Illustration by Daren Bader

Sword of the Dark God

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

With her masterful Skaith trilogy wrapped up in The Reavers of Skaith, it's time for Leigh Brackett to take us away to yet another world—or rather, another era. For while her latest release from Planet Stories, The Sword of Rhiannon, takes place on the same strange and populous Mars as The Secret of Sinharat, the story draws us far back into the past, when Mars was a lush world of oceans, pirates, and strange alien races.

Originally titled "The Sea Kings of Mars" when it first appeared in the pulp magazine Thrilling Wonder Stories and later rebranded for its publication as a novel, The Sword of Rhiannon is the story of Matthew Carse, a Martian archaeologist-turned-looter whose discovery of a mysterious tomb and a sword belonging to the dark god Rhiannon sends him hurtling back in time to a Mars ruled by corrupt imperialists, their tyranny backed by the super-science of sinister snake-men. In this world, only the Viking-like Sea Kings and their winged and aquatic alien allies dare challenge their oppressors, and with the discovery of Carse's sword, the time has come for a last desperate battle. Enslaved by the beautiful but evil princess of the imperial Sarks, and somehow tied to the dark god himself, will Carse help lead the rebellion, or find himself exterminated by his own allies? For more, check out the following excerpt:

Panting, dripping, his mind a whirl of confused speculations, he dug outward through the soft soil till a small hole of brilliant daylight opened in front of him.

Daylight? Then he'd been in the weird bubble of darkness longer than he had imagined.

The wind blew in through a little opening, upon his face. And it was a warm wind. A warm wind and a damp wind, such as never blows on desert Mars.

Carse squeezed through and stood in the bright day looking outward.

There are times when a man has no emotion, no reaction. Times when all the centers are numbed and the eyes see and the ears hear but nothing communicates itself to the brain, which is protected in this way from madness.

He tried finally to laugh at what he saw though he heard his own laughter as a dry choking cry.

"Mirage, of course," he whispered. "A big mirage. Big as all Mars."

The warm breeze lifted Carse's tawny hair, blew his cloak against him. A cloud drifted over the sun and somewhere a bird screamed harshly. He did not move.

He was looking at an ocean.

It stretched out to the horizon ahead, a vast restlessness of water, milky-white and pale with a shimmering phosphorescence even in daylight.

"Mirage," he said again stubbornly, his reeling mind clinging with the desperation of fear to that one shred of explanation. "It has to be. Because this is still Mars."

Still Mars, still the same planet. The same high hills up into which Penkawr had led him by night.

Or were they the same? Before, the foxhole entrance to the Tomb of Rhiannon had been in a steep cliff-face. Now he stood on the grassy slope of a great hill.

And there were rolling green hills and dark forest down there below him, where before had been only desert. Green hills, green wood and a bright river that ran down a gorge to what had been dead sea-bottom but was now—sea.

Carse's numbed gaze swept along the great coast of the distant shoreline. And down on that far sunlit coast he saw the glitter of a white city and knew that it was Jekkara.

Jekkara, bright and strong between the verdant hills and the mighty ocean, that ocean that had not been seen upon Mars for nearly a million years...

James Sutter
Planet Stories Editor

George Lucas On Leigh Brackett

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

When we started publishing Planet Stories, one of our goals (in fact, the primary goal) was to publish books that were not just great stories, but also historically significant. Books that altered the course of science fiction history, that helped invent genres and whose authors managed to indelibly alter the way we think about SF.

Yet sometimes the impact of a given novel isn't felt immediately—as with music or any other art, it's sometimes the imitator or the student who makes a bigger splash than the original. (After all, Michael Jackson didn't invent the moonwalk, he just popularized it.) Leigh Brackett is the perfect example of this phenomenon—while she was huge in her day, modern readers know her mainly through those authors she mentored and works she influence. Folks like Ray Bradbury.

Or, you know, Star Wars.

Within the first ten pages of a Leigh Brackett book, you can immediately see the resemblance between her gritty, realistic worlds (and characters!) and the universe George Lucas brought us in what has come to be probably the most popular science fiction work of all time. (Heck, her Martian city of Jakara or Skeg on Skaith might as well be Mos Eisely, to my imagination.) But though we all knew that George Lucas must have taken inspiration from Brackett—why else would he commission her to write the first draft for The Empire Strikes Back?—we've never really heard him speak about it.

Until now. For The Reavers of Skaith, the last book in Leigh Brackett's marvelous Skaith trilogy, we were fortunate enough to have The Man Himself write an introduction talking about his relationship with Brackett's worlds, the character of Eric John Stark, and their influence on his beloved classics. And it confirmed everything we had suspected:

Beyond the mechanics of the adventure itself, beyond the clash of heroes and villains, beyond the heroic narrative, Leigh created a world of gritty complexity and layered reality. It was a universe with a working political system (wonderfully, painfully and realistically dysfunctional) and an unjust social hierarchy. I never had the sense that it was designed in service of a simple science fiction plot. Rather, it was as if she had selected this fully realized backdrop, and chosen to place Stark into a world already in motion. It was dense and rich and completely lived-in, a supposed reality that commanded respect. It was a complexity worthy of her genre-contemporaries, guys like Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov and J. R. R. Tolkien, but told by way of a swashbuckling, space-faring barbarian. If this was escapism, it was for a new generation of sophisticated genre fans.

It was into that climate—Leigh's climate—that Star Wars and I showed up on the scene. I had tried to capture my own nostalgia for the movies I grew up with, including the movies that Leigh had written. I loved that organic flow of film-speak that balanced between heightened reality and easy, comfortable, conversational dialogue. And her groundwork had helped to inspire me to move away from the squeaky-clean image of cinematic science fiction. I liked the idea of a lived-in universe, with a seamy, worn underbelly as fully cooked as the futuristic aspects. I loved exploring fringes and outskirts. It was there that Leigh had set Stark's adventures, and it was far from the center of the universe that I set Star Wars.

To hear the rest of what Mr. Lucas has to say, pick up The Reavers of Skaith and dive into a new world—one that may be more familiar than you imagine.

James Sutter
Planet Stories Editor

...and we're back!

Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Howdy, all! In the wake of Snowpocalypse 2008, in which we got inches—inches!—of snow and therefore couldn't possibly make it into the office, but rather holed up in our houses waiting for the imminent apocalypse, we're all rushing a bit to catch up and get our latest books off to press. Books like The Reavers of Skaith, Leigh Brackett's epic conclusion to the Eric John Stark novels which began with The Secret of Sinharat. For a taste of what's in store for all you Planet Stories aficionados, check out this scene, which made it onto the cover, illustrated by James Ryman:

Victims customarily went smiling to their deaths. Only at the very end, when they had been cast into the sea and the Children had begun to share them, were there cries amid the blood and the floating garlands; and both cries and blood were pleasing to the Mother. The monks sang in their growling voices and did not notice that Stark had ceased to smile.

He was still beyond any rational thought. He only knew the death was coming swiftly through the silken water to claim him. The life within him stirred—a simple, uncomplicated force that rose of itself to fight against extinction.

Ashton was at his right hand. At his left was a monk, and then a second monk, and then the unguarded edge of the steps.

Stark swung his left arm viciously. The blow took the nearer monk across the throat and swept him back into those who climbed behind him. In falling, he clutched at the second monk and cost him his balance. Blue-robes tumbled and fell, splashing into the shallow water. Stark rushed up out of the space he had opened, clearing more space ahead of him by knocking other monks into the water. Hands caught at him, tearing away the garlands but slipping on his naked, oiled body. Some of the fingers had talons that drew blood, but they could not stop him. He gained the platform with a wild bull's rush.

The blue-robe with the horn turned about, startled. He had an especially brutish face. Stark took the horn from him. With it, he broke the face and sent the blue-robe flying out into the water on the far side of the platform. Then Stark swung the long horn like a ten-foot club to clear the upper steps.

He shouted, "Simon!"

Then he heard a faint voice calling his name, N'Chaka, Man-Without-a-Tribe, and he wondered who on this death-bitten godhaunted planet knew that name to call him. And suddenly he realized that the voice was in his mind...

James Sutter
Planet Stories Editor

Don't Fear the Reavers

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Well, folks, it's finally here. One year and three books later, we've reached the last of Leigh Brackett's amazing Eric John Stark novels, which began with our introduction to the wildman-turned-mercenary in The Secret of Sinharat and continued in her epic Skaith trilogy. In The Reavers of Skaith, her final installment on the world of the dying ginger star, Brackett doesn't pull any punches. Not only do we get more strange landscapes, more epic battles, and more alien cultures (such as the vicious Kings of the White Islands, with their seal-towed iceberg ships containing the frozen corpses of their ancestors), but Brackett gives us something that few authors of her era were willing to: a sense of fear.

While I wouldn't dare give out spoilers, I have to say that I respect an author who can, after multiple novels with the same characters, allow some of them to fail in their quests or die for the good of the story. All it takes is one quality death scene to break through the reader's warm sense of security, and after that it's a nail-biting page turner as you suddenly realize that the author could kill off anybody she wants to. This is her world, and there are no rules. No one is safe. Complacency is a terrible thing in a story, and it's fabulous to see a sword and planet author that isn't afraid to toy with the reader's emotions a little.

Some series lurch to a halt, others grind on long after the magic is gone. In The Reavers of Skaith, Leigh Brackett shows her chops by bringing more than a thousand pages of adventure to an elegant, satisfying close. It's not saccharine—Brackett's too much of a realist for that. As with our world, some people win and some people lose, and those results don't always line up neatly along the axis of good versus evil. But there can be no question that, as you turn that last page, you come away with a new world that is all the more real for its grittiness—a living, breathing place. This is the gift of Leigh Brackett, and a fitting end to the Eric John Stark books.

Enjoy.

James Sutter
Planet Stories Editor

Ryman For The Win

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Covers are important. Not only do they help popularize books and win over new readers—and believe me when I say that the first thing the book industry drills into you is that a book with a bad cover Will Not Sell, no matter how amazing the content—they also go a long way toward establishing the feel of a series. There are a number of authors and series that I can recognize from the cover art alone, and I'm always distraught when some publisher changes a cherished series' look for no good reason. (Granted, sometimes there is a good reason, and kudos to those publishers who raise great books out of the ghetto.) Dan Simmons's Hyperion cantos, Gordon Dickson's Dragon Knight series, Richard A. Knaak's Dragonrealms books which were my first introduction to Larry Elmore—these covers are part of the story to me, forever linked emotionally to the books they promote.

All of which puts a lot of pressure on those of us charged with ordering covers. Fortunately, though our aesthetic is always growing and changing, Planet Stories has gotten extremely lucky during its short history, and a perfect example of that is cover artist James Ryman.

James came on board for the second book in Leigh Brackett's Skaith trilogy, The Hounds of Skaith, and we were ecstatic over his vision of Eric John Stark and that dying planet in its galactic backwater. Naturally, we immediately signed him on to do the cover for the final book, The Reavers of Skaith, as well. Seeing the two side by side, there can be no question of the link between the books, more so than any cover line we could have run over the top of the art. The subtle juxtaposition of the positions of good and evil on the covers is masterfully done as well, and my only regret is that we weren't able to bring him on in time for The Ginger Star and make this a triptych.

You can expect to see more covers from James Ryman in Planet Stories' future, as well as some other fabulous new artists—for instance, the cover currently being finished up for Otis Adelbert Kline's The Outlaws of Mars may be my favorite to date—but if you want to weigh in and make your opinion known, hop over to the Planet Stories messageboards and let us know what you think. We're always listening.

James Sutter
Planet Stories Editor

Riding the Wave

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

It's that time again—time for me to point out that nothing new I can say about The Hounds of Skaith can recommend it any better than it recommends itself and jump straight to an excerpt from the novel. In The Ginger Star, everyone's favorite mercenary and wild man Eric John Stark ventured to the dying world of Skaith in search of his foster father, only to find himself the subject of a revolutionary prophecy. Now, reunited with his mentor and with the support of the rebels' beautiful prophetess, Stark must master a pack of vicious telepathic hounds and tear down the planet's corrupt government before they close the starport and leave him stranded forever in a galactic backwater. The following scene is his first encounter with the race of desert-running cannibals that locals call the Runners...

The hound had stopped in his trotting. He stood braced on forelegs like tree trunks, high shoulders hunched against the wind, coarse fur ruffling. His head, which seemed too heavy for even that powerful neck to support without weariness, swung slowly back and forth. The dark muzzle snarled.

The pack gathered behind him. They were excited, making noises in their throats. Their eyes glowed, too bright, too knowing—the harbingers of death.

There, said Gerd.

Stark saw them, strung along a rib of sand in the grainy light. A second before nothing had stood there. Now, in the flicker of an eyelid, there were eleven...no, fourteen bent, elongated shapes, barely recognizable as human. Skin like old leather, thick and tough, covered their staring bones, impervious to wind and cold. Long hair and scanty scraps of hide flapped wildly. A family group, Stark thought—males, females, young. One of the females clutched something between pendulous breasts. Other adults carried stones or thighbones.

"Runners," Ashton said and pulled out his sword. "They're like piranha fish. Once they get their teeth in—"

The old male screamed, one high wild cry. The ragged figures stooped forward, lifted on their long legs and rushed out across the shadowed sand.

They moved with incredible speed. Their bodies were drawn and thinned for running, thrusting heads carried level with the ground and never losing sight of the prey. The upper torso was all ribcage, deep and narrow, with negligible shoulders, the arms carried like flightless wings outstretched for balance. The incredible legs lifted, stretched, spurned, lifted, with a grotesque perfection of motion that caught the throat with its loveliness even as it terrified with its ferocity.

Gerd said, N'Chaka. Kill?

Kill!

The hounds sent fear.

That was how they killed. Not with fang or claw. With fear. Cold cruel deadly mind-bolts of it that struck like arrows to the brain, drained the gut, chilled the blood-warm heart until it ceased beating...

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