The Best of Planet Stories, No. 1
Page 1
1939-1955
During the golden age of the pulps — those fabulous magazines featuring larger-than-life heroes battling monstrous aliens on hostile planets or pursuing the luscious goddesses of golden worlds — some 70 issues of Planet Stories were published. When the magazine folded, along with most of the other pulps, the space opera all but disappeared. Gone were those marvelous stories that drew us out beyond our narrow skies into the vastness of interstellar space where a billion nameless planets might harbor life forms infinitely numerous and strange. Now Leigh Brackett — whose thrilling tales of wonder and high adventure filled the pages of Planet — has selected seven of the most dazzling stories ever published in that magazine.
BY LEIGH BRACKETT ON THE
BALLANTINE BOOKS LIST:
The Long Tomorrow
The Ginger Star (Stark #1)
The Hounds of Skaith (Stark #2)
The Best of PLANET STORIES #1
Strange Adventures on Other Worlds
Edited by Leigh Brackett
BALLANTINE BOOKS, NEW YORK
Copyright © 1975 by Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
SBN 345-24334-X-125
First Printing: January, 1975
Printed in the United States of America
BALLANTINE BOOKS
A Division of Random House, Inc.
201 East 50th Street, New York, N.Y. 10022. Simultaneously published by Ballantine Books, Ltd., Toronto, Canada
For T. T. Scott, who made Fiction House a home.
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION: Beyond Our Narrow Skies
Leigh Brackett
LORELEI OF THE RED MIST Leigh Brackett and Ray Bradbury
THE STAR-MOUSE Frederic Brown
RETURN OF A LEGEND Raymond Z. Gallun
QUEST OF THIG Basil Wells
THE ROCKETEERS
HAVE SHAGGY EARS Keith Bennett
THE DIVERSIFAL Ross Rocklynne
DUEL ON SYRTIS Poul Anderson
Acknowledgments
"Lorelei of the Red Mist," copyright © 1946 by Love Romances Publishing Co., Inc.; reprinted by permission of the authors' agents, Harold Matson Co., Inc., for Ray Bradbury, and Lurton Blasingame for Leigh Brackett.
"The Star Mouse," copyright © 1942 by Love Romances Publishing Co., Inc.; reprinted by permission of the author and his agent, Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc.
"Return, of a Legend," copyright © 1952 by Love Romances Publishing Co., Inc.; reprinted by permission of the author.
"Quest of Thig," copyright © 1942 by Love Romances Publishing Co., Inc.; reprinted by permission of the author.
"The Rocketeers Have Shaggy Ears," copyright © 1949 by Love Romances Publishing Co., Inc.; reprinted by arrangement with Forrest J. Ackerman, 2495 Glendower Ave., Hollywood/ CA 90027.
"The Diversifal," copyright © 1951 by Love Romances Publishing Co., Inc.; reprinted by permission of the author and his agent, Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc.
"Duel on Syrtis," copyright © 1951 by Love Romances Publishing Co., Inc.; reprinted by permission of the author and his agent, Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc.
Introduction: Beyond Our Narrow Skies
It is seldom enough that one has the opportunity to stand up publicly and say "Thank you" to an old friend. Therefore it gives me great pleasure to be writing this introduction to the first of a new series: THE BEST OF PLANET STORIES.
For fifteen years, from 1940 to 1955, when the magazine ceased publication, I had the happiest relationship possible for a writer with the editors of Planet Stories. They gave me, in the beginning, a proving-ground where I could gain strength and confidence in the exercise of my fledgling skills, a thing of incalculable value for a young writer. They sent me checks, which enabled me to keep on eating. In later years, they provided a steady market for the kind of stories I liked best to write. In short, I owe them much. To Malcolm Reiss, and to Wilbur Peacock, Chester Whitehorn, Paul L. Payne, Jack O'Sullivan, and Jerome Bixby, my fondest salutations.
It was fashionable for a while, among certain elements of science-fiction fandom, to hate Planet Stories. They hated the magazine, apparently, because it was not Astounding Stories, a view which I found ridiculous at the time, and still do. (They come now — to be truthful, not those identical fans, — and say, "Gee, Planet was a great magazine, I wish we had it back!") Of course Planet wasn't Astounding; it never pretended to be Astounding, and that was a mercy for a lot of us who would have starved to death if John W. Campbell, Jr., had been the sole and only market for our wares. Apart from everything else, there wasn't room enough for all of us in that one magazine. And we who wrote for Planet tended to be more interested in wonders than we were in differential calculus or the theory and practice of the hydraulic ram, even if we knew all about such things. (I didn't.) Astounding went for the cerebrum, Planet for the gut, and it always seemed to me that one target was as valid as the other. Chacun à son goût.
Planet, unashamedly, published "space opera." Space opera, as every reader doubtless knows, is a pejorative term often applied to a story that has an element of adventure. Over the decades, brilliant and talented new writers appear, receiving great acclaim, and each and every one of them can be expected to write at least one article stating flatly that the day of space opera is over and done, thank goodness, and that henceforward these crude tales of interplanetary nonsense will be replaced by whatever type of story that writer happens to favor — closet psychological dramas, closet dramas, sex dramas, etc., but, by God, important dramas containing nothing but Big Thinks.
Ten years later, the writer in question may or may not still be around, but the space opera can be found right where it always was, sturdily driving its dark trade in heroes.
There's a reason for this. The tale of adventure — of great courage and daring, of battle against the forces of darkness and the unknown — has been with the human race since it first learned to talk. It began as part of the primitive survival technique, interwoven with magic and ritual, to explain and propitiate the vast forces of nature with which man could not cope in any other fashion. The tales grew into religions. They became myth and legend. They became the Mabinogion and the Ulster Cycle and the Völuspá. They became Arthur and Robin Hood, and Tarzan of the Apes.
The so-called space opera is the folk-tale, the hero-tale, of our particular niche in history. No more than a few years back, Ziolkovsky was a visionary theoretician. Goddard, a genius before his time, had to pretend that his rockets were for high-altitude research only because he was afraid to use the word "space." The important men, who were carrying their brains in their hip-pockets, continued to sit upon them, sneering, until Sputnik went up and frightened the daylights out of them. But the space opera has been telling us tales of spaceflight, of journeys to other worlds in this solar system, of journeys to the world of other stars, even to other galaxies; the space opera has been telling them for decades, with greater or less skill but with enormous love and enthusiasm.
These stories served to stretch our little minds, to draw us out beyond our narrow skies into the vast glooms of interstellar space, where the great suns ride in splendor and the bright nebulae fling their veils of fire parsecs-long across the universe; where the Coal-sack and the Horsehead make patterns of black mystery; where the Cepheid variables blink their evil eyes and a billion nameless planets may harbor life-forms infinitely numerous and strange. Escape fiction? Yes, indeed!
But in its own ironic way, as we see now, it was an escape into a reality which even now some people are still trying to fight off as the Devil fights off holy
water, afraid to look up and out. Usually the space opera was firmly based, in its essentials, upon current knowledge and/or advanced speculation in technology, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, etc. And wild-eyed as some of them may have been, the stories taught us a lot about the universe we live in. They taught us the difference between a planet, a moon, a sun, a solar system, and a galaxy, things which still, incredibly, seem not to be understood by a large number of citizens; taught us something about celestial mechanics, and the origins of life, and the ultimate deaths of stars. They also taught us to beware of scientific absolutes.
Science once knew as a fact that communication between Earth and an orbiting spaceship would be quite impossible because of the Heaviside Layer, through which radio waves could not penetrate. Technology took a step ahead, and we're getting excellent results. Einstein has caused a deal of trouble with his apparently irrefutable theory that the speed of light is the limiting speed of the universe, thereby cutting the continuum out from under the faster-than-light drives necessary to take a spaceship from one star to another in a manageable (for story purposes) length of time. Well, there are ways of getting around that, fictionally, and meanwhile some hateful little particles have been caught moving at speeds exceeding that of light ... so who knows? The most important thing about the space opera was that, besides offering adventure and excitement, it shook us loose from the dead weight of conventional thinking that denied the existence of anything beyond cheese, fence-post, and the income tax.
Now we have seen the actuality. We have seen, via television, those footprints on the Moon, man's first step into the wider universe which he must seek out or perish. We have seen space opera of the noblest sort in the flight of Apollo Thirteen, where brave and gallant men fought for survival against incredible odds, and won. We have seen the faces of alien planets, strange and forbidding.
We have learned a little. We shall learn much more.
So where does this leave space opera — especially the space opera of yesteryear? And why should we bring back even the best stories from a magazine like Planet, which passed on to that Great Distributor in the Sky almost twenty years ago? Surely much of the science is outdated. We know now that Venus is a hellhole of impossible heat where no man could survive for a moment. We know that Mercury is even worse. We know that Mars, — but hold on there, no we don't. We're having second thoughts about Mars, after a much longer and closer look. There was once an abundance of water there, and a thicker atmosphere; and even now human survival on that planet would be possible, with a measure of assistance. One imagines that it might be easy for men to live on equatorial Mars as it is for them to live on the continent of Antarctica — something they manage to do, albeit not comfortably. We have not yet landed on Mars, so we cannot yet be sure what will be found there in the way of life-forms — past or present, — though some sort of vegetation seems at least possible. It's probably too much to hope for the Twin Cities of Helium, but discoveries may well be made which will be far more exciting and of profoundly greater importance.
In any case, Mars is still fun. So is Venus, — not, perhaps, as the actual and factual worlds so named, but simply as creations of a writer's imagination, full of wonders that may perfectly well exist on some world, somewhere.
Stories such as these that we present to you from the heyday of Planet Stories are not intended to be read as educational texts. If you want accurate up-to-date science, buy a book, and be prepared to buy a new one every week or so as the state of knowledge continues to move ahead in quantum jumps. Furthermore, if you are looking for the delights of cannibalism, incest, outré sex, or a general feeling of dismal gloom, you will not find them here. These stories, shameful as it may seem, were written to be entertaining, to be exciting, to impart to the reader some of the pleasure we had in writing them. You may also sense a vigor and vitality that are not too often found these days, — perhaps because we were dealing with heroes and thought no shame to ourselves for that.
A persistent myth flourishes about space opera which says that stories of the genre were all about troops of bug-eyed monsters, wooden men with ray-guns, senseless slaughter and a cretinous jingoism that portrayed the dominant Earthman happily tramping all over an assortment of extraterrestrials invariably imagined as vile, low and menacing. I have even read supposedly eminent critics who went so far as to say that science fiction had failed miserably in that it had never considered alien psychologies or the problems of communication with alien intelligences — something that leads me to wonder what, if any, science fiction these gentlemen have read. The stories contained herein ought to help prove the falsity of those several assumptions.
Two of the stories, "Duel on Syrtis," by Poul Anderson, and "Return of a Legend," by Raymond Z. Gallun, are laid on Mars — in each case, an astonishingly believable Mars even in the light of our latest knowledge. In each case the background is meticulously constructed, interesting in itself and a vital element in the plot. Both are psychological stories. "Return of a Legend" concerns itself powerfully with the effect of an alien environment on Earthmen. "Duel on Syrtis" has excellent action coupled with a sensitive portrayal of a Martian and his attempts to cope with what is to him an alien life-form, only partly understood and direly menacing — an Earthman. "Quest of Thig," by Basil Wells, is a look at Earth through the eyes of a visitor from a distant star, and we see how Earth and its people react upon the alien, affecting him and his mission. Here, too, the emphasis is on psychology rather than on ray-guns, though the ray-guns are present when needed. "The Diversifal," by Ross Rocklynne, is again Earth-based; it's a down-to-earth, grim story of time-travel and betrayal, uncompromisingly honest in its downbeat ending. "The Star-Mouse," by Frederic Brown, is sheer humor and sheer delight, with a sly stinger in its tail. If Mitkey Mouse qualifies as a BEM, then I wish we had more of him! Look for that marvelous line describing the asteroids, plus Brown's deft handling of some highly unusual and likable aliens and their peculiar world.
Of the two stories laid on Venus, one is bitterly realistic in its background. "The Rocketeers Have Shaggy Ears," by Keith Bennett, is a powerfully understated story of quiet heroism that really generates the old tingle and an impulse to stand up and cheer at the end. Unpleasant Venusians we have here. But they are quite convincing, and do not at all register a sense of Hail-the-conquering-Earthman-comes. The cumulative effect of this day-to-day struggle for survival in a totally unfamiliar and totally hostile environment is gut-tightening. You won't put this yarn down. The other Venusian tale, "Lorelei of the Red Mist," by myself and Ray Bradbury, shows a different sort of Venus, purely fanciful — a background I used more than once and had a lot of fun with. And by the way, I offer no apology for including in this collection a story with which I was personally concerned. The nice people at Ballantine gave me a choice — one Brackett story per issue, or you don't edit the series. Since I'm not asked to edit a series every day, and since I'm not totally immune to flattery, I managed to acquiesce gracefully. In this case, of course, the story is as much Ray Bradbury's as it is mine — exactly as much. I've heard all sorts of conjecture about who wrote what in this sole and only collaboration between us — that Bradbury wrote the poetic bits, Brackett the action, etc., etc.
The truth is quite simple. In late summer of 1944 I had finished about half of a 20,000-worder for Planet. Suddenly lightning struck and (no one more amazed than I) I had a job working on the screenplay of The Big Sleep, for Howard Hawks. Obviously I wasn't going to have time to finish the story, and I asked Ray if he would like to tackle it. He had nothing to go on but what I had down on paper. I never worked from an outline in those days (and often regretted it) and had no idea where the story was going. Ray took the story and finished it, completely on his own. I never read a word of it until he handed me the manuscript, and I never changed a word after that. I'm convinced to this day that he did a better job with the second half than I would have done. Bradbury's section begins with the line, "He saw th
e flock, herded by more of the golden hounds." Ray did some of the best of his early writing for Planet, and this was some of that.
One thing for which I will offer a belated apology is the use of the name "Conan." Conan is, of course, an authentic Celtic name and therefore in public domain. In using it I intended a sort of gesture of respect and affection toward a writer I greatly admired. However, Robert E. Howard had made that name so peculiarly his own, and so strongly identified for all time with his character, that I really had no right to use it, whatever my reason. Suffice it to say that I'm sorry, even though Conan-called-Starke bears absolutely no resemblance to Conan the Cimmerian. Getting back to the mention of Big Thinks — like Dr. Moreau's beast-men, writers of adventure stories aren't allowed to have them. Sometimes we manage to sneak one in even so, and all that saves us is that no one realizes it's there. Who looks for a statement of any Real Importance in a space opera?
I won't tell you whether any such are lurking among these stories, — but if you should happen to think you see one here and there, you just might be right.
Anyway, here you are with a handful of good yarns. We hope, with this and subsequent volumes, to bring to you the best of a magazine much too long neglected, both for the enjoyment of young readers who have heard about Planet but have never seen it except on the huckster's tables at prohibitive prices, and for the older ones who may take their own nostalgic pleasure in welcoming back an old friend. We hope also to reach a third and even larger group — people who have never read much, or any, science fiction but who are looking simply for entertainment.