The Secret of Sinharat (Trade Paperback)

Wow...this is AWESOME news! As a long-time admirer of Leigh Brackett's work, the opportunity to see a reprint of this work is very cool indeed - especially as my current copy is a paperback from the late 1960's or early 1970's that is falling apart.

Wow...this is AWESOME news! As a long-time admirer of Leigh Brackett's work, the opportunity to see a reprint of this work is very cool indeed - especially as my current copy is a paperback from the late 1960's or early 1970's that is falling apart.

This book (really two books in one) is absolutely incredible. Brackett's breathtaking vision of Mars definitey has a lasting impact. Of all the books we've announced so far, this one is absolutely one of my favorites.

Brackett deserves a much wider modern audience. We're banking on the idea that there are enough readers out there to make a line like this profitable, and I can say with strong authority that if this book sells well there will be _much_ more Leigh Brackett to come.

--Erik Mona

First, let me say that I am utterly *freaking* thrilled that all these classic planetary romances and weird fantasies are getting a second life via Paizo; I've already purchased the two C. L. Moore volumes and it is likely -- very, very, very likely considering my fantastique-oriented bibliophilia and my acute money-incontinence -- that I will buy all the current PS volumes and continue buying them as they come out.

Now, I would like to throw some recommendations for the PS line at you. I know that some of these may have already been suggested, and there's a possibility that they don't dovetail with the theme you've chosen for PS, but hey -- what can it hurt? If enough people yell loud enough for something . . .

Sword of Rhiannon
(I'm trying to build up the ultimate Leigh Brackett collection. Haffner's helping me with the short stuff. Can Paizo give me a hand with the novels, and so give me further assistance in my mad quest to utterly drain my bank account?)

The Dwellers in the Mirage -- A. Merritt
(An incredible, psychadelic fantasy about the reincarnation of a mighty Uighur warrior/godling who goes gold prospecting with his best friend, Cherokee mystic Jim Two Eagles, ends up finding a hidden magic city in the Alaskan hills and eventually confronts a freaky, black-tentacled god-thing from another dimension. Actually, a lot of Merritt's stuff needs back in print, man! He didn't write very many, so check 'em out! )

Citadel of Fear -- Francis Stevens
(Two adventurers enter a remote valley in Mexico that ultimately leads them to the lost city of Tlapallan, the land of Quetzalcoatl, which is perched above a fiery lake! The heroes become involved in a conflict between the devotees of Quetzalcoatl and those of Nacoc-Yaotl, who may even BE his own living statue! Guys go nuts! Some 1st-world dude learns about making artificial life from Tlapallan, and starts makin' him some monsters! It's a wham-bop-pow finish between monsters and people and everything else! This book has never seen a trade paperback or hardcover printing to my knowledge. Pity!)

The Book of Ptath -- A. E. van Vogt
(The Great God Ptath, thrice greatest Ptath, he whose strength is unlimited, who tires not, and knows no fear, rules mightily over the world of 200,000,000 A.D.! However, to keep flowing a steady infusion of human experience and spirit so that he doesn't fall out of touch with his mortal subjects, he "submerges himself in the race," reverse incarnating himself into the bodies of people of the past, sharing their triumphs and sorrows. But while he is doing this, one of his Goddess-wives, Golden Ineznia, pulls a vile trick on him! Can Holroyd, a WWII tank commander in whom Ptath was living, save the day after he is zapped, shocked and unknowing, into the mighty body of 200,000,000 A.D. Ptath? Maybe it's just me, but I *loves* da van Vogt! What about you guys?)

To my knowledge, all three of these fantasy classics are out of print. However, Merritt and Stevens have seen a *limited* resurgence in popularity. Merritt's The Moon Pool and it's sequel, The Metal Monster, are back in business via small and academic presses. Most of Francis Stevens shorter works are available from the Bison Frontiers of the Imagination series and Sense of Wonder press has published Claimed, one of her novels, at the recommendation of Forry Ackerman. If you guys think these two authors are good for ya, you better strike before the (relatively) hot iron cools!

Thanks again for the cool reprints!

We've got three more Brackett's coming soon (The Ginger Star, The Hounds of Skaith, and The Reavers of Skaith), and we're in discussions about The Sword of Rhiannon. I'd frankly expect an announcement about that on in a couple of months.

I am only now getting into A. Merritt. Give me a little time with this author, and I will get around to him. So far I really like what I've read, and a great deal of it is out of print.

I'm not familiar with Stevens at all. We considered a few A.E. Van Vogt books early on, but most of them are spoken for. It'll probably be a while before we try that route again.

Thanks for the suggestions, and especially for the support!

I wish I could write a positive thing about this book yet I am still waiting for it. It was allegedly mailed on December 28 and I have sent several emails this week asking about when I would be getting it after checking my mail for that day. None of the emails has been answered. Is your customer service that bad. Where is the book. Did I make a mistake not ordering this from amazon and at what point do I ask for a get a refund.

Is your customer service that bad?

I would say "no" - you can always give them a call at 425-289-0060.

Ronald Weinstock wrote:

Is your customer service that bad?

I would say "no" - you can always give them a call at 425-289-0060.

*might call, ask for Cosmo, and then just breathe really heavily into the phone.*

I wish I could write a positive thing about this book yet I am still waiting for it. It was allegedly mailed on December 28 and I have sent several emails this week asking about when I would be getting it after checking my mail for that day. None of the emails has been answered. Is your customer service that bad. Where is the book. Did I make a mistake not ordering this from amazon and at what point do I ask for a get a refund.

I apologize for the delayed response. I am answering your emails now, please check your inbox.

Thanks,
cos

*might call, ask for Cosmo, and then just breathe really heavily into the phone.*

So it was YOU.

Noted.

Here is my complete review of "The Secret of Sinharat"

Let me start off by saying that this is the first book review that i have ever written.. so cut me some slack! :-)

Paizo has taken a big chance here by attempting to introduce classic works of Adventure SF and Fantasy to a new/younger audience. And so far it seems to be paying off if the activity on the message boards is any indication.
I have a new subscription to the series and my first volume arrived today.
“The Secret of Sinharrat ( with “The People of the Talisman”) is probably Leigh Brackett’s most famous work or at least it features her most famous character “Eric John Stark”.
This is the 3rd edition I own of the book. I first discovered LB waaaaay back in the early 70’s when an older cousin of mine gave me a pile of the old “Ace Double” paperbacks. For those of you who don’t remember them these were a very long running series of 241 Science Fiction/Fantasy paperback series from Ace Books from the 1950’s up to the early 1970’s.
The contents were usually one short novel from a famous writer and one short novel from a newer writer. The novelty was that the 2 novels were not printed one after the other. You would read one novel and then flip the book over (which made the back cover the front cover) and read the next novel. So these were paperbacks that 2 different “Front covers”.
Anyways one of these caught my eye right off. On one side it showed a man dressed somewhat in barbarian fashion riding some sort of large reptile beast across a night time desert landscape while being pursued by other figures who were similarly mounted .
My 11 year old brain thought “Cool!”.
As I started to read it I became very excited when I realized that this was two novels set on a Mars that was very similar to the Mars/Barsoom of Edgar Rice Burroughs.
But after reading a few pages of the first novel I became kind of confused. The good guy was actually sort of a bad guy who is forced / black mailed into helping the law stop a planned uprising of the locals.
Eric John Stark was the first Anti-hero I ever came into contact with. He lives in a universe where it seems that at least all of the inner planets of the Solar System are habitable.
You have to understand that even into the 1950’s no one was 100% sure of the conditions that existed on the other planets. So the popular conceptions in the minds of many folks were

Mars is a dying desert world that is much older than ours.
Venus is a young dynamic tropical hothouse of a world that is younger than ours.
Mercury is hot as hell, doesn’t rotate on its axis and is probably only liveable at the terminator existing between the day and night sides.
This is the universe that Eric John Stark was born into. He is a mixture between Tarzan and Clint Eastwood’s “Man with no name”.
Stark was born on mercury in a mining colony where his parents worked as geologists. They were killed in a landslide and he was adopted as a baby and raised by the mercurian aborigines who are/were more or less an art of Neanderthal and given the name “N’Chaka” which means “He with no Tribe”
When he was 12 years old his tribe gets wiped by Terran miners and he is caged and tormented by the men who murdered his people. He gets raised and civilized by an agent of this universes UN interplanetary police.
We have some serious Tarzan parallels going on here! :-)
He spends the large part of his adult life as a mercenary helping the natives of Mars and Venus in their attempts to throw off the yoke of Earth.
This is some serious stuff here! This is not Burroughs romanticized Mars with its noble warlike inhabitants who are taken as they are and seen from the perspective of their own cultures.
This is Mars from the gutter up that has been exploited and “colonialized” by the Earth (white folks that is.). Imagine Barsoom going straight to hell after the big earth corporations show up and exploit the hell out of the place, keeping down the natives and basically treating them as 3rd class nuisances! We don’t see Mars from the eyes of its Ruling Class. We get a Mars from the perspective of its lower classes. These are people who are being screwed over by not just their own rulers but also the colonial powers from earth. LB’s Martians are cut throats, thieves and whores who we see from the context of our culture and not theirs. This is a sad, worn out, angry, brutal and cynical Mars. It’s not really a place you’d care to visit. And if you did bother to visit, the locals would cut your throat the first chance they got.

What is so great with Leigh Brackett is that her women are as tough as the men and maybe tougher.
If you have ever seen the old westerns by Howard Hawks; Rio Lobo, Rio Bravo and El Dorado starring John Wayne, you might have notice how tough and strong the female characters are. That’s not just because Hawks loved tough “dames”. Leigh Brackett was his favourite Screenwriter. She wrote the scripts to at least 4 Howard Hawks’s films starring John Wayne.
So what we have here is “Film noir” Science Fiction. The good guys aren’t really all that good. They are just good in comparison to the true villains.
Both novels included in this volume are 2 stark adventures the LB expanded to novel size. Both deal with Stark being forced into helping people against his own interests and better judgement. I won’t give too much away aside from saying that these are very adult stories. When I say “adult” I mean “adult” in an emotional sense. These are stories full of wonder that are set a SF universe that is not wonderful. The “ERBzine” website has a great article on this subject. Check it out. It is called “Colonial Barsoom”.
And did I mention that Eric John Stark is to my knowledge the first BLACK hero?
That’s right, he black! He was burned black by the searing rays of the sun over Mercury.
In the “Secret of Sinharat” one of the villains even refers to him as a”black ape”!
And big Hats off to Paizo for having the first cover art ever that doesn’t portray him as a white man.
I would also like to mention that the Paizo edition is a very nice book. Well bound, large format and with very thick covers. This will look great in my collection!

“The Secret of Sinharat” is the book for you if you love SF adventure where the wonder and adventure are matched with brilliant writing, great dialog and people who behave like real people.

Eric John Stark

Wow

This is an outstanding book. I read the first book on an airplane.

I like modern Fantasies and SF

but after reading 1000 page Steve Erikson Saga's it is nice to read a gritty awesome pulp story.

I became a Planet Stories subscriber because of this Book.

It is that awesome.

I wonder if George R.R. Martin named the Stark Family because of this pulp series.

Erik,
Great book, this one! I'll admit that I was disappointed with Joirel, and knew from past experience that Moorcock's Kane books were (in my opinion) inferior to his later works. I picked up this one on your recommendation -- and now I owe you one for that!

Everybody Else,
Review Follows
Singharat starts off strong; Stark is cool, savvy, and tough; the action proceeds briskly; the dialogue is not that silly bombastic psuedo-fantasy garbage -- most people talk in this book, instead of walking around issuing Shakespearian pronouncements. You can almost see it like it's on TV. Understand in advance that you, the reader, will figure out the "surprise plot twist" a few days before Stark ever does -- evidently the guy is no genius -- and it gets sort of beat into the ground from there. But this is a solid story, overall, and it's over so quickly... But wait! There's a BONUS novel included, People of the Talisman -- and this one is WAY better than Singharat! It's exactly like Robert E. Howard meets A. Merritt. We get barbarian rages, thieves, medieval warfare, ancient artifacts, alien races with superior weapons -- everything you could want from a science fantasy novel. And Stark is at the center of it all this time, making things happen, putting his mark on the world instead of just going along with events, and he is one crafty, savage, no-nonsense barbarian hero. Man, I loved this book.

I saw an old Ace double while stopping in at a local rare book store (which reminds me of the bookstore in NeverEnding Story) that included this and People of the Talisman. I totally would have picked it up, but I want to get the Planet Stories version, and it was even more expensive than a new Planet Stories book. Any plans to publish People of the Talisman, since it's also an Eric John Stark story?

This volume includes People of the Talisman, as per the description above:

In a special bonus novel, People of the Talisman, Stark ventures to the treacherous polar icecap of Mars to return a stolen talisman to an oppressed people.

This volume includes People of the Talisman, as per the description above:

Product description wrote:

In a special bonus novel, People of the Talisman, Stark ventures to the treacherous polar icecap of Mars to return a stolen talisman to an oppressed people.

Well, paint me unperceptive. I guess that's what I get for not reading carefully.

Any chance you'll ever publish Queen of the Martian Catacombs and Black Amazon of Mars--the originals of these stories? I enjoy the longer versions, but I've always liked the originals better.