Dry Ice Factory

The story about "Lorelei of the Red Mist" is that Leigh Brackett had written half of it when she was hired by Howard Hawks to work on the screenplay for The Big Sleep in 1945. So she handed it over to a young Ray Bradbury, who hadn't made his name yet, and he wrote the second half. With this story in mind, my feeling the first time I read the novella was that I couldn't tell where one writer left off and the other took over. Now having read it a second time, I perhaps mistakenly feel I can.

"Lorelei of the Red Mist" is, like much of Brackett's output, an old-fashioned story. This is a planetary romance in the mode of Edgar Rice Burroughs, with a layer of A. Merritt's science fantasy blended in, and like so much of the work of both of these models it is a lost world story. It's set on Venus, but protagonist Hugh Starke, in an attempt to escape the cops after a heist, crashes in the Mountains of White Cloud: "The backbone of the planet, towering far into the stratosphere, magnetic trap, with God knew what beyond." Well, it turns out that what lies beyond is a sea of red gases that works just like water except humans (or humanoids) can breath while swimming under it. Here three different tribes of more or less (in one case quite a bit less) humans are locked in a battle for domination. Starke comes from Brackett's shared pulp solar system universe where spaceships flit everywhere from Mercury to the moons of Jupiter, but the lost world he discovers on Venus might as well be in a pocket universe in another dimension. There's no contact with outside civilizations, and that was a pretty old dream already by the time the Summer 1946 issue of Planet Stories was published with this story in it.

One thing that's interesting about the novella, at least to a Brackett fan like myself, is how similar it is in many ways to The Sword of Rhiannon, which was first published as Sea-Kings of Mars in the June 1949 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories. Both are stories of desperate thieves thrown into the middle of a conflict between various savage enemies, swords versus magical super science, and two erotic beauties in the balance -- one a scheming sorceress and one a powerful princess. But this much is typical Burroughs/Merritt material, and the more striking similarity is the dual consciousness of the protagonists of both stories. Actually, Starke's situation is even more complicated than that of Matthew Carse in The Sword of Rhiannon. Carse has another mind inside his own, but that mind cannot control him in any direct way. Starke, on the other hand, is occasionally possessed by the inhuman sorceress Rann, who is able to direct his action up to a point. On top of that, Starke suffers a fatal accident in the opening scene, and Rann transfers his mind to that of another person (unfortunately named Conan) whose own mind had been lost due to torture. So, according to the logic of the story, our protagonist is really a kind of composite of three identities: Starke, Rann, and Conan. And the confusion of identities leads to a similar confusion of allegiances.

To my mind, this is the thing that, along with her incredible sense of mood and atmosphere, makes Brackett stand out from the other acolytes of Burroughs and Merritt. Her characters -- all of them spun from common pulp formulas -- are conflicted, and she often found ways to make the conflicted motives literally the result of multiple identities or wills. (To be honest, this may come from Merritt too. I've only read The Moon Pool.) In "Lorelei of the Red Mist," Starke's backstory is that he was born in a isolated mining colony in the asteroids, his body stunted from being starved for most of his first 21 years, before he turned to a life of crime and spent time in the Lunar cell blocks. Because of his deprived early life, his survival depended on pure grit and will power. Conan was a powerful warrior with a well-developed body, but he was unable to resist Rann's compulsion of his will. That's what Starke brings to the mix: will-power.

Needless to say, if you have any knowledge at all of Ray Bradbury, none of this is even remotely like Bradbury's typical material. This is all pure Brackett. I think that was what was so remarkable to me the first time I read the novella: that Bradbury could write in this vein so convincingly. I'm not sure Bradbury ever wrote another action-adventure story in his life, let alone one involving sword fights. But once you get past the oddity of this, I think you can start to see his fingerprints on the half he wrote.

Going out on a limb here, my guess is that he took over around the point Starke/Conan leaves Crom Dhu with the intent to leave this lost world behind. Going even further out on that limb, since this is all speculation any way, I'd point to the word "abortion" used in Starke's meditation on his old body -- "the little stunted abortion that had clawed and scratched its way to survival through sheer force of mind" -- as my first sign that something had changed. This word struck me as an unusually aggressive description for Brackett. Very soon there were other signs of Bradbury at work.

Some of the signs are actually signs of an inexperienced writer at work, I think. There are several points at which the second person is used to describe what I think should be Stark/Conan's reaction to events. The example I noted was: "The very silence of their encirclement made your skin crawl and sweat break cold on your cheeks." The use of "you" breaks the narrative frame for no apparent reason, so I assume inexperience (and a bad or inattentive editor). There are also at least a couple of points at which otherwise fine images are muffled by waffle-words, e.g.: "Dead bodies under-sea are never in a hurry. They sort of bump and drift and bide their time." Get rid of the "sort of," and that's a nice macabre image.

And the story becomes a lot more macabre in the second half. Bradbury had apparently published a few stories in Weird Tales by this point, and the infusion of the weird into this story is noticeable. Some of it is gruesome, as when Starke hacks at a dead body animated by magic super science, eventually cutting off the head, which continues to talk to him, um, animatedly. I found that the horrific nature of some of this jarred against the earlier tone of the story, but I have to say that nevertheless young Bradbury came up with some powerfully weird imagery, such as this brief moment of panic: "He was afraid his head might fall off and whirl away like a big fish, using its ears as propellers."

In other passages Bradbury seems to be channeling Lovecraft channeling Dunsany:

Long ago some vast sea Titan had dreamed of avenues struck from black stone. Each stone the size of three men tall. There had been a dream of walls going up and up until they dissolved into scarlet mist. There had been another dream of sea-gardens in which fish hung like erotic flowers, on tendrils of sensitive film-tissue. Whole beds clung to garden base, like colonies of flowers aglow with sunlight. And on occasion a black amoebic presence filtered by, playing the gardener, weeding out an amber flower here, an amythystine bloom there.

I think the influence of Lovecraft in his Dream Cycle phase is obvious, but I'm not sure I have the critical chops to explain why it seems unlike something Brackett would have written. I would probably start with the word "amythystine," which is far more precious than Brackett even at her most exotic:

Her skin was white, with no hint of rose. Her shoulders, her forearms, the long flat curve of her thighs, the pale green tips of her breasts, were dusted with tiny particles that glistened like powdered diamond. She sparkled softly like a fairy thing against the snowy fur, a creature of foam and moonlight and clear shallow water. Her eyes never left his, and they were not human, but he knew they would have done things to him if he had had any feeling below the neck."

Rather than raise the rhetorical level with the poetically rare "amythystine" it's perhaps more typical of Brackett to bring things down to the demotic earth with the hard-boiled plainness of "would have done things to him." It also seems typical of her writing that metaphors in her descriptions are fairly simple: foam, moonlight, and clear shallow water. Referring to "erotic flowers" seems decadent (in the aesthetic, not moral, sense), where "the pale green tips of her breasts" seems actually erotic.

"Lorelei of the Red Mist" is a strange marriage of two very different sensibilities. I'd be curious to know how much of the plot had been worked out by Brackett, who said she often didn't know where her stories were going until she finished them. (Unlike her husband, Edmond Hamilton, who always plotted his stories out before he started writing them.) If Bradbury took over about where I think he did, he got the most interesting world-building material, as in the second half of the story we're introduced to the "under-sea" world inside the red mist. There's also more than a little bit of Pirates of the Caribbean in the way the dead are re-animated and used as an army. If that's where Brackett was headed with the story, I wonder if it would have still managed to be less macabre if she had written it. But would that have made it less unusual?



ENDNOTES:

The same Summer 1946 issue of Planet Stories that ran "Lorelei of the Red Mist" also included Bradbury's "The Million Year Picnic," which eventually became the capstone story in Bradbury's famous 1950 book, The Martian Chronicles. So you could say that 1946 was the year he started to make his name.

Artist credits for the three images above are Chester Martin for the cover of Planet Stories, and Kelly Freas for the two pieces of artwork from the Fall 1953 issue of Tops in Science Fiction, which is not a publication I was previously aware of. (Notice that Bradbury's name has been moved ahead in the byline, indicating that he was now the more famous writer.) Freas did two other interior illos for that reprint, both of which can be found at The Pictorial Arts, along with a a quote from Freas about his work on the project.

I originally read "Lorelei of the Red Mist" in the eponymous volume of Haffner Press' collection of the complete fantastic short fiction of Leigh Brackett. I read it again this week in Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories 8 (1946), edited by Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg. Other notable stories in this volume include "A Logic Named Joe" by Will F. Jenkins (who usually published under the pen name Murray Leinster), which is renowned for anticipating some aspects of the internet; "The Million Year Picnic" by Bradbury, as described above; "Rescue Party" by Arthur C. Clarke, which packs remarkable scope and scale into a short story about an expedition from an advanced alien federation investigating Earth while the sun is in the process of going nova; "Vintage Season" by Lawrence O'Donnell (C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner), which is an absolutely terrific novella about sophisticated dilettantes who travel through time in search of thrills; and "Evidence" by Asimov, which is one of the stories in I, Robot. "Lorelei" stands out as old-fashioned in this bunch, although Nelson S. Bond's "Conqueror's Isle" is another lost world story of sorts and basically a sensationalistic short story version of Bulwer-Lytton's 1871 novel, The Coming Race.

There were still people writing pastiches of Burroughs, if not Merritt, as late as the 1970s. I'm thinking of Lin Carter, for instance, not to mention Brackett's own final three novels about Eric John Stark. I'm not aware of the Burroughsian style of planetary romance surviving beyond that era, however, although you can see elements of it in things like the movie Avatar.

Anyone who has been following my series of posts about Leigh Brackett might be interested in my post at Dreamland Cafe about The Vampire's Ghost, her first film credit.

In an interview conducted for the fanzine Tangent in April 1976, Leigh Brackett was asked what she had in the pipeline after The Reavers of Skaith, and she replied, "I'm working on the fourth Eric John Stark novel. We finish with Skaith with this third one. Both Eric John and I have had enough with that planet, and I think we're going to move on to something else. We're starting a whole new world." Instead she turned next to the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back, which she completed before she died in March 1978. So The Reavers of Skaith ended up being the last book she wrote. It was published in 1976.

The first two volumes in the late-career Eric John Stark series, The Ginger Star and The Hounds of Skaith, were published in 1974, so I assume they were written together and this one was written later. It has some stylistic differences from the first two books, most notably in the way it switches at times away from Stark's viewpoint to that of other characters. At first this seemed sloppy to me, but I think I understand why she did it. Maybe she had more than one reason, in fact, because it both allows her to paint a broader picture of the social convulsions on Skaith as things fall apart and it allows her to resolve the stories of the rather large cast of characters she created over the course of the trilogy without having to bring them all back into contact with Stark again. Nonetheless, I think it does tend to create a looser, less finely focused book, especially since I had a hard time remembering who half the point-of-view characters were.

Michael Moorcock, who has written perceptively about Brackett's talent and importance, says that these late Stark books are not worthy of her. I think part of the over all problem with the trilogy is that Stark is a less interesting character than he is in the original trilogy of novellas she wrote about him. He was conceived as a combination of Tarzan and Conan -- half man, half animal, all mercenary -- but in these books the savage, sadomasochistic side of his character rarely has any real impact. For that matter, the mercenary side of him gets lost in a rather more idealistic character who fights for the down-trodden of Skaith and falls in love with a witchy woman. The relationship with the seer, Gerrith, is problematic in other ways, because his feelings for her are apparently deep, and yet their interactions seem completely secondary to the plot. (That said, his feelings for her do lead in this book to one of the best lines in the trilogy: "And Stark's heart turned in him like a sword blade.") Another weakness of these books, to my mind, is the overt turn to supernatural magic, as in Gerrith's ability to see the future. The older stories were science fantasies in which science was more or less miraculous, but there was no overt magic.

And yet I ended up liking these books, despite their apparent flaws. I thought the depiction of Skaith got more interesting in the second volume, and it gets even better in the third, for all that Brackett herself was apparently tired of the place. What we get in the final episode is the apocalypse. Skaith is a planet orbiting a dying star, and the planet is slowly freezing from the poles inward. Human civilization has been convulsively migrating toward the last remaining fertile land in the temperate and equatorial zones. In The Reavers of Skaith there is a sudden climatic change that ruins crops and sends waves of starving migrants toward the fertile zones. The desperation of this migration is vividly portrayed, as is the resulting collapse of social stability. Brackett's pragmatic tough-mindedness keeps an eye on the logistics of civilization, with a bracing view of what it looks like when people have to live in their own offal and disease begins to spread.

Brackett also keeps an idealistic eye on the stars, which offer an avenue of escape that is traditional to old school American science fiction. The trilogy ends on a hopeful note, although it is counterpointed by the personal loss Stark has suffered. It's our loss that we didn't get any more fiction from the remarkable Leigh Brackett, who was only 63 when cancer took her.

Okay, so I guess I'd agree that this is a better novel than the first one in the series, The Ginger Star. They both came out in 1974, so I wonder if Brackett wrote them back-to-back. The third and final book of the series came out in 1976, but Brackett said in an interview that she was planning further adventures for Eric John Stark and was looking forward to getting him off Skaith and onto another planet. In any event, what makes The Hounds of Skaith more interesting than The Ginger Star is both that the world of Skaith is that much richer with increasing familiarity and that Stark is less passive and actually drives the story.

Skaith is a dying planet, like the Mars of the earlier Stark stories, but it's dying in a different way than Mars. Essentially the sun -- the ginger star -- is dying, and the planet is slowly cooling down from the poles toward the equator. As the population was pushed toward the equator, a despotic government formed to control the remaining fertile territory. In the frozen wastelands of the north (and presumably the south) people have evolved into mindless animals or lawless bands of thugs. In earlier days when the planet's civilization was at its height, some humans chose to be genetically modified into other forms. For example, in this second book we meet a race of genetically modified bird people, but the catch is that the modification failed to actually give them full flight ability. On the other hand, they have a mysterious ability to control the wind that is pure super science wizardry.

Stark is a mercenary, and his skill is war. The despots of Skaith want to prevent people from leaving the planet, because they live off the people. Stark's goal is to break the power of the despots so that people can choose to emigrate off-world if they want to. The Hounds of Skaith is about his efforts to organize the oppressed groups to rise up against the despots. The real attraction of these books, I think -- aside from the interesting parts of the world-building -- is Brackett's tough-mindedness. She doesn't dwell on battle, but her writing about strategy and fighting is very compelling. It's unsentimental, focused, and brutal.

That said, I still find these books lacking in depth. While Brackett does a good job -- better in the second book -- of describing the political stakes, I find it hard to care much. It's possible that it's just not my cup of tea. The stories of hers I prefer are the downbeat ones full of wild, inexpressible feelings and tragic loss. These Skaith novels don't feel as though anything is at stake, although at the same time Brackett displays an admirable ability to see all sides. Even the despots get a chance to argue their cause, which is stability. Even those who fight for freedom are also afraid of change.

Well, now that I've read the second book, I'm tempted to read the third just for completion's sake. Next up, however, is her award-winning Western, Follow the Free Wind, which is about James Beckwourth, who was born into slavery in Virginia in 1798 but became a mountain man and trapper.

Like The Secret of Sinharat, with which it is paired in the Ace Double edition in which I read both short novels, People of the Talisman is an expansion of a novella originally published in the magazine Planet Stories. Wikipedia has a comparison of the two versions, but it's incomplete. Rich Horton's review of this same Ace Double also compares versions.

I should also note that it is commonly alleged that Brackett's husband, Edmond Hamilton, was responsible for the expansions of the two novellas, but I've never seen any documentary evidence for this claim, so I don't lend it much credence.

This is another Eric John Stark story set on Mars. Planetary romance is a form of science fiction, but in many ways it feels more like historical adventure or sword and sorcery fantasy. There isn't much interest in science or technology, but there's a gizmo (the titular talisman) and eventually there's a lost race of aliens. The Secret of Sinharat also had something of the feel of a lost race or lost world story, but this one definitely falls into that category.

As an adventure, this is rock solid stuff. Brackett sets up an intriguing situation in which Stark inherits a talisman that was stolen from a city named Kushat near the north pole of Mars. He travels there and is caught up in an attempt by a tribe led by a mysterious figure in black to conquer Kushat. The talisman is said to be the key to finding a powerful ally through the Gates of Death who has protected Kushat in the legendary past.

Somebody compared this to a spaghetti western, and there's something of the Man with No Name about Stark, who wanders into this struggle with ambiguous loyalties. As is frequently the case in Brackett's stories, including The Secret of Sinharat, there are two women who draw Stark's interest, one young and innocent, the other older and more hard-bitten. The more experienced woman in People of the Talisman is one of Brackett's most fascinating characters: Ciaran, the bastard daughter of a king who has taken up arms to exert power in a world that has always tried to keep her powerless. She is Stark's physical equal, and Stark is an extraordinarily powerful physical specimen. It is perhaps the one time that Brackett expressed any frustration with being a woman in what was primarily a male profession at the time, but the frustration is also intimately connected to the erotic power of a strong woman's body.

Her face had a white blaze to it, a strength and an iron pride. He studied her, sitting tall and straight on the old rock, with her long legs and her splendid shoulders, and the fine hands that seemed forlorn without the axe to fondle.

"I would like to know," he said, "what made you as you are?"

She said impatiently, "A man is free to be what he will without questions, but a woman is supposed to be a woman and nothing more. One gets tired of explaining." She leaned back against the boulders, and there was a certain triumph in her eyes. "I did not ask for my sex. I will not be bound by it. I did not ask to be a bastard, and I will not be bound by that, either. So much I have accomplished, if I die today."

Later there is remarkable, erotically charged scene in which she and Stark are stripped naked, their bodies nicked and sliced by sadistic tormentors, whom they fight back against side by side, dripping with blood. The sadomasochistic sublimation of desire and pleasure in this scene is pretty potent stuff, further proof that great sex scenes don't necessarily need a graphic representation of sex or even of the body.

The sadomasochism of the climax, which involves decadent aliens who amongst other things cut themselves and others for pleasure, is perhaps shocking if you haven't read much pulp fiction or, for that matter, much Brackett. The Stark stories always seem to involve a scene in which he's tortured nearly to death. The ability to withstand pain and to transform it into the will to live is a constant theme. Because sexual desire has to be covert in these stories, it pops out in these sadomasochistic arenas, creating a mood of dark, sensual perversity.

This perverse mood carries into political areas as well, where Brackett takes the side of the lower class thieves against the effete aristocracy. There is another utterly remarkable scene where Stark and a companion have to find their way through catacombs in which the royalty of Kushat have been buried for centuries. They discover that the royal tombs have been stripped bare by the thieves over the ages, and that the thieves have taken their revenge in other ways as well.

Of all that immeasurable splendor, the tunneling thieves of Kushat had taken every crumb. Even the metal sconces had been dug out of the walls. Nothing was left, except the thrones, which were stone and immovable, and the kings themselves, who were not worth the carrying. Stripped of their robes and armor and their jeweled insignia of office, the naked corpses shivered on their icy thrones, and the irreverent thieves had placed some of those that were still sturdy enough in antic poses. Others were broken in bits and scattered on the floor or heaped like kindling in the throne seats.

Pure pulp poetry. These short novels, and the novellas they were based on, represent Brackett at the peak of her prowess. She would end her career with three novels about Eric John Stark, trying to recapture past magic -- or at least the enthusiastic paying audience for past magic. Brackett's fiction was a creature of commerce, but she invested it with something more. From the common elements of planetary romance she fashioned folk tales of intense sexual heat and the chilly embrace of death.

'A port opened in the side of the ship. And as though that was the final symbolic trigger I needed, I got the full impact of what I was seeing. Suddenly the friendly, protecting sky seemed to have been torn open above me as the veiling cloud was torn, and through the rent the whole Outside poured in upon me, the black freezing spaces of the galaxy, the blaze and strangeness of a billion billion suns. I shrank beneath the vastness. I was nothing, nobody, an infinitesimal fleck in a cosmos too huge to be borne. The stars had come too close. I wanted to get down and howl and grovel like a dog.' (Leigh Brackett, "The Queer Ones", 1957)

The Long Tomorrow (1955) is widely considered Brackett's best novel, and it's easy to see why. For one thing, it is a very Campbellian novel, so probably more palatable to hard SF fans than her planetary romances and space operas. It's also written in a down home, all-American venacular that's very different from the hard-boiled exoticism of her other science fiction and her crime fiction. On top of that, it's about Mennonites and mentions a character named Byers, which are sure signs of high quality. Oh yeah, and it's a damned good book.

It's a post-holocaust novel. Sometime in the past, humanity destroyed civilization in a nuclear war. In America, we learn, the Constitution has been changed to limit communities to two thousand people or two hundred buildings in an effort to stop this self-destructing civilization from ever developing again. The entire country has become agrarian, and cities and advanced technology have been abandoned. Our protagonist, Len Colter, is an adolescent farm boy living in a community of New Mennonites. His cousin, Esau, is a hellion who discovers a device that they gradually learn is a radio. They figure out how to use it by reading stolen books, and they surreptitiously listen for a signal. Then they hear a message from Bartorstown, the legendary town where scientists are said to still pursue the illegal dream of technology.

The novel is divided into three sections, like acts in a play. It's a coming of age story about Len, and an exploration of the American landscape, full of finely-observed details. (One book it reminded me of was Neal Barrett Jr's Through Darkest America, although that is a much darker and more nightmarish story.) It's an examination of religious fundamentalism, which always seems timely in this country. It's also an examination of the dangers of knowledge and individualism. In fact, it is a classic tale of the journey from ignorance to knowledge, with all the mixed blessings and responsibilities it brings. The ending is, perhaps typically for Brackett, strange, unexpected, and rushed. I've read that she never plotted her stories out ahead of writing them; she just started somewhere and made it up as she went along. Perhaps because of that, her denouements often feel haphazard.

When I say the novel is Campbellian, I'm really talking about the set-up and tone. The ending is more conflicted than you might expect in a paean to science, technology, and human ingenuity. Perhaps that explains why the book is not considered a true classic within the field, although come to think of it, the conflicted ending has a certain resemblance to another classic of post-holocaust SF, A Canticle for Leibowitz. Whatever the case, this is a very fine novel. I personally like her pulpier adventure stories more, but this one probably has a better claim to greatness. It's possible that even people who don't normally care for science fiction would like this one, because of the naturalistic surface.

Darkness. 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.

( Analysis of maguffin with BIG SPOILER )

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.

Lorelei of the Red Mists: Planetary Romances is the latest Leigh Brackett collection from Haffner Press, following Martian Quest: The Early Brackett. I'm not familiar enough with Brackett's bibliography to know if these volumes collect all of her short science fiction and fantasy, but the stories included are arranged in order of original publication. The stories in this volume run from "The Blue Behemoth", published in the May 1943 issue of Planet Stories, through "The Dancing Girl of Ganymede", published in the February 1950 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories.

The subgenre of planetary romance consists of romances in the old sense of the word: heroic adventure stories in exotic settings. Think Arthurian romance. The planetary romance sets the adventure on an alien planet. Brackett wrote at the tail end of the period when these stories were set on planets in the solar system. Most of these stories are set on either Mars or Venus, but a Mars and Venus of the pulp imagination. Here Mars is a dying planet along the lines that Percival Lowell once speculated, with only canals remaining from the once vast Martian oceans, and inhabited by humanoid Martians from an ancient, now decadent and dying, civilization. Venus, below the clouds, is a savage, primitive planet covered with oceans and jungles and soaring mountains. The men whose adventures she writes about are Byronic figures. They are always lean and wolfish. They are always broken or torn inside. They have done bad things, suffered terrible losses, and they are trying to escape the nightmare of history. Sometimes they manage it, but often they don't. What's perhaps surprising about these stories -- what's different from earlier models such as the planetary romances of Edgar Rice Burroughs and his many imitators -- is how downbeat they are.

( And I'm talking beat down here ... )

Is there anybody on my Flist (or who is lurking) who went to Readercon and would be willing to send me a photocopy of John Clute's article about Leigh Brackett from the program book? I'd be happy to reimburse you for the expenses. (I'm actually slightly unclear whether it was from this year's program book or last year's.)

EDIT: All praise gerisullivan! Mission accomplished.