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It Just Keeps Getting Better

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

I've got a problem.

See, back in April I did one of these blog posts about The Ginger Star, the first of Leigh Brackett's three Skaith books. In it, I talked all about how she's my favorite Planet Stories author so far, and how The Ginger Star is hands-down the most fun-to-read book in our line to date. I was fair, but I was effusive, as the world she painted was a beautiful blend of fantasy and sci-fi (as is the case with so much far-future apocalyptic fiction), a work of a sword-and-planet genius that seems more akin to Tolkien or Star Wars than Edgar Rice Burroughs. It lit me up, and I shouted it from the rooftops. And now I'm in a bind.

Because The Hounds of Skaith is better. Way better.

In this sequel to The Ginger Star, Brackett has more of everything I loved from the first book. More strange aliens. More bizarre and yet immediately familiar cultures. More battle scenes, more fights with telepathic hound-beasts, more starships and political theory and morally ambiguous bad guys getting what's coming to them. New nations and landscapes (and an additional map of the world as well, courtesy of Rob Lazzaretti). Without the need to explain who Eric John Stark is and why he's there, Brackett is free to keep pushing the envelope and packing every scene with more wonder. One of the things I love most about Brackett is actually one of the things that originally attracted me to China Miéville (who was born just six years before her death... Ms. Brackett was light years ahead of her time). Both of them have so many ideas that they can afford to just toss them away with a line or two. The beautiful, perfect Yur men, for instance, whose women are like shrieking, pale grubs—Leigh may only have given them a paragraph, but the image has stuck with me ever since.

So what can I say? I spoke too soon. My only hope at this point is that, when it comes time to release The Reavers of Skaith, I'll be referring back to this post in much the same fashion. Call me crazy, but something tells me Brackett isn't quite finished yet.

James Sutter
Planet Stories Editor

Men of the Broken Towers

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

In trying to choose a topic for today's blog post on Leigh Brackett's The Ginger Star, I had a rough time. After raving about Brackett's prose in my last post, I knew that I wanted to share an excerpt—but which one? The scene depicted on the cover, where Stark and the mysterious wise woman face execution? Perhaps his fight with the Children of the Sea? Or his escape from the subterranean world of humanity's ferret-faced descendants? Eventually, though, I realized that there's one scene in particular which stands out in my mind whenever I'm thinking about this book: the first appearance of the Corn King, after Stark's been captured by the treacherous trader Amnir. While it's a bit longer than the usual excerpts we post here, I hope you'll find it as captivating as I do.

Amnir rode along the line of wagons. "Close up there. Close up. Smartly now! Let them see your weapons. On your guard, watch my lance point, and keep moving."

The broken towers were grouped around an open circle, which had a huge lump of something in the middle that might once have been a monument to civic pride. Three figures stood beside the monument. They were gaunt. Tuck-bellied, long-armed, slightly stooped. They wore tight-fitting garments of an indeterminate gray color, hoods covering narrow heads. Their faces were masked against the wind. The masks were worked in darker threads with what appeared to be symbols of rank. The three stood immobile, alone, and the ragged doorways of the buildings gaped darkly on either hand.

Stark's nostrils twitched. A smell of living came to him from those doorways—a dry subtle taint of close-packed bodies, of smoke and penned animals, of dung and wool and unnamable foods. He was riding in his usual place beside the third wagon in line. Gerrith was behind him, beside the fourth; the other captives strung out behind her, except for Halk, who was still confined. Stark tugged nervously at his bonds, and the armed man who led his beast thumped him with his lance butt and bade him be still.

The noise of the wagons rolled against the silence. Amnir rode aside, toward the three gray figures. Men came after him bearing sacks and bales and rolls of cloth.

Amnir halted and raised his hand. The hand held a lance, point upward.

"May Old Sun give you light and warmth, Hargoth."

"There is neither here," said the foremost figure. Only his eyes and his mouth showed. The eyes were pale and unreadable. Above them, on the forehead of the mask, was the winged-disc sun-symbol, which Stark had found to be almost universal. On the sides of the mask, covering the cheeks, were stylized grain patterns. Stark supposed the man was both chief and high priest. It was strange to find a Corn King here, where no corn had grown for centuries. The man's mouth had thin lips and very sharp teeth. His voice was high and reedy but it had a carrying quality, a note of authority.

"Here there are only my lord Darkness, and his lady Cold, and their daughter Hunger."

"I have brought you gifts," said Amnir.

And the Corn King said, "This time, you have brought us more."

The wind blew his words away. But Amnir's lance point dipped and a movement began along the line of wagons, a bristling of weapons. The man leading Stark's beast shortened up on the rein.

In a curiously flat tone Amnir said, "I don't take your meaning."

"Why should you?" said the Corn King. "You have not the Sight. But I have seen. I have seen it in the Winter Dreaming. I have seen it in the entrails of the Spring Child that we give each year to Old Sun. I have seen it in the stars. Our guide has come, the Promised One who will lead us into the far heavens, into warmth and light. He is with you now." A long slender arm shot out and pointed straight at Stark. "Give him to us."

"I do not understand you," Amnir said. "I have only captives from the south, to be sold as slaves to the Thyrans."

The lance point dipped lower. The pace of the wagons quickened.

"You lie," said the Corn King. "You will sell them to the Citadel. Word has come from the high north, both truth and lies, and we know the difference. There are strangers on Skaith, and the star-roads are open. We have waited through the long night, and now it is morning."

As though in answer, the first sullen glimmer of dawn stained the eastern sky.

"Give us our guide now. Only death waits for him in the high north."

Stark shouted, "What word have you of strangers?"

The armed man clouted him hard across the head with the lance butt. Amnir voiced a shrill cry, reining his beast around, and the wagons began to move, faster and faster, the teams slipping and scrabbling on the frosty ground...

James Sutter
Planet Stories Editor

Playing Favorites

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

For me, trying to pick a favorite author in the Planet Stories line is like trying to pick my favorite child: impolite, but still totally doable. (At least, I presume that's what the expression means—I don't have kids.) And while each of my literary children is a unique and beautiful snowflake, for me, the favorite is Leigh Brackett.

It's not just because she was a master of many genres, writing everything from westerns to sword and planet to hard-boiled detective stories like the screenplay for the noir classic The Big Sleep, which she co-wrote with William Faulkner. Nor is it because she was a woman writing during the pulp era, a time when females in the SF world were darn-near unheard of. (Even though I'm probably wrong, I still imagine her and C. L. Moore with sleeves rolled up, Rosie-the-Riveter-style, banging away at their typewriters as they ushered in a horde of young female authors-to-be.) Nor is it even because she wrote the original script to The Empire Strikes Back, possibly the finest space opera ever filmed, and easily the most satisfying installment of a groundbreaking trilogy. (Being too young to remember it first-hand, I can only imagine the shock those first audiences must have felt when the film ended with Han trapped in carbonite and Luke minus a hand. Coming on the heels of a traditional fairy-tale plot like A New Hope, think of what guts it must have taken to write that kind of dark, brooding cliff-hanger ending!)

No, the reason Leigh Brackett is my favorite Planet Stories author to date is simple: her words. While Catherine Moore may have beat her to the punch by a few years, and has a definite florid charm of her own, Brackett stands out with just how modern her work feels. In reading The Ginger Star, the first of Brackett's Eric John Stark books set on the planet Skaith, I'm constantly struck by the smooth flow of her prose, the way it slips cleanly through your mind and leaves nothing behind but an image. There's a school of thought that says the best sort of writing is invisible, work in which the author herself disappears and you're left with only the story. Brackett obviously understood that. And what ideas she presents! The intentionally mutated Children of the Sea and Children of Skaith-Our-Mother, humans who sought to avoid their planet's apocalypse by returning to the embrace of the sea and the subterranean realms. The Corn King and his masked men of the northern towers, who worship only hunger and cold. Even the psychic wolves that guard the citadel of the Lords Protector, who kill by projecting paralyzing fear into the minds of their prey. Ideas like these flow fast and furious in her books, and it was these flights of fancy that ultimately inspired so many.

And if my own reasons aren't enough to convince you that The Ginger Star is worth checking out, consider this: Many years ago, at the height of her career, Ms. Brackett was sought out by a young author named Ray Bradbury in search of a mentor, and was taken on as her protégé. He's said himself that he learned much about the craft of writing at the feet of her and her husband, Edmond Hamilton. Which leads me to ask: who are we to argue with Ray's taste?

James Sutter
Planet Stories Editor

Map the Stars

It Just Keeps Getting Better

Men of the Broken Towers

Playing Favorites