Leigh Brackett
The Best of Leigh Brackett
edited by Edmond Hamilton
COPYRIGHT (c) 1977 BY LEIGH BRACKETT
Introduction: Story-teller of Many Worlds
COPYRIGHT (c) 1977 BY EDMOND HAMILTON
Map by Margaret Howes
All Rights Reserved
Published by arrangement with
Ballantine Books A Division of Random House, Inc.
201 East 50th Street New York, New York 10022
To be published by Ballantine as a Del Rey Book
* * *
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“The Jewel of Bas,” copyright (c) 1944 by Love Romances Publishing Company, Inc., for Planet Stories, spring 1944.
“The Vanishing Venusians,” copyright (c) 1944 by Love Romances Publishing Company, Inc., for Planet Stories, spring 1944.
“The Veil of Astellar,” copyright (c) 1944 by Standard Magazines, Inc., for Thrilling Wonder Stories, spring 1944.
“The Moon That Vanished,” copyright (c) 1948 by Standard Magazines, Inc., for Thrilling Wonder Stories, October 1948.
“Enchantress of Venus,” copyright (c) 1949 by Love Romances Publishing Company, Inc., for Planet Stories, Fall 1949.
“The Woman From Altair,” copyright (c) 1951 by Better Publications, Inc., for Startling Stories, July 1951.
“The Last Days of Shandakor,” copyright (c) 1952 by Better Publications, Inc., for Startling Stories, April 1952.
“Shannach—The Last,” copyright (c) 1952 by Love Romances Publishing Company, Inc., for Planet Stories, November 1952.
“The Tweener,” copyright (c) 1954 by Fantasy House, Inc., for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 1955.
“The Queer Ones,” copyright (c) 1956 by Fantasy House, Inc., for Venture Science Fiction, March 1957.
Story-teller of Many Worlds
The author of these stories was once, a good many years ago, a sunburned, muscular, small girl roaming the California beach in front of her grandfather’s old house and playing at being a pirate. From what her family told me, I believe she was a hardy, adventurous little tomboy. But then something happened that wafted her away to realms more fascinating than the shores of Santa Monica Bay and imagined piracy.
The something was a chance gift to her of a copy of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Gods of Mars. In that classic of wild adventure on a haunted, dying Mars, Leigh found a basis on which to build new and vaster dreams. The book was an inspiration on which, in later years, she slowly built up her own colorful Mars, the planet of the wicked Low-Canal cities and desert tribesmen and lost secrets, the world of an ancient history full of magic and mystery.
After her first stories about Mars, she began to create her own Venus. This was her very own planet, with such glamorous features as the Sea of Morning Opals and the Mountains of White Cloud. She was soon writing many adventure stories about it, progressing to wholly imaginary worlds.
Here I intrude a personal note. I had met and become good friends with Leigh in the summers of 1940 and 1941, which I spent in California, and when I returned to Pennsylvania I read her earliest adventure stories with great interest. I thought they were fine, swinging action stories.
In a magazine a couple of years later, I read the longest of her stories thus far, “The Jewel of Bas.” Here was something that made me sit up and take notice. It was basically a thrilling adventure tale, but there had been some changes made. In the first place, the conventional hero and heroine of such stories were gone. Instead as the chief protagonists we had Mouse and Ciaran, two wholly believable and earthy (if the term may be permitted) people. The alien landscapes were sharply realized. And, as an old writer about androids myself, I was struck by the eeriness and power of the androids she had created. I well remember that when I’d finished this story I shook my head in surprise and said, “Hey, this gal can write!”
Soon after that I read “The Veil of Astellar” and was equally impressed by that. This dark, haunting story of a man who betrayed his own people for love of an alien seemed to me—and still does—to have great power. I have always thought that the main character was modeled after Humphrey Bogart. Leigh refuses to confirm this, but I know that she was a great admirer of Bogart at that time. And each time I read this story I seem to hear the somber, unforgettable Bogart voice, as a sort of voice-over.
By coincidence, soon after writing “Astellar,” Leigh was hired by Hollywood film producer Howard Hawks to work on the script of the now-classic Bogart-Bacall film, The Big Sleep… collaborating with the august William Faulkner, no less. From that she went on to other Hollywood film script jobs for a couple of years.
But when I returned to California in the summer of 1946, the whole movie business had been closed down by a craft-union strike. And so by the end of 1946, when Leigh and I were married, she went back to her first love, science-fiction…back to Mars and Venus. And this time she created her most famous character, a great, half-wild, formidable son of Earth reared on savage Mercury—Eric John Stark, whose adventures she was to follow in later years in “The Ginger Star” series and others.
One of her first stories about Stark took him to the Brackett Venus. I believe that “Enchantress of Venus” is one of the best of the Stark stories; it’s the story of a half-wild man’s struggle with the demoniac oligarchs of the Lhari, played out against that gorgeous Venusian background. The scenes in the strange depths of the gaseous Red Sea lead inexorably toward a final struggle…and a final failure.
And indeed, this is a favorite and recurring theme of the Leigh Brackett stories—the theme of a strong man’s quest for a dream and of his final failure when it turns to smoke and ashes in his hands. From the hero of her early “Astellar” story, to the Jim Beckwourth of her splendid historical novel Follow the Free Wind, her heroes seek something that they can never quite attain, yet their failure is not really defeat. “The Moon That Vanished,” with its foredoomed quest for the mysterious Moonfire across the alien seas of Venus, is just such a story. And so is “Shannach—The Last,” which works up a strange sympathy for the unhuman alien whose final defeat is also victory.
The Brackett Mercury, lacking the glamor of Venus and the haunting sadness of ancient Mars—there is no history here, and no beauty—has a certain harsh authority even so. Nature is the chief villain, and a convincingly nasty one. Those were the days when we were all writing, in accordance with the latest guesses of astronomers and scientists, about a Mercury that kept one face always to the sun and the other to space and had a Twilight Belt between these extremes of savage heat and bitter cold, where there were alternate sunsets and sunrises due to the rocking of the planet, and where life might conceivably exist. Today those concepts have been shot down by better data from probes and more advanced scientific methods. But in those days they were valid, and Leigh’s concept of a world where tremendous mountains went up literally beyond the sky, where the cliff-locked valleys were racked by violent storms and sudden rockfalls, and life was a precarious thing beset by heat and cold, thirst and starvation, is a nice little view of Hell. It was this world that molded Eric John Stark, but she used it in a number of other stories, of which “Shannach” is the best.
Before leaving the other planets to return, fictionally, to Earth, Leigh wrote the last, finest, and saddest of all her Mars stories. “The Last Days of Shandakor” is a summing-up, a valedictory, of the Brackett Mars. The old glories of Mars are faded and lost, and the dreamers of Shandakor, summoning up as shadows the magnificence of the old legends, doubtless mirror the mood of the author taking leave of the wonderful world she had built up in her imagination since the time a little girl had read Burroughs on a California beach.
The two stories, “The Woman from Altair” and “The Queer Ones,” both take place on Earth, but with the outer universe as background. In both stories, visitants from other worlds are the key characters. Yet the two stories are done from exactly opposite viewpoints: one from the standpoint of strong sympathy with the strange visitant, the other from the viewpoint of the ordinary Earth folk who regard the visitant with fear and wonder.
It was during this fictional return to Earth that Leigh wrote the most impressive of her full-length science-fiction novels. This was The Long Tomorrow, a prophetic tale of the world after an atomic war that has become a near classic. It originated from her interest in the Ohio village background that is now her home for half the year (the other half being spent in the California desert). When she first came to Ohio, she was greatly intrigued by the Amish folk here who continue their old, simple way of life in the midst of the modern world. This led her to remark that if modern civilization disappeared, the Amish would be perfectly fitted to live in a non-mechanical world—and that remark grew into a novel.
I have always admired the ease with which Leigh can move from one kind of fiction to a completely different land. In eighteen months, in 1956-57, she wrote not only The Long Tomorrow but also two novels of crime and suspense, The Tiger among Us, which became an Alan Ladd movie, and An Eye for an Eye, which formed the pilot for the “Markham” series on television.
At the end of that period, she returned to Hollywood and to her old producer, Howard Hawks, to write Rio Bravo, the first of a series of John Wayne action-epics she has done. The other three were Hatari!, an African jungle story, and El Dorado and Rio Lobo, two more big Westerns. I well remember that when she was writing El Dorado, there was a difference of opinion between Leigh on one side and the producer and star on the other. They wanted to repeat a scene that had been used in Rio Bravo, and Leigh doesn’t like to repeat. When I asked her how the argument came out, she said, “I told them it was too close to the scene in the earlier picture and that we couldn’t use it, and Howard asked surprisedly, ‘Why can’t we?’ and Duke Wayne said, ‘If it was good once, it’ll be just as good again.’ ” Leigh added, “I knew when I was outgunned…so I shut up and wrote the scene.”
Through the years, Leigh has continued to work for Hollywood in feature films and television. One of her most recent feature scripts was for the Raymond Chandler novel The Long Goodbye. The producer had read the script of The Big Sleep, done decades before, and decided that Leigh Brackett could write a Chandler film better than anyone else. So she flew twice to London for conferences, and did the script here in our Ohio farmhouse.
But during all these years, she has continued to write science-fiction in between the film jobs. A film-writers’ strike, which gave her an unexpected vacation from Hollywood work, provided the opportunity to return to her favorite hero, Eric John Stark, in a series of novels set in a wider sphere than the old Stark stories. The Ginger Star and its sequels, The Hounds of Skaith and The Reavers of Skaith, launch Stark out of this little solar system into the starry universe, and the old Brackett Mars and Venus are laid aside for the gorgeous star-world of Skaith.
I might mention that Leigh is talented in many fields other than writing. When she graduated from her girls’ school in California, she immediately got a job in another school, teaching swimming and dramatics. Each subject came easily to her. She is to this day an expert swimmer. I regret to add that also to this day she is a frustrated ham-actress.
But her talents withstood a severer test when we moved to the Middle West. We had driven east in the summer of 1949 with Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore—two of our oldest friends, and an even earlier married-science-fiction-writing couple than ourselves. That was a trip we still treasure in memory. It contained that unforgettable moment when Henry encountered, all unaware, an elephant in darkest Iowa…
Once back east, in 1950, we bought a home in the country. It was an ancient little Ohio farmhouse, built in 1819, a mile outside of the quiet, New England-like village of Kinsman. We did not realize that we were buying trouble…the house had been vacant and abandoned for years, it had never had electricity, and its water supply was a stone-lined well dug out sometime before the Civil War.
Just as so many of today’s youngsters are doing, we set in to restore the old wreck and return to life in the woods. I remember that the grass in the front yard was a yard high. Looking out from work inside one day, I saw Leigh out there sturdily dealing with the grass. She had bought an old-fashioned scythe up in the village and was swinging it with abandon. By some miracle, since she had never used a scythe before, she avoided cutting off her own ankles.
That was only the beginning. In the succeeding few years, as we strove to make a habitable dwelling out of our Early American relic, Leigh helped me roll big stones out of the yard, lay down new floors, tack up wall paneling, and on at least one occasion, she was up on the roof helping tack shingles. In between times, for fun, we roamed the old woods, gathering blackberries and wild strawberries. In the evenings, she would “put up” jars of delicious jam and other delicacies…and next day return early to the typewriter and her current work.
I recall that in the early winter of 1966 we had returned from Hollywood, where she had been working on the film script of El Dorado. We were, in a few weeks, leaving for a long-planned trip to Egypt, Persia and the Middle East. But in the past spring we had planted parsnips and now they had to be dug out of the freezing ground before we left. As we labored with forks and spades in the half-frozen mud of the garden to dig up those blasted parsnips—which seemed to be immovable, the more we tried to lever them up, the more we levered ourselves down into the mud—I chaffed her by saying, “This is a strange interlude between Hollywood and Egypt.” She merely answered, “They’re good parsnips and they have to be stored properly before we leave,” and kept right on digging.
The only outdoor activity Leigh would never engage in was hunting. I had bought a fine Sako .222 caliber rifle, ideal for potting the woodchucks that kept digging holes around the edge of our meadow. But when the time came to use it, Leigh made strong objections. She had got used to watching the woodchucks from her window, when she looked up from her typewriter, and had sort of made pets of them, and did we have to kill them? Needless to say, my fine high-powered rifle with its beautiful variable telescopic sight has never been used.
It might seem that for two full-time professional writers to marry and set up housekeeping together would create problems. But it never did. As we both knew how hard it is to write a story, we respected each other’s work-habits from the first. When one of us goes to a workroom and to a typewriter, everything else is ignored and we don’t interrupt one another.
I have sometimes been asked why we never collaborated on a story. Well, of course, during all these years we have done a good bit of what I might call unofficial collaboration. And quite recently we did our first full-dress collaboration on a story for Harlan Ellison’s Last Dangerous Visions anthology. We decided to write a story that would feature our respective favorite heroes. Leigh’s favorite, of course, is Eric John Stark. My own were the Star Kings, a gaudy bunch of far-future adventurers whom I wrote about years ago. So the story came out “Stark and the Star Kings,” and will appear next year.
We found, when we first began working together, that we had quite different ways of doing a story. I was used to writing a synopsis of the plot first, and then working from that. To my astonishment, when Leigh was working on a story and I asked her, “Where is your plot?” she answered, “There isn’t any…I just start writing the first page and let it grow.” I exclaimed, “That is a devil of a way to write a story!” But for her, it seemed to work fine.
We never read each other’s stories until they’re finished. The trouble is that you can get thrown off your own ideas by suggestions, however good, from the other party. Pretty soon you’re all confused and your story vanishes in a haze of contradictory elements. So we nearly always wait
until we’re finished.
There was one exception. When Leigh wrote Follow the Free Wind, she was a little uneasy about my reactions to it. She knew that Jim Beckwourth, the valiant mulatto who went west in the old days and became one of the great mountain-men and pathbreakers of the West, was one of my heroes. She was afraid that I’d take umbrage at something she had written about Jim. So after she finished each section of the book, she had me read that section. Each time I was able to say, “That’s perfect…just keep going.”
Although I had been writing professionally a dozen years earlier than Leigh, I learned a great deal from her. My own work was usually done at high speed, and often contained hasty pages. But I soon found that having a built-in critic right in the house pulled me up short when I did something too hurried and careless.
She was, and is, the kindest of critics. When I would give her my finished story to read, if it was good she was enthusiastic in her comments. But if it was less than good, she never said, “This is faulty.” Instead, she would unconsciously get a little wrinkled frown and would choose her words very carefully. She would say, “This or that minor character is very well done.” Not a word about the fact that the whole rest of the story was unsatisfactory. But I very soon got the message. And so, when I got some kindly, cautious reaction like that from her, I would simply go and write the story over again.
That was very good for my writing, after all those years of highspeed production for pulp magazines. And I think, and other people have told me, that my writing improved rapidly because of it. For that—and for at least a million other things—I’m grateful to her.
Edmond Hamilton
Kinsman, Ohio
The Best of Leigh Brackett Page 1