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