money he buys himself and the Lesser Vegan tickets to Lesser Vega, so he need not get off at Xeria; on Lesser Vega he frees the girl.

Kuttner plays all this for laughs; Macduff, who is overweight, is always comically running away from mobs or from the lobsterman, and Kuttner includes plenty of jokes and gags, like the silly Scottish accent of the space liner's captain ("Vurra weel,") and a Macbeth reference tied to Macduff's name.  These jokes aren't actually laugh-out-loud funny, but they are not irritating.  At the same time that this is a comic story, it has an intricate plot,  with its many aliens it gives you the feeling of life in a vast multicultural galactic civilization, and, in classic Golden Age SF fashion, the hero overcomes enemies and achieves his goals by using intelligence, trickery and his knowledge of science.  You might think of "The Voice of the Lobster" as a P. G. Wodehouse story in a Star Wars setting, with Macduff playing both the Bertie (scared goofball) and Jeeves (imperturbable problem-solver) roles.  It also reminded me a little of something Jack Vance might do.  Thumbs up.

"The Voice of the Lobster" has reappeared in several Kuttner collections, as well as in the oft-reprinted 1950s anthology Adventures in Tomorrow and a 1978 issue of the Croat magazine Sirius.

   
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In our last blog post I pointed out Marion Zimmer Bradley's fun and interesting letter.  (I've never actually read any of Bradley's fiction, and I am aware of the abominable crimes she committed and abetted, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't find this letter charming.)  Quite a few of the letters in this issue, though none written by anyone as prominent as Bradley (though John Jakes comes close, I guess) are good reading.  Robert R. Smith argues that science fiction will soon be the greatest field in literature and claims that "the detective story has fallen to pieces," citing the fact that John D. MacDonald has abandoned detective fiction for SF.  (Of course, in the event, MacDonald left SF behind to become one of the most successful of detective novelists.)  Grad student Donald Allgeier writes in to say he favors Brackett, Kuttner (though he doesn't like the Hogben stories), Bradbury, and van Vogt, even though van Vogt's work is full of what Allgeier calls "obscurities."  (This Allgeier guy has good taste!)  Allgeir does complain that the illustrations contain too much "cheesecake," however.  Gwen Cunningham loves the Hogben stories (as do Elizabeth Curtis and Bob Johnson), and also likes Brackett, though she erroneously thinks Brackett is a man (the editor sets her straight.)  Pearle Appleford writes from South Africa to report that an import ban has kept all pulp magazines out of the country, and asks if any Thrilling Wonder readers who throw their SF magazines away might mail them to her instead.  Many of the letters include jocular poems, and the editor responds to them with poems of his own; many of the letter writers rank the stories from the October issue, and there is a real diversity of opinion.  The letters column gives one the feeling that Thrilling Wonder is the center of a whole community of people with their own in-jokes, feuds and friendships.  And to bring things full circle the editor closes out the letters column by recommending you go out to the cinema to see Mickey Rooney in The Big Wheel!

Leigh Brackett: Three 1940s detective stories

We've read a bunch of Leigh Brackett's SF novels, like Alpha Centauri or Die! and The Sword of Rhiannon, and short stories like "The Veil of Astellar," "Enchantress of Venus" and "Mars Minus Bisha."  Today, after typing Brackett's name into the internet archive, let's read three Brackett short stories from detective magazines that we find there.

"Murder in the Family" (1943)

"Murder in the Family" was published in Mammoth Detective, a magazine of over 300 pages.

Nineteen-year-old Danny is homeless and hungry; it is late at night and he is looking for some place to sleep at the La Brea Tar Pits. He hears a scream, finds a woman who has just been murdered by being lifted up and hung by the neck on the metal fangs of a statue of a saber-toothed cat!  This woman died with her purse on her, and penniless Danny decides to take some money for food. Just as he is committing this crime the cops arrive. Danny manages to escape them, then uses the money for bus fare and a meal at a Log Cabin, which I guess is the name of or a nickname for a chain of restaurants in Southern California. This first part of the story is full of Los Angeles references: Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood, Santa Monica Boulevard, Earl Carroll's, etc. Frankly, I prefer it when stories are set in New York and drop the names of places I have been.

Danny is tormented with fear that the cops, who got a good look at him with their flashlights, will catch him and he'll end up in the gas chamber.  But then he finds a clue in the wad of bills he took from the dead girl--a note written on a sales receipt with the purchaser's name (Cicely Rieff) and address.  Maybe with this info he can catch the killer himself and escape death at the hands of the state!

Danny goes to the address, a boarding house, and gets mixed up in a very confusing and crazy plot involving a bunch of double-crossing, lying, blackmailing, murdering jerk offs.  "Murder in the Family" is one of those stories in which we are lead to believe one person is a victim and another is a fiend, and then we learn that the innocent-seeming person is really the villain and the person we thought a criminal mastermind was just misbehaving because somebody had psychological influence over them, and various permutations of that sort of idea.

Maybe I can explain the gist of this thing briefly.  (Maybe not.)  Mrs. Rieff runs the boarding house where reside a multitude of shady characters.  In a flat over the garage in the back lives a prostitute or a call girl or courtesan or whatever you want to call her, whom Hollywood actors come to have sex with; they give this woman expensive gifts and she and Mrs. Rieff split the money when Rieff sells the gifts, and I guess maybe Rieff blackmails the actors--there is so much blackmail in this story that I lost track of who was blackmailing who and now, as I copy edit this blog post some hours after reading the story, am assuming everybody living in this boarding house is a blackmailer or blackmailee or both.  We also have Mrs. Rieff's son, Teddy, a handsome but evil guy--Brackett more than once says he looks like a "blonde Satan."  And a pretty young woman, Frieda, Teddy's cousin, Mrs. Rieff's niece, and sister of Cicely, the girl killed at the La Brea Tar Pits.  And then there is the servant woman, middle-aged Millie.

I think Cicely was blackmailing her aunt, Mrs. Rieff over the prostitution thing, and also blackmailing a tenant, Halstead.  I can't remember what Halstead was doing that he could be blackmailed over; he didn't have a speaking part.  When Danny, our hero, gets to the boarding house, Halstead is laying dead next to the trash pile, a gun in his hand.  Eventually we learn that Halstead was going to ambush Cicely and kill her because he was sick of paying her the blackmail, and Millie jumped him from behind and beat him with a frying pan to save Cicely, who was the only person to ever be nice to Millie in her whole life.  Teddy and Frieda welcome Danny in to the boarding house, pretending he is an old friend of Frieda's.  At first it seems like Frieda is doing this because she wants an outsider to save her from the evil Teddy, and Teddy is doing it because he wants somebody around on whom he can pin the murder of Cicely, but things turn out to be more complex than that.  Eventually, in between people getting tied up and beaten up and all that, we learn that Cicely, I think, was only blackmailing people to raise money to pay the people who were blackmailing her.  I think it was Frieda and Teddy blackmailing Cicely, but then Teddy fell in love with Cicely, his cousin, so Frieda, fearing her sister would go to the cops, killed Cicely (Frieda is strong for a woman.)  Danny has a fight with Teddy and knocks Teddy out; while Danny's back is turned Frieda kills Teddy by passing a five-inch-long needle through Teddy's eye to destroy his brain--Frieda needs Teddy dead because Teddy will narc her out to the cops; she figures maybe people won't notice the evidence of her little amateur lobotomy and can frame Danny for the blonde Satan's death.  Mrs. Rieff, bitter over the death of her son, tries to kill both Frieda and Danny with a pistol, but Danny outfights her and holds both women captive at gunpoint as the cops arrive.

When I wrote about "Enchantress of Venus" back in 2017 I pointed out that Brackett included in that story a lot of brutal sexualized violence with incestuous, heterosexual and homosexual overtones, and she does the same thing here.  Frieda kills her cousin and sister by penetrating them with a long narrow object (when Danny sees Cicely's body Brackett describes how blood has pooled between the "small curved breasts" strain against her tight evening gown.)  Teddy ties up Danny spreadeagled to a bed and pulls his hair while he is bound, and when Danny is freed by Millie the two men fight in a way that includes lots of bloody scratching and grappling and clothes tearing.  When Danny interrogates Frieda he pulls her hair.  Whoa.

I think I have to give "Murder in the Family" a marginal negative vote--it is just too confusing, a puzzle I didn't care to figure out.  I'm all for gross eroticized violence, but the story is too short for Brackett to give the legion of characters any personality (besides, part of her project here is to heighten the mystery by keeping everybody's personalities obscured so the sympathetic person on page X can turn out to be a diabolical monster on page X+3) which means the terrible risks they all run and nightmarish fates they all suffer inspire only a minimum of suspense or dismay in the reader.

"The Case of the Wandering Redhead" (1943)

This one made its debut in Flynn's Detective Fiction, where "The Case of the Wandering Redhead" was highlighted on the cover, though the mad scientist illustration has nothing to do with Brackett's story.  That issue isn't available at the internet archive, but luckily "The Case of the Wandering Redhead" was reprinted in a 1951 issue of New Detective that is. 

Marty James is a violent crook, a "racketeer."  And our narrator!  Marty is in love with Sheila Burke, who has skin white like milk, blue-green eyes with sparks in them, red hair that looks like fire!  But Sheila Burke and her Ma, who live in a sixth floor walk up and have run out of money for food, hate Marty's guts!  Ma calls him a "cheap little hoodlum" and Sheila says, "You've got blood on you, Marty....You're not in my world."

Marty doesn't give up easy, however.  His strategy is to wait until Sheila and Ma are starving, thinking that Sheila will have to turn to him and accept one of his endless series of proposals of marriage in order to survive--Marty's thugs terrorize any local business that hires Sheila, so she can't get a job.  But Sheila has just met a guy fresh into town from the farm and today while Marty is at the Burkes' apartment with his right hand man Tony, declaring his love to Sheila (who is calling him a rat and so forth), this Good Samaritan climbs those six flights of stairs with three bags of groceries for the Burkes, putting a crimp in Marty's plans.

Marty can't spend 24/7 working his schemes to get Sheila to marry him because he has business to attend to.  For example, Buckwald, a fellow crook who is trying to muscle in on Marty's territory.  Marty and Tony have to leave the Burkes' and head to the apartment Buckwald shares with his girlfriend; Tony expects he is going to teach Buckwald a lesson.  Ay, caramba!  It's a trap!  Tony and other members of Marty's gang are working for Buckwald!  Tony knocks Marty out, and when Marty wakes up he is tied up and facing Buckwald, Tony, some other thug formerly on Team Marty, and Buckwald's girlfriend, who keeps complaining that Marty's blood is getting on her carpet.  Tony explains that Marty hasn't been handling business right, he being too obsessed with that Sheila Burke: "When a guy goes simple on a dame, like you have, it's time for a change."

Marty fights his way out of this mess--everybody involved, including Buckwald's main squeeze, gets shot full of holes, but Marty's wounds are not life-threatening.  That Marty is a survivor.  He makes his way back to the Burkes' place, and tries to force them to provide him an alibi.  They refuse, and that farm boy, unafraid by Marty's gun, insists on attacking our narrator, driving him outside for a final showdown with the cops. 

This is a far better story than "Murder in the Family," even if there is no reference to saber-toothed tigers, the characters all having believable and interesting motivations, and the action scenes being the best of all three of the stories we are talking about today.  Moderate recommendation.

"I Feel Bad Killing You" (1944)

First printed in New Detective, "I Feel Bad Killing You" seems to be a favorite of anthologists, appearing in 1993 in Tough Guys & Dangerous Dames, edited by Robert E. Weinberg, Stefan Dziemianowicz and the ubiquitous Martin H. Greenberg, and in Denise Hamilton's Los Angeles Noir 2 in 2010.  I read it in a scan of the 1993 volume, which I may return to some day, as it also includes stories by such MPorcius-approved authors as Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Robert Bloch, Donald Wandrei, and Ray Cummings.

Surfside is a corrupt town where the bars and hotels break all the regulations and the cops are paid to look the other way.  (In her intro to Los Angeles Noir 2, Denise Hamilton floats the idea that Surfside is supposed to represent Santa Monica.)  Detective Paul Channing quit the Surfside police force a few years ago, but he's back in Surfside today because his little brother Hank, a Surfside beat cop, turned up dead, apparently having committed suicide by jumping off a pier.  Channing thinks his brother was murdered, and he is back to get to the bottom of things.  The local police captain isn't too happy to see him, though.

Like "Murder in the Family" this story has a multitude of characters whose roles in the many crimes taking place is a mystery that unravels as the story proceeds, with some people who initially seem innocent or morally compromised but trying to help Channing later turning out to be among the most villainous of all, while some of those who appear at first to be the worst are in fact themselves pawns or victims.  This story isn't quite as confusing as "Murder in the Family," though, and the characters are a little more interesting.

The early scenes of "I Feel Bad Killing You" consist of introducing us to six suspects: the police captain of the Surfside division of the LAPD (don't ask me to explain the relationship between Surfside and LA, because I don't understand it); a local store owner; a young man who works at the store and was a friend of Hank's; that store employee's sister, who dated Hank; a drunk journalist; and the drunk journalist's girlfriend.  Then Channing immediately gets captured by Dave Padway (a seventh suspect) and his thugs; when Channing was a detective in Surfside he tangled with Padway's gang, sending some of Padway's men to prison and some others to the morgue, and now Padway tries to get his revenge.  Padway murders two of the suspects, then shoots Channing and leaves him for dead on the side of the road, but Channing has only suffered a flesh wound and can continue his investigation.

A few hours later Padway captures Channing again.  In the final scene all the suspects--except the police captain--and a bunch of Padway's thugs are gathered in an abandoned music hall with the wounded and bound Channing.  It turns out all the suspects--except the clueless police captain--were working together on various criminal schemes, though not all of them were in on the murder of Hank.  The crooks all start squabbling over who is to blame for foolishly bringing Channing back to town by unwisely murdering Hank, and then blaming each other for the fact that Channing is still alive, and then they start shooting each other and Hank's girlfriend frees Channing from his bonds in hopes Channing will help her get through this spot of trouble and then she tries to kill Channing because she was instrumental in killing Hank and fears Channing's wrath, etc.  The police captain's men come in to clean up the mess--sure, in that first scene the police captain may have punched Channing in the face, but he turns out to be an OK guy. 🤷

Acceptable.  There's no sex, really, but there are lots of descriptions of pain and blood and torture (Channing is afraid of fire and Padway keeps burning him with matches) and descriptions of the beach and buildings and all that that I suppose are OK.  (In his intro in Tough Guys & Dangerous Dames, Dziemianowicz points out Brackett's emphasis on the landscape.)  

 **********

I was curious to read some of Leigh Brackett's crime fiction, and I am glad I have done so.  But I have to say, as I have said before, that detective fiction is not really for me.  Part of it (and maybe this is snobbery I am about to propound) is that, it seems to me, that most of even the lamest and most adventure-focused SF is trying to make some point about life or society, that we need less government or more government, less democracy or more democracy, less technology or more technology, that the future is going to rock or the future is going to suck, that smart people are using their smarts to help us or to exploit us, or whatever.  This gives even a story about a barbarian tolchocking thieves or an astronaut hosing down BEMs with a ray pistol an additional level of interest.  SF stories have an ideology.  If these three detective stories have an ideology, I didn't detect it; maybe that reflects a flaw in me, but even so, it contributes to the inability of these stories, and detective stories in general, to move or inspire me.

Three stories by Poul Anderson from 1951

There's Chryseis on Pelias the erinye.  Anderson's
text actually mentions the precious stones
she wears in her hair.

When people complain that SF from the past is sexist I think one of the things they have in mind may be the covers of Planet Stories--it seems that almost every one features some hot chick in trouble, or causing trouble for somebody else.  (The covers of Astounding from the same period present a stark contrast--I guess they are sexist because they rarely feature women on them at all, instead foregrounding technology, heroic men, and metaphorical tableaux.)

Another thing you'll see if you look at a bunch of covers of Planet Stories is Poul Anderson's name.  Let's check out three stories by Poul Anderson that appeared in 1951 issues of Planet Stories.  I think these stories are among Anderson's least well-known, but as my regular readers are well aware, I like reading things that have been largely forgotten or which have gotten a bad reputation.  I'll be experiencing all three of these tales of violence on other worlds on this very computer screen via the scans of the actual magazines in which they appeared that are freely available at the internet archive.

"Witch of the Demon Seas"

The January 1951 issue of Planet Stories actually includes two pieces by Anderson, the Dominic Flandry story "Tiger by the Tail" and the "novel" I'm reading today, "Witch of the Demon Seas," a cover story appearing under the pen name A. A. Craig.

"Witch of the Demon Seas" takes place on a planet where people live under a perpetually cloudy sky, fight with swords and bows, travel in sailing ships, live in castles and believe in magic (dismissed by some as mere "women's tricks.")  The surface of the planet is covered in oceans, and the many maritime kingdoms ("thallasocracies") are based on groups of islands, their economies based on seaborne trade and slave raiding.  The planet's human inhabitants come in many different ethnicities, including "blue-skinned savages" who serve as mercenaries in the armies of white kings.  One such white empire is Achaera, land of brunettes and the most powerful and extensive of the kingdoms.  The current king of Achaera is huge muscular Khroman.  As our story begins, Khroman's most dangerous enemy, huge muscular Corun the pirate, has just been captured.  Khroman's father, the previous king, conquered Corun's kingdom of blonde people, Conahur, and hanged Corun's father, the king of Conahur.  Ever since this conquest, Corun has been a fugitive and a pirate captain, attacking every Achaeran ship and town he can get his hands on.

King Khroman's top adviser is his father-in-law, Shorzon the sorcerer.  Khroman's wife died giving birth to their daughter, Chryseis.  Trained by her grandfather, Chryseis is reputed to be a powerful witch, and is also perhaps the most beautiful woman on the planet!  Anderson unleashes a lot of purple prose in this story, descriptions of landscapes and seascapes and the sky and how they make people feel, and we get elaborate descriptions of Chryseis's "chill sculptured beauty," "marble-white face," "eyes of dark flame," her clothes, her jewelry, her hair, etc.  Chryseis also has a tame monster by the name of Perias, a flying reptile of a species the characters call "erinyes" or just "devil-beasts"-- you can see witch-princess riding Perias on the cover of the magazine.  A pet monster, too?  This is like my dream girl!  Oh, wait, then there's the fact that she "ordered the flaying alive of a thousand Issarian prisoners and counselled some of the darkest intrigues in Achaera's bloody history."  Every rose has its thorn, I guess.

It turns out that Chryseis and Shorzon have bigger fish to fry than just maintaining the power and glory of Achaera.  The two magicians betray King Khroman, springing Corun the corsair from solitary after they have convinced him to join them on a quest that will shake the very foundations of this planet's whole civilization!  Chryseis is a real femme fatale, using her beauty as a carrot ("I like strong men") and her pet monster as a stick ("If you say no...Perias will rip your guts out.")   

Shorozon and Chryseis need Corun's guidance to get to the sea of the Xanthi, fish-people whose language lacks words for "fear" and "love" (but you better believe they have a word for "hate!")  Corun, besides being a first-class hunk and a cunning sailor, is one of the few people who has spoken to the Xanthi and lived to tell the tale, and so is a perfect addition to the crew of the wizard and witch's galley, which otherwise consists of blue men, "a cutthroat gang" whose "reckless courage was legendary."

Anderson's story totally lives up to the sex and violence reputation of Planet Stories--"Witch of the Demon Seas" fulfills the expectations set up by all those covers of beautiful girls facing or meting out horrible deaths. On the month-long voyage to the black castle of the Xanthi, Chryseis and Corun become lovers, and, in a fight against the Xanthi, we get to see Shorozon use his magic and Chryseis shoot her bow and ply her sword.  The sex-charged atmosphere, less-than-admirable characters and pervasive bloodshed reminded me of Leigh Brackett's work, which of course is a compliment!

Even though its full of dragons, sea serpents, witches and swordsmen, this is a science fiction story, not a fantasy.  What the characters seek is not a pile of treasure, but knowledge.  There's a scene in which Corun and another sea captain speculate about the possibility of using a chronometer and a sextant to determine a ship's position on the open sea (their world is too superstitious and low tech to accomplish these feats as of yet.)  All the magic is in fact telepathic hypnosis and illusion, as Corun learns when he does some espionage work, listening in on the negotiations between his girlfriend and her grandfather and the rulers of the scaly Xanthi, themselves formidable wizards.  Shorozon and Chryseis seek to join forces with the fish people and become as gods by enslaving the entire human race and using the masses of human brains as a source of psychic energy.  With their own minds amplified by those of thousands of slaves, S and C think that they and the Xanthi sorcerers can explore the universe beyond the clouds, riddle out the mysteries of nature, and achieve immortality!

When he realizes Chryseis is a megalomaniac who is going to screw over every human being in the world, Corun leads the blue-skinned sailors in a raid on the Xanthi arsenal, where he lights a fuse leading to a stockpile of the Xanthi secret weapon, "devil powder" (you and I would just call it "gun powder.")  The castle explodes during a running fight between the blue humans and the fish men--luckily enough blue people survive to man the galley.  Shorozon is decapitated in the fighting, while Chryseis and Perias escape into the jungle, pursed by a vengeful Corun.  Our hero kills Perias in a gory fight, gouging out one of the monster's eyes with his fingers--yuck!

With the monster dead, and Corun now immune to Chryseis's illusions, I was expecting the blonde muscle man to kill the witch in a cathartic Mickey Spillane-style ending.  I was disappointed to find Anderson was giving us a happily-ever-after ending--the death of her evil grandfather and her monstrous familiar broke the hypnotic spell Shorozon had put on Chryseis so many years ago, when she was just a little girl.  Chryseis was never really evil, she explains, she was just a pawn of her grandfather.  Now that the spell is broken her true (sweet) character is liberated, as is her sincere love for Corun.  As the story ends we are led to believe that Corun will marry Chryseis and eventually become the king of Archaera who unites Archaera and his native Conahur  on a basis of equality and brotherhood.

There is maybe too much blah blah blah about the luminescence on the waves and the smell of Chryseis's hair and all that, and I consider the happy ending that absolves Chryseis of all responsibility for her crimes a cop out*, but "Witch of the Demon Seas" is a pretty good sword fighting adventure story.  Robert Hoskins included "Witch of the Demon Seas" in his 1970 anthology Swords Against Tomorrow, and the Gene Szafran cover actually illustrates the story, depicting Shorozon's ship, a blue sailor, a fish man (with a face like a dog, unfortunately), and sexy sexy newlyweds Corun and Chryseis.

*Here's a question for all you feminists: which is more sexist, a story in which an evil woman uses her gorgeous body and superior intelligence to manipulate men in pursuit of becoming the world's greatest scientist and then gets killed by one of the men she manipulated, or a story in which a good woman is the pawn of a man who manipulates her to act against her goody goody nature and has to be liberated from this domination by yet another man?

"Duel on Syrtis"

"Duel on Syrtis" was printed in one of the most famous issues of Planet Stories, the one with Leigh Brackett's "Black Amazon of Mars" (one of the Stark stories) and A. E. van Vogt's "The Star Saint" (I reread this great story of a hunky superhero, told from the point of view of the "muggle" whom he cuckolds for the good of the community--ugh, even my thick skull is not impervious to that suffocatingly ubiquitous Harry Potter goop!)

In this story, Anderson portrays the human race as a bunch of jerks!  When mankind colonized Mars they enslaved the native Martians, who look like skinny four-foot tall owls, if you can imagine such a thing.    (There is a good illustration of a Martian on page 5 of the magazine.)  They also hunted them for sport!  Slaving and hunting Martians was recently outlawed, but successful interplanetary businessman and big game hunter Riordan hasn't bagged a Martian yet, and he goes to a secluded spot on the red planet where the authorities don't have everything locked up tight yet, to shoot himself an "owlie."

The Martian owlies are very challenging quarry because they are intelligent and psychically in tune with the flora and fauna of the desert landscape--bushes and rodents miles away can warn them of an Earthman's approach, and even attack the Earther.  The Martian Riordan has set his sights on is a particularly tough nut to crack.  Most Martians are now debased members of the urban lower class, but Kreega is one of the last wild Martians, living in an isolated ruin in the desert.  Something like 200 years old, Kreega was one of the greatest warriors of Mars, a witness of the arrival of the first Earthman and a veteran of many raids on the human colonists before the signing of the peace treaties and amnesties now in force. Along with a hunting dog and a hunting bird, Riordan sets out to hunt this wily and venerable Martian hermit.

Anderson gives us a good long action sequence, describing the several days of the hunt through the desert, the various weapons and traps and stratagems employed by the hunter and hunted.  In the end Kreega not only defeats Riordan but captures the Earthman's space ship, and we readers are led to believe that, like the Martians in Chad Oliver's 1952 "Final Exam," Kreega and his fellows are going to be able to copy the ship and weapons and build a military force with which to challenge Earth hegemony.  (More on this Anderson-Oliver connection below.)  Riordan himself is put into suspended animation, still conscious, so that he will be forced to lie inert for centuries, contemplating his defeat.

We see a lot of these stories in which cloddish Earthmen with their high technology are contrasted with aliens who are sensitive and/or artistic and/or live as one with the natural world; I guess all these stories are reflective of a sympathy for the peoples the world over whom Europeans conquered or otherwise dominated, as well as a fear of technology and concern about the environment.  For me, this noble savage stuff has worn thin, but the meat of this tale is the well-written chase, and I can strongly recommend "Duel on Syrtis" as an engaging adventure story, a quite successful entertainment.

"Duel on Syrtis" has reappeared in Anderson collections and a few anthologies, including 1975's The Best Of Planet Stories, edited by Leigh Brackett.  I will also note that, in the issue of Planet Stories that includes "Duel on Syrtis," there is a little one column autobiography by Anderson; among other things, Anderson says that a year spent in Washington, D.C. convinced him that it was not "a town fit to live in" and that his favorite contemporary author is Johannes V. Jensen (Anderson is really into being Scandinavian.)

"The Virgin of Valkarion"

The setting of "The Virgin of Valkarion" reminds one of the Mars of Edgar Rice Burroughs or Leigh Brackett--an old planet, thousands of years ago fertile and ruled by a glorious empire, now a desolate waste of dry sea beds and crumbling ruins.  Our hero is Alfric, a claymore-wielding barbarian who rides some kind of hoofed beast and has behind him a long career as bandit and mercenary general.  When he arrives at Valkarion, the capital of the last tiny remnant of that empire of long ago, two slaves marked in such a way that it is clear they are property of the priesthood try to ambush and murder him.  Why have they targeted him, a total stranger to the environs of Valkarion?

Alfric gets a room in a disreputable inn.  The room comes with what we now are calling a "sex worker," and what the introductory blurb of this story calls "a tavern bawd."  But this is no ordinary prostitute--she is one of the most beautiful women Alfric has ever seen, and she turns out to be exceptionally skilled in "the arts of love."  As that intro blurb told us (that intro is full of spoilers), she is also a Queen--the Empress of Valkarion!

Why are these strange things happening to Alfric?  Well, it all has to do with a prophecy and a major political crisis.  Not only is tonight important astrologically, but the Emperor is dying, and he has no heir.  The priesthood would like to take over the kingdom, but a prophecy from thousands of years ago (recorded in the "Book of the Sibyl") predicts that under just such circumstances an outsider will crown himself Emperor.  So the priests have been looking for a guy like Alfric (to murder) and the Empress likewise has been looking for a guy answering Alfric's description (to ally with.)  After their sex session, the Empress explains all this to Alfric, who is not unwilling to make himself Emperor, and then they get caught up in the open fighting between the agents of the Temple and those devoted to the Empress.  (If the traditionally anti-religious readers of SF haven't already gotten the message,  Anderson makes clear that the Empress would be a better ruler than the priests by pointing out that her financial policy features lower tax rates than that of previous administrations, and that the Temple tries to maintain a monopoly on knowledge of the high technology of the Empire's heyday, even executing those who read the old books and try to build the machinery described therein.)

Alfric and the Empress get captured, and the High Priest gives the Empress the opportunity to marry him, which would make him Emperor--if she refuses she will be gang raped by the Temple slaves and then burned at the stake.  She agrees, but, once untied, contrives to free Alfric, who kills the high priest.  The lovers escape the Temple, and lead the Imperial loyalists against the priests and their dupes, Anderson gives us several (too many) pages of tedious battle scenes.  The Empress herself wears armor and rides a beast and stabs people--I think we can say this story includes the much-sought-after "strong female protagonist."  The Temple and the Imperial Palace both get burned down in the fracas, but we readers are assured that Alfric and his lover will build a glorious new Empire and found a noble new dynasty.

This story is just OK.  I am tired of prophecy stories and the action scenes in this one are not particularly stirring and the characters are not very interesting.  "The Virgin of Valkarion" doesn't seem to have set the world on fire--I don't think it ever appeared in an Anderson collection.  It was translated into Portuguese, however, for inclusion in a 1965 anthology alongside pieces by H. G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, and other worthies.

The issue of Planet Stories that includes "The Virgin of Valkarion" also includes a letter from Chad Oliver, the anthropologist and SF writer whose "Final Exam" I just compared to Anderson's "Duel on Syrtis."  In the letter Oliver praises the active SF community of letter-writers, makes literary puns, and says that Anderson's "Duel on Syrtis" was "outstanding."  Maybe he really did lift the central idea of "Final Exam" from Anderson!  Oliver also, bizarrely, denounces the cover of the March '51 issue, a cover whose use of color I find striking and whose central figure I find mesmerizing.  Chad may have been a good anthropologist, but he was no art critic!

**********

Three worthwhile stories by Anderson, even if "The Virgin of Valkarion" is borderline, and I certainly enjoyed rereading van Vogt's "The Star Saint," while the Anderson autobiography and the letter from Chad Oliver both provide fun insights for us classic SF fans.  Those old magazines available at the internet archive are full of gems!

Four tales of Mars by Leigh Brackett

Let's explore yet another of my Fifty Cent Second Story Books finds, my copy of Ace's 1970s edition of The Coming of the Terrans by Leigh Brackett.  There is some mystery over exactly when this edition was published and who produced its cover illustration, but we know that the first edition of The Coming of the Terrans was published in 1967 and had a cover by Gray Morrow.  The collection includes five stories, and we've already read one, "The Last Days of Shandakor," as it also appears in The Best of Leigh Brackett, which we read in its entirety in the summer of last year.  Today we'll tackle the remaining four stories it contains by the celebrated writer of SF adventures, detective stories, and screenplays.

"The Beast-Jewel of Mars" (1948)

"The Beast-Jewel of Mars" was the cover story of the Winter 1948 edition of Planet Stories, where it is advertised as a story of "lost worlds" where beautiful women try to bewitch tall men (how different is that, really, from our own world?)  I like the cover illustration--the principal figures wear suitably and convincingly desperate expressions and the female lead sports a charming little blue number--and the inside pages boast not only the Brackett tale but contributions from two other beloved writers on the fantastical end of the SF spectrum, Ray Bradbury and Frank Belknap Long. 

Captain Burk Winters is a broken man!  He chain smokes Venusian cigarettes!  His hands shake so severely he drops coins all over the place when he pays a cabbie.  What happened to this dude, who was once one of our best space pilots?  He lost his girl to alien drug pushers, that's what!

Jill Leland was a wealthy member of the thrill-seeking classes who spend their leisure time in the solar system's Trade Cities, where the decadent rich of Earth gamble and indulge in elaborate vices!  Such pastimes are sought to relieve the pressure of life in the go go future--here are the kinds of people one sees in the Trade Cities:

Their faces were pallid and effeminate, scored with the marks of life lived under the driving tension of a super-modern age.

Leland's particular vice was the Martian "Shanga."  The Martians are the heirs of the wreckage of an heroic high-tech civilization that collapsed many centuries ago due to nuclear war; even though they can't reproduce much of that old time technology, the Martians can still operate some of the artifacts, and the Shanga crystals are among such artifacts.  In the Shanga parlors in the Trade Cities, Earth people can expose themselves to the Shanga rays, and temporarily feel physically and mentally younger, and live carefree for a few hours.

Brackett explicitly compares the treatment to drug use, and depicts exposure to the rays as a direct stimulant to the human brain's pleasure centers and as quite addictive.  Hard core addicts like Leland soon hear rumors that the Shanga treatment in the Trade Cities is mere kid's stuff compared to the real deal, the Shanga rays available in the desert in the crumbling half-deserted cities of Mars's heyday.  Winters tried to get the Shanga monkey off Jill's back, but to no avail; she disappeared in the Martian desert without a trace, presumed dead!

We learn all this stuff I just told you over the course of the 60-page story, which is structured sort of like a hard-boiled mystery.  The plot of "The Beast-Jewel of Mars" follows Winters as he goes to the Trade City on Mars, Kahora, and then out into the desert in search of his junkie girlfriend.  Winters is a manly man who isn't really interested in Shanga or any of the twisted allures of the Trade Cities, but to pursue his lost love he patronizes their evil trade, posing as a hopeless Shanga addict.  The Martian pushers take him out to the desert, to a lost city on the shore of a dry ocean basin, where they hold him captive and Winters learns the terrible truth.

The Shanga rays, at full power, after repeated doses, don't just roll your biological clock back to childhood, but back down the evolutionary ladder!  One strong dose of the rays turns Winters into a brutish cave man!  Winters recovers from this treatment, but he sees other Earthlings who have received many doses and been turned back to Neanderthals, to "missing links," even to god-damned reptiles and amphibians!  Winters worries that, if he doesn't escape, he'll eventually get turned into an amoeba!

The Martians, who see themselves as a superior race of great wisdom who were building skyscrapers when humans were still living in caves, resent human control of their ancient red planet.  The tribe of Martians in this story, those who run the Shanga parlors, turn Earthers into these evolutionary throwbacks in order to put them into an old amphitheater to torment them and laugh at them, a way of getting a little of their own back and assuaging their humiliation at the hands of us humies.

Our French friends included "Beast-Jewel of
Mars" in this 1975 anthology of stories from
Planet Stories.

Winters finds Jill Leland reduced to the condition of a cave woman--she can't even talk any more!  At night he escapes captivity and sneaks into the room of the leader of this tribe of vengeful Martians, a beautiful woman named Fand who has catlike grace and walks around with her high breasts bare.  (Brackett generally writes stories in which aliens are so biologically similar to Earth people that they are sexually compatible.)  Winters treats Fand the way a New York state prosecutor might treat one of his girlfriends, knocking her unconscious while she sleeps by bashing her in the head and then tying her up and carrying her back to the amphitheater.  When the Martians turn on the Shanga rays as they do every day, Fand gets exposed just like the Earth-creatures, and, because the Martians are an old race with tired genes, she gets devolved way way back, becoming into a disgusting vermiculate monster.  When her tribe realizes what has happened to Fand, chaos ensues, with the Martians fighting hand-to-hand with the Earth creatures in the arena, and Winters escapes with his mute and illiterate girlfriend to alert the human authorities about the menace of the Shanga parlors.       

(The crazy evolution stuff in "The Beast-Jewel of Mars" reminded me of the numerous stories by Brackett's husband, Edmond Hamilton, that feature wild speculations about evolution, and of course the whole plot and theme of the story reminds you of Chinese opium dens and Chinese resentment of Western imperialism.)

When we read two Poul Anderson novels recently we saw they were full of signs of his libertarian attitude--celebrations of private trade, the individual, and rational reason, and denunciations of big government and mysticism.  In "The Beast-Jewel of Mars" we see signs of an old-fashioned conservatism on the part of Brackett.  Modern life, we are told, is too fast and too complicated and drives people batty, and we see that modern wealth and leisure just leave hands idle to do the devil's work.  Interstellar trade hasn't made the life of Terran or Martian better, but corrupted and demeaned them both, giving rise to bitter hatreds as each race abuses or exploits the other at every opportunity.   Brackett also evinces a traditional skepticism of the city and city life:

Winters hated the Trade Cities.  He was used to the elemental honesty of space.  Here the speech, the dress, even the air one breathed, were artificial.

As you might guess, the Trade City on Earth is New York, a famous target for criticism from country folk and conservatives (and not always without reason.)

Not Brackett's best work, but entertaining and interesting.

Scanned from my copy, a brief introductory essay by Brackett and a list of "othe" Ace books
by her, including Alpha Centauri or Die! and Sword of Rhiannon, which I own and have read,
  and Big Jump, another publisher's edition of which I own and have read.

"Mars Minus Bisha" (1954)

Another cover for Brackett, and another Planet Stories in which Brackett shares an issue with Ray Bradbury; this time Bradbury is represented by one of the all-time most famous dinosaur stories and stories about time travel, "A Sound of Thunder."  In "Mars Minus Bisha" Brackett again invites comparisons between the people of Mars and East Asians, this time very directly:

She sat up, a dark and shaggy-haired young person, with eyes the color of topaz, and the customary look of premature age and wisdom that the children of Mars share with the children of the Earthly East.

This is the kind of thing you'd probably think twice about committing to paper today.

Fraser is a scientist living alone in a Quonset hut in the Martian desert, studying Martian diseases.  A woman from a tribe of reptile-riding nomads brings her daughter to him and flees--the shamans of her tribe had declared the seven-year old girl, Bisha, to be cursed, scapegoating her for a plague, and sentenced her to death.  Fraser examines her and finds Bisha to be perfectly healthy, and she moves in with him; soon the little girl is the light of his life, and he plans on bringing her home with him to Earth when his project is complete in a few months.

But it is not to be--this story is a tragedy!  From an ancient race of Martians with tremendous psychic powers Bisha has inherited a recessive genetic trait, an ability to drain the life force of those around her over which she has no control!  If they continue to live alone together, Bisha's autonomic vampiric powers will eventually kill Fraser, but if Fraser lets any Martians see her they will recognize her condition and destroy her.  Fraser's life force is fading--can he get to a human settlement three hundred miles away before he expires and before any natives spot Bisha?  And if not, who will live and who will die?

An effective story, more economical (just 30 pages) and better structured than "The Beast-Jewel of Mars" and with more human feeling, including a sad ending like something out of Somerset Maugham which took me by surprise.

"Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon" (1964)

Brackett's name sits at the top of the list on the cover of the 15th Anniversary "All Star" issue of F&SF, right above her husband's.  (We read Hamilton's contribution to this issue, "The Pro," back in June of last year.)  Preceding "Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon" is a page long bio of Brackett and a description of this story's genesis--it seems that Anthony Boucher, writing about Brackett in F&SF in 1955, made up the slightly goofy name od this story as a sort of parody of the titles of the type of planetary romances she excelled at writing, but some readers didn't realize it was a joke and began asking Brackett where they could find the story.  So, when the opportunity presented itself almost ten years later, Brackett wrote a story to match the title, making real this once fabulous component of her oeuvre.

Harvey Selden (!) has always wanted to go to Mars.  As he looks at the red planet from the observation dome of the starship as it comes in for a landing, Third Officer Bentham, an alcoholic whose career has been stunted by his love for the bottle, invites Selden to have dinner with him on the surface with some Martian friends of his.

Selden is staying at the Kahora Hilton.  Kahora has changed since the days when Jill Leland and Burk Winters frequented the Shanga parlor there; now that "the bad old days of laissez-faire," as Selden calls them, are over, Kahora and the other Trade Cities are under strict government control and all those sinful amusements are just a memory.  Kahora now has seven domes--Bentham takes Selden to the original dome, now a residential district, to meet his friends, including a Martian called Firsa Mak, Firsa Mak's sister and her human husband Altman, and a gorgeous Martian girl who walks around topless and serves the drinks, Lella.

Though this is his first trip to Mars, Selden is an academic expert on Martian culture and history; he came to Mars to take up a position at the Bureau of Interworld Cultural Relations.  He is also one of those liberals who identifies more with the colonized Martians than with his own people, the colonizers, and denigrates the actions of the first human explorers of the red planet, calling them "piratical exploiters."   

...Firsa Mak said with honest curiosity, "Why is it that all you young Earthmen are so ready to cry down the things your own people have done?"

Selden dismisses as nonsense the stories told by those first Earthmen to visit Mars about Martian cults who worshiped evil gods and practiced human sacrifice, but he's in for a surprise, because Bentham the drunk has just delivered him into the hands of people who know how very true those stories are!  Lella has served him a drugged drink and when he wakes up he's bound and gagged in the cold wilderness beyond the domed cities.  Brackett presents starkly the contrast between bookish know-it-all Selden, who in the wilderness proves weak and ineffectual, and adventurous manly men Firsa Mak and Altman, who are perfectly comfortable in harsh conditions and dangerous situations.

This German collection of
Brackett stories includes
"Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon"

Firsa Mak and Altman disguise Selden and drag him to a ritual where cultists pay obeisance to a slumbering Godzilla-sized monster.  The experience is so horrifying that Selden faints.  When he wakes up, Firsa Mak and Altman try to convince Selden to alert the Terran authorities about this cult which sacrifices people twice a year and its dangerous monster, which, they fear, if roused could destroy an entire city.  The government does not believe scruffy adventurers like them, but maybe they will believe a trained academic and member of the establishment like Selden?   

Selden, however, begins to doubt his own senses--Lella drugged him, after all--and worries that spreading rumors about Martian cults and Brobdingnagian monsters will wreck his career.  Instead of reporting the menace to the authorities he abandons his new job with the Bureau and flees to Earth where he undergoes psychotherapy and is relieved to be told he hallucinated the ritual and the monster, the result of drugs working on his unresolved feelings about his mother and his repressed homosexuality.  (We see evidence of Bracket's adherence to traditional ideas about gender roles and sexual mores here as well as in the quote I extracted from "The Beast-Jewel of Mars" above and in her novel Alpha-Centauri or Die!)

"Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon" is well-written and I liked it, but at the same time I have to admit I thought the end was a little disappointing, anti-climactic.  A traditional adventure or horror story with a plot like this would end with the protagonist killing the monster and/or the priestess or making a narrow escape.  Instead, this story is a satire of inept intellectual types who look down on the brave men who defend and expand society, and so the main character is a kind of spectator lead around by the nose and kept from danger by the manly adventurer characters.  He is never in real danger and because he is incompetent outside a classroom he never makes any real decisions of consequence, just takes the path of least resistance.  I'm all for goofing on effete liberals and psychoanalytic quacks, but to achieve its full potential I think a story that follows the kind of adventure/horror template that this one follows needs real tension and a real climax--as "Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon" stands, it is unsatisfying.  (I was hoping all along that Selden himself was going to be sacrificed--this would accomplish the goal of ridiculing the willfully-blind academic types who dismiss the reports of men in the field while at the same time providing a satisfying horror story conclusion.  Of course, then Brackett couldn't work the psychoanalytic angle.)

Another problem I have with the story is the equivocal role of Lella.  We have every reason to believe that the masked woman who leads the ritual, the Purple Priestess, is Lella herself, but at the same time Lella seems to be allied with Firsa Mak and Altman, who are trying to get the government to do away with the cult.  A nagging mystery.

"The Road to Sinharat" (1963)

"The Road to Sinharat" was an Amazing cover story.  isfdb lists it as part of the Eric John Stark series, but Brackett's famous hero does not appear in the tale.  Maybe it is considered part of the Stark series because the city of Sinharat also appears in a Stark story "Queen of the Martian Catacombs," later expanded into the novel The Secret of Sinharat? 

Long ago Mars was a world of oceans and forests; today it is an arid desert.  The men of Earth think they have the technology to restore part of the red planet to its former verdant glory, but the Martians resist the renewal project; they have made peace with their old and tired planet, and don't want to see their canals messed with and their settlements moved.  In fact, the renewal effort is leading to unrest among the natives and even violence against Earthmen.

In 1932 Edmond Hamilton published the short story "Conquest of Two Worlds," a story about Earth imperialism and an Earthman who joined with the natives of Jupiter to oppose Earth oppression.  Brackett considered this one of her husband's best stories--at least she chose it for The Best of Edmond Hamilton, a volume she edited.  I bring this up because "The Road to Sinharat" also features a Terran, Dr. Matthew Carey, who goes against his superiors and risks his life to stand against Earth interference with aliens.

Carey is an archaeologist currently working with the organization planning the renewal project--because the natives oppose the project, so does Carey.  Carey has lived so long among Martians, exploring tombs and even participating in barbarian raids, that he can pass for a Martian desert dweller and capably wield Martian weapons (by which I mean things like axes and daggers--I guess automatic rifles and heat ray pistols aren't among the ancient Martian technologies which have survived.)  He ditches his job to help the natives, and the plot of "The Road to Sinharat" follows Carey and some Martians--the trader Derech, an old friend who accompanied him on his archaeological expeditions years ago, and Arrin, a sexy Martian girl--as they travel via canal barge and then on reptile-back to the forbidden city of Sinharat, to look for some ancient documents which may convince the Terran authorities to abandon their renewal scheme.  They face various obstacles, among them pursuit by a Terran police detective, Howard Wales, and his Martian cops, who is tasked with bringing in the renegade archaeologist on suspicion of fomenting native violence.

Eventually Carey and his friends and Wales and his cops end up trapped together inside Sinharat, under siege by some barbarians who are reluctant to enter the ancient city, which is taboo because it was once the HQ of a tribe of Martian scientists who achieved longevity by kidnapping young people and shifting their consciousnesses into the youth's bodies.  Just as an aircraft comes to rescue the besieged humans and their Martian comrades, Carey finds the records he needs.  They show that the body snatchers of Sinharat, ages ago, launched their own renewal effort, and the memory of its eventual failure lingers in the Martians' cultural consciousness, rendering all such efforts anathema.  These records convince the authorities to abandon their plans.

"The Road to Sinharat" was among the
stories from Amazing and Fantastic
included in this 1968 reprint magazine.

Like "The Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon," "The Road to Sinharat" contrasts academic experts who think they know it all with the men of action in the field who actually do know what's going on, and like "The Beast-Jewel of Mars" doles out some harsh conservative medicine--change is bad, progress is a scam, history is a tragedy, and you shouldn't interfere in other people's business, even if you have the best of intentions.  "The Road to Sinharat" is also reminiscent of Brackett's "Citadel of Lost Ships;" both feature government projects that relocate towns and tinker with water sources, allegedly for the greater good.  (Public policies that destroyed American communities to create reservoirs and dams, like those chronicled here, seem to have struck a chord with Brackett.)

While not bad, this story is another disappointment.  Brackett overstuffs "The Road to Sinharat" with lots of cool material, but because it is confined to a paltry 50 pages the story feels rushed and cramped, almost like a condensed version of a longer piece of work.  All Brackett's ideas and all the many relationships she sets up are dealt with in cursory fashion--she has no room to explore any of them with any depth, so they lack dramatic power.  Derech, Arrin, Wales, and Alan Woodthorpe, head of the renewal project, all have potentially fun and interesting relationships with Carey, in particular Wales and Woodthorpe, because all three of the Earthmen have a strong sense of duty and a determination to do the right thing for the people of Mars, but Carey's thinking is at odds with those of his fellow Earthers, and over the course of the story Carey wins them to see his side.  Unfortunately, Brackett doesn't have room to develop these relationships and chart their evolution in a compelling way.  Arrin is also a lost opportunity--she could have been a sexual interest for Carey, part of a love triangle with Carey and Derech, or given voice to one of the numerous Martian factions (Brackett's Martians are not monolithic, but split into distinct and often competing cultural and political groups who react to the colonizers differently, just like colonized peoples in real life) or all three, but as the story appears, she does very little.

(I often moan that a piece of fiction is too long, but here we have the rare case in which I think a story would have been better at two or even three times the length.)

Another problem with "The Road to Sinharat" is that it lacks the thrilling danger and cathartic (and sexualized) violence of many of Brackett's stories--often in Brackett stories men kill each other with their bare hands and women get beaten or killed (when Fand in "The Beast-Jewel of Mars" got transformed into a 100 lb. slug her lieutenant euthanized her with a sword.)  I don't think anybody gets killed in "The Road to Sinharat"--when the barbarians charge Wales and his men they repel the charge with stun guns.  To be satisfying, an adventure story has to have believable physical or psychological dangers, and "The Road to Sinharat" comes up short in this department. 

**********

"Mars Minus Bisha" is a quite good story of human feeling, while the other pieces we've looked at today are just marginally good or merely acceptable.  "Beast-Jewel of Mars" has some of the violence and passion that bring to life Brackett's best work, like Sword of Rhiannon or "Enchantress of Venus," but lacks their strong characterizations and relationships, while "The Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon" and "The Road to Sinharat" follow an adventure template but lack the danger and violence of a good adventure story and the latter feels underdeveloped.  Fortunately, there are still Brackett stories out there I haven't read, and I can live in the hope that there is another Brackett masterpiece awaiting me.