The leap of faith
Aug. 7th, 2008 08:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
randy_byersDarkness. The black silence of the tomb. He strained his ears, but even the supersonic torture of the drive was slipping away, receding beyond reach. Blue witch-lights flared from every metal surface in the ship, and then it began: the subtle slide and wrench and twist that took each separate atom in a man's body and moved it in a new direction with the most horrible effect of vertigo that ever had been devised. Comyn tried to scream, but whether he made it or not he never knew. For one timeless ghastly interval he thought he saw the fabric of the ship itself dissolving with him into a mist of discrete particles, and he knew that he wasn't human any more and that nothing was real. And then he plunged headlong into nothingness.
-- Leigh Brackett, The Big Jump (1953/1955)
The Big Jump is a slick, hard-boiled space opera that reminded me in tone of Budrys' Rogue Moon, particularly in the focus on hard-driven, almost maniacal characters in semi-realistic settings that feel very Fifties. The enormously rich family's domed garden enclave on the moon, on the other hand, reminded me of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. This perverse family and their interest in exploiting rare elements in distant stars are perhaps faintly echoed in Samuel R. Delany's Nova.
This is mostly a fairly middling novel -- a potboiler about humankind's first trip to another star and the frighteningly transformative phenomenon they find there.
BIG SPOILERS: One thing of interest is that the scientific maguffin struck me as an elaboration on the fountain -- or fire -- of youth from Haggard's She. As I mentioned after I read The Moon Pool, Merritt's angle seemed to be to give a superscientific explanation for the supernatural phenomena of the old romances. That's what Brackett is up to here, describing the fountain of youth in terms of transuranic elements, except she is now doing it in a hard-boiled space opera that has left behind the other trappings, such as the evil, seductive femme fatale priestess. Substituted for that tangle of sex, obsession, and betrayal is a taste of spiritual paradise that is then lost to -- worse, torn from -- the protagonist. There is an unholy wedding of science and religion at the climax of the novel that was a little surprising in what had been such a terse, naturalistic narrative until then. The experience of it is effectively portrayed, but Brackett muffs the haunted ending as she tries to tie together some other loose threads. She handles a similar denouement more effectively in a couple of her novellas from the late '40s, but those are more in the mold of the old romances anyway.
Next up is Brackett's The Long Tomorrow, which is frequently cited as her best novel, along with The Sword of Rhiannon. I believe it is the only one of her science fiction novels that is Earthbound.
-- Leigh Brackett, The Big Jump (1953/1955)
The Big Jump is a slick, hard-boiled space opera that reminded me in tone of Budrys' Rogue Moon, particularly in the focus on hard-driven, almost maniacal characters in semi-realistic settings that feel very Fifties. The enormously rich family's domed garden enclave on the moon, on the other hand, reminded me of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. This perverse family and their interest in exploiting rare elements in distant stars are perhaps faintly echoed in Samuel R. Delany's Nova.
This is mostly a fairly middling novel -- a potboiler about humankind's first trip to another star and the frighteningly transformative phenomenon they find there.
BIG SPOILERS: One thing of interest is that the scientific maguffin struck me as an elaboration on the fountain -- or fire -- of youth from Haggard's She. As I mentioned after I read The Moon Pool, Merritt's angle seemed to be to give a superscientific explanation for the supernatural phenomena of the old romances. That's what Brackett is up to here, describing the fountain of youth in terms of transuranic elements, except she is now doing it in a hard-boiled space opera that has left behind the other trappings, such as the evil, seductive femme fatale priestess. Substituted for that tangle of sex, obsession, and betrayal is a taste of spiritual paradise that is then lost to -- worse, torn from -- the protagonist. There is an unholy wedding of science and religion at the climax of the novel that was a little surprising in what had been such a terse, naturalistic narrative until then. The experience of it is effectively portrayed, but Brackett muffs the haunted ending as she tries to tie together some other loose threads. She handles a similar denouement more effectively in a couple of her novellas from the late '40s, but those are more in the mold of the old romances anyway.
Next up is Brackett's The Long Tomorrow, which is frequently cited as her best novel, along with The Sword of Rhiannon. I believe it is the only one of her science fiction novels that is Earthbound.
