Planet Stories on StarWars.com

Friday, January 23, 2009

If you’ve been keeping up with our blog, you already know how excited we were to have a legend like George Lucas pen an introduction to Leigh Brackett’s The Reavers of Skaith, the latest Eric John Stark adventure out from Planet Stories. So you might imagine how thrilled we were to see StarWars.com feature Reavers on both the front page and the Book Vault section of their Web site.

Check out the feature here.

The Reavers of Skaith is now in stock and shipping from our warehouse. If you haven’t had a chance yet to read George Lucas’s introduction, "From Stark to Star Wars, about how the worlds of Leigh Brackett influenced his own creations, order your copy now and dive into a strangely familiar world, in a galaxy far, far away...

Christopher Carey
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

Map the Stars

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

It's not often that I get to show off Planet Stories art besides the covers, but I wanted to take a minute and point out that in addition to a killer story, Leigh Brackett's Skaith books (which include The Ginger Star, The Hounds of Skaith, and the forthcoming The Reavers of Skaith) all feature hand-drawn maps by the incredibly talented Rob Lazzaretti. I've always loved being able to follow along with a character's adventures on a map, getting a better sense of what the author's world actually looks like, and Rob does a fantastic job of maintaining an old-timey cartographic flavor that really makes these maps pop. The two images here are from The Ginger Star and The Hounds of Skaith. Click for larger versions, and enjoy!

James Sutter
Planet Stories Editor

Judge the Books By Their Covers

Friday, September 26, 2008

Over the last year or so, we've been listening carefully to what people have to say about Planet Stories, and especially about the books' covers. While we all know that it's what's inside that counts—and with authors like Brackett and Howard, Moore and Moorcock, I think we're pretty set on that level—the cover remains the single most important factor in selling a book to somebody who may never have heard of it. I know that, especially as a child, covers often made my buying decisions for me. Did it have bright colors? A dragon on it? What about a weird alien landscape? My favorite science fiction novel of all time, Dan Simmons's Hyperion, I purchased based solely on the amazing cover, and it's my sincere hope that someone can someday say the same thing about one of our books.

But finding the right mix with covers isn't always easy. Should it be pulpy or sophisticated? Detailed and realistic or painterly and stylized? All of us at Planet Stories have our own personal tastes, but we're a relatively small sample, and as such we've been spending a lot of time on the Planet Stories messageboards getting reader feedback. Lately, it seems that we've really hit our stride, with the Swordsman of Mars cover and this fabulous Hounds of Skaith art from our old friend James Ryman being the hands-down favorites to date.

So what do you think? What do you look for in a science fiction or fantasy cover? Click on over to the messageboards and let us know.

Believe me, we're 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

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

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