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.

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.

So I'm working my way through Leigh Brackett's novels. I probably should have started with her first novel, a mystery called No Good from a Corpse (1944), but I read it not too long ago and didn't think enough of it to want to read it again. So far I've read Nemesis from Terra (aka The Shadow over Mars, 1944), The Starmen of Llyrdis (aka The Starmen, 1951), and Sea Kings of Mars (1949). Sea Kings of Mars was the magazine title of the novel published in book form as The Sword of Rhiannon, which I've read before. It is published under its original title in the Orion collection, Sea Kings of Mars and Otherworldly Stories, which is where I read it this time. I'm not sure if this is actually the magazine version, or if they just used the old title. I've e-mailed the editor of the collection, Stephen Jones, but haven't heard back from him yet. I couldn't tell any difference, but it's been a while since I read The Sword of Rhiannon.

Since I had the collection with me in Oregon and had finished the novel, I also reread the Eric John Stark novella, "Queen of the Martian Catacombs". This is, in fact, the magazine version of the story, which was later rewritten (allegedly by her husband, Edmond Hamilton) and slightly expanded as The Secret of Sinharat, which I'm now reading in the Ace Double form. This is Brackett at her best -- an exotic adventure story full of pungent details and powerful atmosphere and heightened-through-suppression eroticism. There's a one-sentence description of a kiss of broken, thirsty lips that beautifully captures a sadomasochistic sensuality. The first part of The Secret of Sinharat seems identical to "Queen of the Martian Catacombs," but I've reached the point where changes begin. I'm curious to see what was done to the ending, which I found very powerful in the original version -- a typical moment of renunciation and separation, the price of crimes committed.

Nemesis from Terra isn't very good, although it has some of the usual great sensual and sadomasochistic detail. The Starmen of Llyrdis is a bit rambling or episodic, but it successfully moves from a mundane Earth to a far-flung space opera. The central idea is a strain of humanity that has been bred to survive faster-than-light interstellar flight. This idea has been used over and over, including by Delany in "Ay, and Gomorrah" (IIRC) and "The Star Pit". I wonder what the earliest usage was? In any event, there's a terrific horror scene in The Starmen of Llyrdis involving a normal human who stows away aboard an FTL flight.

Sea Kings of Mars/The Sword of Rhiannon is one of Brackett's best-known books. The adventures (as often in Brackett) are largely formulaic, and what is remarkable about the novel is its vision of an ancient Mars with oceans and sea-going civilizations. The clash of pre-gunpowder cultures and super-science is straight out of Edgar Rice Burroughs, but Brackett layers on the torn loyalties, torn consciousness, and sadomasochism. It's a potent cocktail of pulp psychosexual histrionics. The mild telepathy of the Martian halflings perhaps represents our naked vulnerability, our inability to hide, though we desperately wish to, like prey trying to hide from predator, like a lover trying to hide his betrayal at the height of passion.

There had been a brawl at Madam Kan's, on the Jekkara Low-Canal. Some little Martian glory-holer had got too high on thil, and pretty soon the spiked knuckle-dusters they use around there began to flash, and the little Martian had pulled his last feed-valve.

They threw what was left of him out onto the stones of the embankment almost at my feet. I suppose that was why I stopped -- because I had to or trip over him. And then I stared.

The thin red sunlight came down out of a clear green sky. Red sand whispered in the desert beyond the city walls, and red-brown water ran slow and sullen in the canal. The Martian lay twisted over on his back, with his torn throat spilling the reddest red of all across the dirty stones.

He was dead. He had green eyes, wide open, and he was dead.

-- Leigh Brackett, "The Veil of Astellar", Thrilling Wonder Stories, Spring 1944

I think we can safely assume that Brackett didn't mean glory-hole in its modern slang sense, but I'm not sure whether it's a neologism or whether it had a different meaning in the '40s. Feed-valve I take for a stefnal neologism, although she doesn't define it within the story.

These are the very first words of the story. A completely familiar Mars -- thin sun, red sand, canals -- but she's giving it the stripped down, hard-boiled edge of the day. Thin sun, red sand, canals -- and death. Pure pulp poetry. You know there's only one thing that can follow this, and it's telepathic vampires.

For the past few years, when I've read SF and fantasy it has tended to be the older, pulpier variety. Lately, I seem to be embarking on the project of rereading some of my adolescent favorites, spurred by enjoyable recent tours of Andre Norton and HP Lovecraft.

When I was a teenager, my favorites (after I was done with Norton) were Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, and JRR Tolkien, all of whom I read and reread fervently, as did my friend Reid, who also joined me in making up trivia quizzes about the different minor characters and secondary world zoology. I stopped reading all of them when I went to college and got serious about literature and thus started reading New Wave SF writers instead. Later, I went back to Tolkien, but I've never had any interest in rereading Burroughs or Howard. But somehow I was prompted to give Leigh Brackett's The Sword of Rhiannon a reread, and from there it wasn't much of a reach to try Burroughs' A Princess of Mars again.

( Two Martian odysseys )