(listen to episode on Spotify)
(music: dark ambiance)
Planet Stories background, non-spoiler discussion
JM:
Hello, everyone. This is Chrononauts. I'm JM, and I'm here with Gretchen and Nate, and we're talking about the legendary space opera development and the, I guess, history of heroic interplanetary romance.
And right now, we're going to continue a discussion we started in our episode previous to the last one, during which we talked about "Princess of Mars" by Edgar Rice Burroughs. And if you want to hear that, that one's up, as well as our talk on "Shambleau" by C. L. Moore. And I want to continue the discussion I started with us in the Burroughs episode right now, and we left off there discussing the germination and sort of eventual acceptance of the designation space opera, long after Edgar Rice Burroughs and into the 1950s and 60s.
But now let's back up just a little bit and talk about a particular magazine, which Hartwell and Kramer mentioned, along with our soon to be discussed author, Leigh Brackett, as well as other writers of the time, as feeling that it kept alive a certain flavor of science fiction in the pulps. And this flavor was arguably, in some ways, a conservative one. And these are the kind of stories you would have seen in the earliest days of some of our already discussed magazines, the prototypical space adventure with a lot of borderline, fantastic elements, almost.
In the early days, that is especially late 1920s and early 1930s, these types of stories were kind of spread all over the existing magazines, but as each publication sort of attained its particular niche and style, you kind of saw some leaning into this formula, while others distinctly leaned away from it into their own. And by the time Planet Stories put out its first issue in Winter 1939, and it ran till Summer of 1955, was largely quarterly, though there were a few brief bimonthly stents. 1939, and these kind of a tales in Astounding, for example, were already well on the way out. And Weird Tales would occasionally publish science fiction, sort of like this, but they kind of kept it to a minimum, I think, because some of the readership didn't really go for this sort of thing and express their disdain for science fiction.
You could see a lot of peril, though, I think, in the Thrilling Wonder Stories type magazines, but Planet Stories thrived on loud, brash, swashbuckling interplanetary romance of a melodramatic sort, and their covers and design reflected this as did the plethora of internal illustrations. Stories in the early issues had wonderfully exciting, tantalizing titles, and I'm going to read a whole bunch because they're so much fun. So the very first story ever published in the first issue was "The Golden Amazons of Venus" by John Murray Reynolds. Then we have stuff like "Sphere of the Never-Dead" by Sam Carson, "The Cosmic Juggernaut" by John Russell Fern, Dark Swordsman of Saturn by Neil R. Jones, "Venus Has Green Eyes" by Carl Selwyn, "The War Nymphs" of Venus by Ray Cummings, "The Monster That Threatened the Universe" by R. R. Winterbotham, "Through the Asteroids to Hell" by Leroy Yerxa, "The Rocketeers Have Shaggy Ears" by Keith Bennett, and unfortunately maybe the "Ballad of Blaster Bill" by our old "friend" Nelson S. Bond, who contributed a lot in the early days as did Ross Rocklynne". We also got "The Star of Satan" by Henry Hess, we got Henry Kuttner's "War Gods of the Void", and an interesting, unexpected arrival in the early issues by Isaac Asimov with "Black Friar of the Flame". More about that one in a little bit, but yeah, one of my personal favorites that I'll end up with is "Prisoner of the Brain-Mistress" by Bryce Walton.
But it seems like authors were strangely drawn to Planet, maybe some you wouldn't expect. So yeah, Asimov had his "Black Friar of the Flame", as previously mentioned, and he'd failed to sell this to Astounding and some other markets, and it was originally under the quite prosaic title of "Pilgrimage", but as with other Asimov magazine stories, the editors at Planet decided to change the title to something more lurid and fitting of their particular thing, so that became "Black Friar of the Flame". And this was one of Asimov's least favorite stories, he called it comic style space opera, and it went through so many rewrites that it sounds like he was just exhausted with the whole thing. But it came out in the spring of 1942 issue, around the same time as the first "Foundation" story appeared in Astounding, and include some references, i.e. the Planet Trantor and some of the other things that would be seen in the other more famous series.
There's other authors of note that we've either discussed or talked about on the podcast. Of course, there's Ray Bradbury, who was arguably the most important contributor along with Leigh Brackett. Also, Philip K. Dick, who's "Beyond Lies the Wub", was his first published story and appeared in the July 1952 issue. We've also got Clifford D. Simak, appearing a whole bunch of times, Manly Wade Wellman, yes, that name, Henry Kuttner, Eando Binder, Ray Cummings, Lawrence Manning, Raymond Z. Gallun, Donald A. Wollheim, who's got a very Burroughs-inspired sounding entry in one of the early issues, "The Planet That The Time Forgot", Jack Vance, the famous Western and American historical novelist John Jakes, Frederick Brown, Margaret St. clair, James Blish, Poul Anderson, Sam Moskowitz, Frank Belknap Long, and future Galaxy founder and editor Horace Gold, I guess before he got tired of the whole Space Western thing and decided to really set himself apart from everything that stood for. Damon Knight, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Sheckley, and many more who I've never heard of outside of this particular examination.
It seems like many authors just were attracted to the fun of this magazine, even those who'd be recognized for taking the genre to new and perhaps more literary places in years to come. This despite the fact that Planet did not pay its authors particularly well, ranging from between one to two cents a word as late as the 1950s.
The magazine was launched by Fiction House and its subsidiary Love Romances. The magazine ran for 71 issues, usually maintaining a 128 page format. For all of the 1940s, it cost 20 cents US, and that went up to 25 cents in 1950 along with the page count going down. So yeah, pay more money, you get less pages, sorry, nothing we can do, but yeah. Malcolm Rice was managing editor throughout, but not always listed on the cover page. And story editors included Wilbur S. Peacock, Chester Whitehorn, Jack O'Sullivan, and in the summer of 1950, for about a year, Jerome Bixby, who was already an experienced editor and would soon be famous for his writing work for both the Twilight Zone and Star Trek.
Like the other magazines we've mentioned in the podcast, the Planet had a letter column called The Visograph, and it was very lively, with even Malcolm Rice contributing frequently. Brackett and Bradbury were very well liked, but there were some complaints from a few readers about the slight sexual content in some stories, like the one Brackett and Bradbury co-wrote, "Lorelei of the Red Mists".
Brackett had 17 stories featured in Planet, starting from 1940, and "Enchantress of Venus" was the second to feature her hero, Eric John Stark, after a "Queen of the Martian Catacombs". But before we get to that, let's return to talking about Brackett for a bit, and we're going to try and incorporate everything. So early on the podcast, we covered No Man's Land in Space, her July 1941 appearance, and amazing. But to recap, Brackett was born Leigh Douglas Brackett on December 7th, 1915 in Los Angeles, California. She's yet another writer, featured on Chrononauts, whose father wasn't around for her childhood, though this time it was because he perished in the influenza epidemic of 1918.
Leigh was a child who, in her own words, loved adventure and excitement, preferring to play, "boys' games". She went to a girl's private school in Santa Monica, but was denied a college scholarship, and the family had financial difficulties around this time, of course. And she got introduced to the local science fiction scene in 1939, hanging with people like Willie Ley and Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and Henry Kuttner, the last of whom she considered her mentor. And I couldn't find any reference to Leigh and Catherine Moore meeting, but they must have done, because they were all in the Southern California scene, and she already had a mentoring, tutoring relation with Henry Kuttner.
So she didn't just write science fiction, of course. She got ahead in detective stories, the first of which, "Murder in the Family", appeared in Mammoth Detective in 1943. Her first novel was |No Good from a Corpse|, a hard-boiled work in the tradition of other American writers of the area, like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. And I haven't read this yet, but it seems to have been a very important work for her, because it got the attention of filmmaker Howard Hawks, later to have a hand in science fiction, cinema, himself, with his "The Thing from Another World". Hawks wanted to make an adaptation of Chandler's "The Big Sleep", and asked his secretary, "hey, get a hold of that guy, Brackett". Completely unaware that Brackett was a woman. Well, this apparently didn't cause any friction later, as Hawks was perfectly willing to go with it long-term. And Brackett's writing partner on this project was none other than William Faulkner, but Faulkner was never much of a screenwriter, and it seems by several reports that, although meetings between Brackett and Faulkner went well, and she said he was a sweet southern gentleman who was mostly concerned with getting paid and getting home to Mississippi, it seems like Brackett actually did most of the work, and this was her doorway into the world of Hollywood screenwriting.
She worked on several more projects for Hawks in the early 50s and later, including John Wayne vehicles like "Rio Bravo", "Hatari!", and "El Dorado". Her screenwriting did slow down her science fiction output in the 50s and 60s somewhat, but it never stopped entirely. I believe her last full screenwriting credit was on "The Long Goodbye", another Chandler adaptation, this time in 1973, directed by Robert Altman, and that's a really good film.
But by the 1970s, Brackett was known as the Queen of the Space Opera, and she had influenced many later writers, including Marion Zimmer Bradley, Lin Carter, also editor of the Ballatine Adult Fantasy series, and of course George Lucas. Her last work for the screen was "The Empire Strikes Back" draft script, a very different take on the story than the one Lucas produced. And if you all want, we can maybe discuss that at the end a little bit, but it's interesting to read the script now and see Brackett's style in it, but also its contrast to the 1980 produced film. Lucas and other script writers certainly made a lot of changes, but some of Brackett's core ideas and scenes do somewhat remain in place.
In 1975, Brackett edited for Ballantine, "The Best of Planet Stories", Volume 1, implying that they were intended to be others in the series, but it doesn't seem like they ever happened. Brackett was going to edit them all. He talks about this in the introduction, so yeah, it's a shame that this seems to be the only one. But her introduction to this book turned out to be a rather strident and perhaps cutting defense of the entire concept of space opera, which she may have felt was under attack from the new wave, for example. And at this time, she was also putting out science fiction books, "The Skaith Trilogy", a series of novels featuring Eric John Stark, now taken far out of the solar system, since the idea of life on planets like Mars, Venus, and Mercury was now just about proven to be impossible. But it was also here in the late 70s that del Rey Books published their best of series, including many classic American SF authors. And Moore and Kuttner each got their own volumes, and so did Leigh Brackett. On this book, the words space opera were used adorning the jacket as a mark of praise. del Rey, fronted by a former writer and sometimes Campbell compatriot Lester del Rey, was responsible for bringing a lot of this sort of golden age, if you'll excuse the term in a more broad sense this time, not necessarily Campbell's golden age, and earlier science fiction to the public in the 70s and 80s, and in a sense they were working counter to the new wave. Lester del Rey himself had pretty strong ideas about this and wasn't a fan of that movement and style.
The initial Star Wars novelizations, including "Empire Strikes Back", which had Brackett's name on it, even though she didn't actually contribute and was sadly deceased by then, were published by del Rey. Lester del Rey wanted to bring science fiction back to its roots, and so here we basically have the story of how space opera went from a dismissive and pejorative term to an endearing phrase and then a marketing tactic.
Anyway, I'm going to quote from Brackett's introduction because it seems very pertinent, and maybe her tone is a little bit defensive, but I think maybe from her perspective that seems totally justified.
"For 15 years, from 1940 to 1955, when the magazine ceased publication, I had the happiest relationship possible for a writer with the editors of Planet Stories. They gave me in the beginning a proving ground where I could gain strength and confidence in the exercise of my fledgling skills, a thing of incalculable value for young writer. They sent me checks, which enabled me to keep on eating. In later years, they provided a steady market for the kind of stories I liked best to write. In short, I owe them much. To Malcolm Rice, and to Wilbur Peacock, Chester Whitehorn, Paul L. Payne, Jack O'Sullivan, and Jerome Bixby, my fondest salutations. It was fashionable for a while, among certain elements of science fiction fandom, to hate Planet Stories. They hated the magazine, apparently, because it was not Astounding Stories of view which I found ridiculous at the time and still do. They come now to be truthful, not those identical fans, and say, gee, Planet was a great magazine, I wish we had it back. Of course Planet wasn't Astounding, and it never pretended to be Astounding, and that was a mercy for a lot of us who would have starved to death if John W. Campbell Jr. had been the sole and only market for our wares. Apart from everything else, there wasn't room enough for all of us in the one magazine, and we who wrote for Planet tended to be more interested in wonders than we were in differential calculus, or the theory of practice of the hydraulic ramp. Even if we knew all about such things, I didn't. Astounding went on for the cerebrum, Planet for the gut, and it always seemed to me that one target was as valid as the other. Planet, unashamedly, published Space Opera. Space Opera, as ever reader doubtless knows, is a pejorative term, often applied to a story that has an element of adventure. Over the decades, brilliant and talented new writers appear, receiving great acclaim, and each and every one of them can be expected to write at least one article stating flatly that the day of Space Opera is over and done. Thank goodness. And that, hands forward, these crude tales of interplanetary nonsense will be replaced by whatever type of story that writer happens to favor. Psychological dramas, closet dramas, sex dramas, etc. But by God, important dramas containing nothing but big things."
And yes, that's big things. Brackett goes on to justify how the Space Opera is the modern myth tale, likening these kinds of tales with the battling against forces of darkness, dark heroes, and grand adventure, ancient folk epics. And in among all dimensions of Arthur, Robin Hood, the Mabinogion, and the Icelandic sagas, we have none other than "Tarzan of the Apes" from Edgar Rice Burroughs. But she goes on, and sorry but I'm going to continue with this because it's good.
"The so-called Space Opera is the folktale, the hero tale of our particular nation history. No more than a few years back, Tsiolkovsky was a visionary theoretician. Goddard, a genius before his time, had to pretend that his rockets were for high altitude research, only because he was afraid to use the word space. The important men who were carrying their brains in their hip pockets continued to sit upon them, sneering until Sputnik went up and frightened the daylights out of them. But the Space Opera has been telling us tales of spaceflight of journeys to other worlds in this solar system, of journeys to the worlds of other stars, even to other galaxies. The Space Opera has been telling them for decades, with greater or less skill, but with enormous love and enthusiasm. These stories served to stretch our little minds, to draw us out beyond our narrow skies into the vast glooms of interstellar space, where the great suns ride in the splendor and a bright nebulae fling their veils of fire parsecs long across the universe, where the corals coalsack and the horse head make patterns of black mystery, where the Cepheid variables blink their evil eyes and a billion nameless planets may harbor life forms infinitely numerous and strange. Escape fiction? Yes, indeed."
And she continues to talk about contemporary developments in science and how far-flung and outlandish ideas helped to break people away from the mold of conventional thinking, i.e. ways to circumvent the light barrier, after all, some devil particles might be doing just that.
"So where does that leave Space Opera? Especially the Space Opera of yesteryear. And why should we bring back even the best stories from a magazine like Planet, which passed on to the great distributor in the sky almost 20 years ago? Surely, much of the science is outdated. We know now that Venus is a hellhole of impossible heat, where no man could survive for a moment. We know that Mercury is even worse. We know that Mars, but hold on there, no we don't. We're having second thoughts about Mars after a much longer and closer look. There was once an abundance of water there and a thicker atmosphere, and even now, human survival on that planet would be possible with a measure of assistance. One imagines that it might be easy for men to live on equatorial Mars, as it is for them to live on the continent of Antarctica. Something they manage to do, albeit not comfortably. We have not yet landed on Mars, so we cannot yet be sure what will be found there in the way of life forms past or present. Though some sort of vegetation seems at least possible, it's probably too much to hope for the twin cities of Helium. But discoveries may well be made, which will be far more exciting and of profoundly greater importance. In any case, Mars is still fun, so is Venus. Not perhaps as the actual and factual world, so-named, but simply as creations of a writer's imagination, full of wonders that may perfectly well exist on some world, somewhere."
And on that note, I think it's a pretty good time to start talking about "Enchantress of Venus", which was the second Eric John Stark story and showed up in the fall 1949 issue. So, yeah, I really enjoyed this story a lot. Her style has got so much action and verve, and you can tell the excitement when she feels just writing this stuff.
Nate:
Yeah, this is definitely a lot of fun. It feels very, I don't know, like definitely turn your brain off type story, but she's just so awesome at writing these kind of adventure stories that... Yeah, we get this crazy setting on Venus in this, like, gaseous sea, and there's just all these weird creatures and ancient cities. She just packs so much stuff in there, and it's all great.
Gretchen:
I love the imagery of this one. There's that particular scene, we'll get to it when you're introduced to the family that is... Oh, yeah. It's a Lhari that is just great. I love that scene, and I love the way that she describes it. The overall plot may not be as complex, and it may not be very... Maybe the sort of thing that a new wave author would enjoy, but I think it's a lot of fun, and I think that she is very talented.
JM:
Michael Moorcock was a really big fan of Leigh Brackett. Totally, totally.
Gretchen:
Yes.
JM:
Yeah, so it's more complex than just new wave versus old style space opera, I guess.
Gretchen:
Yeah, it's definitely... I really do like this one. I think that it's interesting to compare this to "Princess of Mars", where here we have this sort of outsider...
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
This is the sort of person that might have been described in Burrough's narrative as primitive, and it is described as primitive here, and we see that from his perspective. I feel like there's a lot more sympathy here for what would be considered someone who is more alien, or maybe not the typical hero.
Nate:
He's unable to punch his way through everybody like John Carter is in the Burroughs. He does do a fair amount of punching other people in the story, which is fun to read. The action is definitely better done than the Burroughs, I'd say. And at this time, Leigh Brackett definitely has some practice at doing that. The Space Western we did earlier was, I don't know, not quite 10 years before this, but a decent chunk in her career before this. And as you mentioned, this is the second John Stark story, which I haven't read the first, but I can imagine she had other goes at this kind of style before getting to this point, and pretty much knows the ropes by now.
JM:
So the last year in a bit, I actually read two of the other Eric John Stark stories. They were both in the Ace Double edition, so there was the "The Secret of Sinharat", which actually was originally "Queen of the Martian Catacomb" from the previous issue of Planet Stories, and another one called "People of the Talisman". Not sure which one that one was taken from. She changed the titles, and I guess she added, changed a little bit of the material. I think this was in the 60s. So I'm not quite sure exactly how much was changed. It didn't seem like, and I was kind of, the reason I was unsure about this one, actually, was I wasn't sure if that one had been incorporated into a different work or not. It doesn't seem like that's the case. Definitely "People of the Talisman" and the "The Secret of Sinharat". I think, I don't know how much attention to detail there was in terms of the chronology. It definitely seemed like you were meant to just, you know, pick it up. It didn't seem like events needed to follow on one from another. I believe I actually read "People of the Talisman" first, and then the "Secret of Sinharat", and that would have been, I mean, in terms of writing, that would have been, the latter would have been first, but I can't say, but they were both sort of similar to this one, and there was a lot of, yeah, like lost race kind of stuff, and action, tribal rebellions, and Eric John Stark is kind of trying to help out the rebels from Mars who are being kind of exploited by the Earth people and stuff like that. There's some pretty amazing scenes and also a really cool character in "People of the Talisman", who, you spent the first three quarters of the story thinking that it was an evil king or something like that, and he's like this, it's just kind of like the king of the pirates, because I think Leigh Brackett loves pirates. I mean, why wouldn't you, right? She always has them in her stories.
They don't have the big romance, but she does have that in some of the other stuff as well, and I noticed that in this too, there's often you have two female characters, and one is like kind of the romantic interest, and the other is not, and oftentimes the romantic interest is the really dangerous one who's probably going to poison you, right? And so in the end, it's not like they lived happily ever after, and the other female character is like, she might be an innocent like the one here. I don't remember if in the other cases, well, I mean, okay, I won't spoil this one yet, but yeah, I mean, you know, it's interesting that she kind of does that, she wants to juxtapose two different kinds of feelings almost, like there's this almost love for a sister or something like that, and then a little sister even calls her at that one point, and there's the tantalizing she-demon kind of.
Gretchen:
The femme fatale, which makes sense since she also was an adapter of noir authors. I think it kind of feels fitting that she would want to have a sort of femme fatale character in some of her works here.
JM:
Yeah, yeah, it's fun, but it's interesting that she also seems to want to, I guess, portray Eric John Stark. Again, it's kind of like similar in some ways to Northwest Smith, and that means he's sort of definitely very much a loner, and he never really walks off with a companion at the end of the story, although it turns out he does have many friends in many places, and oftentimes that's how the stories start, including this one is he's trying to find out what happened to somebody that he knew and liked, who vanished without a trace, and "People of the Talisman", this person that he knows gives him, which is dying breath, he gives him this strange artifact and he has to find out where he has to take the artifact and what's it actually for and all this stuff. This is like a very loyal person, but yeah, I described him as Space Conan in one of my reviews, but I think Space Tarzan or even Space Mowgli might be more appropriate.
I think, again, the way she writes this stuff is just so, there's so much feeling in it and so much energy, right? And it's just like, it's just go, go, go. And interestingly, she does have some stuff that's not like this, especially the book "The Long Tomorrow", which is very rural and post-apocalyptic work, and it feels almost more like a Western, but not really like an action, not the action-packed kind, like just like a frontier story almost. It's interesting, the fact that she had so much experience in different genre styles probably influenced her a lot. She was working with the hard-boiled stuff and she was doing Westerns, and the whole time she was writing these space romances, right? I bet so many people loved those Chandler adaptations and had no idea they were written by a science fiction writer, so it would probably be horrified to find out, especially back then.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, the stories are definitely as lurid as the Planet Stories covers. Yeah, I don't know, it's just a lot of fun and definitely really enjoyed it. It works as a standalone, even though it is the second part of the John Stark series. Certainly wouldn't mind checking out the other ones.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I would be interested. I did know that it was part of a series. I hadn't realized where in the series it was, and again, it's easy to really step into it and read it without prior knowledge of it.
JM:
Yeah, I'm curious to read the ones she wrote in the 70s to see how that developed because that was pretty much at the end of her writing career. Those books came out, then the "Empire Strikes Back" draft, and yeah, she died in 1978.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, they all have good reviews on Goodreads, so it would be cool to check out this character taken, I guess, 25 years down the road.
JM:
Yeah, bring back this creation. Yeah, Eric John Stark, spending most of his life on Mercury, of course, there's a lot of comparison between him and the people of Venus, especially in that area, I guess, where they all live in the swamps and they all never see the sun and their skins are all like really, really, really white. And he's like the darkest person they've ever seen, and they always comment on that. Yeah, I mean, I guess kind of makes you thinking like, yeah, if they were an Eric John Stark movie, you definitely want to get the right kind of actor to play him. Some people might protest just like they do all the other times when it's inappropriate.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, for a movie that I was thinking of for this, it definitely fits that like cheesy 80s sword and sorcery type production, which you just don't really see anymore, or at least they don't look the same way as like "Deathstalker 2" and movies like that did. But I could definitely see them hamming it up in a big way to do something like this.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
I don't know. The asylum film of "Princess of Mars" just didn't hit in the same way as a lot of those 80s movies did. Fulci did that one "Conquest", which is pretty wild and out there.
JM:
Oh, yeah.
Nate:
There's a whole lot of stuff.
JM:
That's amazingly weird. Yeah.
Nate:
Yeah, yeah. But yeah, this would definitely fit in right there with all those kinds of movies, I think.
JM:
There are also a couple of sword and sandal movies from the 60s that went from Hercules in the Ancient World to science fiction like halfway through. Was it? Again, Atlantis, right? That's always the answer.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
There's always Atlantis. And there's a lot of Atlantis in here, even though it's said on Venus.
Nate:
"Yor Hunter from the Future" is one of those.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah.
(music: bubbling oscilloscope)
spoiler summary and discussion
Venus is seen as quite a contrast to Mars. Mars is dry and cool and dusty. And Venus is fiery, teeming with weird jungle life. And Brockett's conception of Venus is a damp cloud shroud in place. And unlike the innermost Mercury, people don't see the sun on Venus because there's so much cloud cover. And life, though, somehow does thrive. And it always rains there. And everything is damp and swampy. She calls it "muddy fecundity", which I thought was really picturesque somehow.
Nate:
She does have a way with words. I mean, I know I said it before, but I really enjoy her writing.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's really good. Eric John Stark is one of Brackett's big hero types. And yeah, maybe more space Tarzan and space Mowgli than space Conan, as I had first thought. He was born, I believe, of Earth parents, but raised on Mercury by savages. He is described as very dark skin and muscular man, made half beast by the threat of violence. He travels around the inner planets of the solar system. He's just come from Mars and is now on Venus and he's hiding, or maybe on the run. He has booked passage on his ship, traveling the mysterious and beautiful and intimidating Red Sea, which is a sea of gaseous elements that appears to be roiling with red sparks of flame.
They are bound from some narrow straits and through a huge, seemingly impenetrable wall, where lies a dark town ruled by piracy, Shuruun. And Captain Malthor is somewhat untrustworthy and he attempts to persuade Stark to get lodgings with him using his beautiful daughter as a a temptation.
And Stark hears a sorrowful chanting carried on the night air that affects his sense of intuition, like a warning. And the captain dismisses it as a trick of the wind, but Stark knows he lies. And as they near the land, Stark is struck from behind and the sailors attempt to subdue him. But despite being bashed over the head, he lively slips away from them and plunges overboard into the Red Sea. Unlike an earthly sea, it's possible to breathe in the gasses of the Red Sea. Despite lots of talk and flame, it doesn't seem to be on fire either.
So Stark muses about his lost comrade, Helvi, who disappeared in the dark warrens of Shuruun, never to emerge again. And he gets lost in an atmospheric, trippy scene and encounters a petrified forest of gnarled trees and has an overwhelming feeling of evil. This totally reminds me of a bad dream I had many, many years ago, so that's cool.
Yeah, he naturally does find his way to the shore and enters the town. And it's a decadent place, overcrowded and dangerous and probably run by pirates. The distilled juices of a poppy are one of the main contraband traits. Stark's formidable dark appearance causes quite a stir among the townsfolk.
He is followed into the square and he sees a huge castle. And three men accost him near a tavern, but a ravaging looking earth man interrupts them, berates the interlocutors, and they leave sheepishly. He tells Stark that he's walked into a trap, but that he should come drink and talk with them. The three men end up meeting the captain of the ship, who Stark had branded with his teeth in the earlier scuffle.
But the man who rescued Stark with these twisted legs is named Mike Larrabee. He's been on Venus for almost a decade and was a wanted man for staging some kind of bag heist. And Stark remembers seeing pictures of him and Larrabee also remembers pictures of Stark. So it's this cool bonding moment among the wild men and the wanted men and also both wanted by the law.
The Lhari are the rulers of Shuruun and they dwell in the castle naturally. And there's a lot of portentous talk of danger for Stark and eventually Larrabee, the more he drinks, the more cautious he gets. He tells Stark he better leave and there's a massive rainstorm as Stark wanders off. He's met by a young girl described rather unflatteringly as pretty in a stupid sort of way. But I do think that it's kind of a sweet thing that they have going on. But yeah, it's like you kind of get it over time.
Apparently she's supposed to do something. Lure Stark maybe, but she's tearful and says she can't and that he should run for his life. Lest become one of the lost ones. That dying in the swamp would be preferable to that. The doleful chanting heard in the gulf at night may come from the lost ones. And the girl, who is Malthor's daughter after all, doesn't know exactly what the lost ones are. But she knows that strangers have a way of disappearing in Shuruun and that her father hunts them. Sometimes his hold is full of captives.
Stark announces that he plans to visit the Lhari and she's even more horrified. It's forbidden to speak of the lost ones and the Lhari are dreadful, whatever they are. But he gently dismisses her, though I have a feeling we'll be seeing her again. He makes it to the castle and there's a little village inside the gates. He makes sure to leave his gun hidden somewhere since he guesses rightly that it would be taken from him.
The castle serfs find amusement in his statement that he wishes to speak with the Lhari. And then inside the castle itself the servants are tongueless and Stark begins to feel trepidation. But thinks of his lost friend Helvi and perhaps other rumors or stories, and the fear is largely replaced with anger.
He finds himself in the Lhari's presence. And here's, I think, the scene you were talking about Gretchen, right?
Gretchen:
Yes. This one's really cool.
JM:
Yeah, it's just so like it's dark in there and he doesn't really know what's going on. And you feel the Stark fear and the almost hallucinogenic strangeness of it. It's dark and quiet in there and a bit spooky for sure. And there are some hideous noises and Stark is spooked. Only then he sees there's a 10 year old boy pulling a baby dragon and a little dragon. A Venetian creature is angrily making all the noise.
There are seven Lhari. She went but somehow debased seeming in Stark's eyes. And he or Brackett likens them to the children of Lucifer himself. There's three men, the boy and three women. And one of the men, a younger one named Treon, who is described as deformed and ungainly, crippled elsewhere, who whittles wood into the shape of a strange feminine creature. He seems more compassionate or human than the rest.
One of the women is incredibly obese and almost sessile. And she's always gobbling morsels of food the entire time where she's around, any scene where she's around. They're of a different race of the people of Shuruun from the high plateaus up in the clouds, as it were. It's almost unheard of to see such people in this part of Venus beyond the Great Barrier Wall.
Only the masticating woman on the bed speaks besides the little boy, that is, who called Stark all kinds of nasty names when he came in. It's clear this is some kind of sordid family thing. The woman on the bed is the matriarch, grandmother of the younger woman and, I guess, the boy. Stark explains himself and we learn that Helvi had a brother whom he was seeking. They both vanished and Starks come looking.
The old woman says that because the Lhari are kind hearted, the friends will meet again. The whole family finds this very amusing. The younger woman, Varra, appears to find Stark attractive.
There is some sexual tension through the rest of the story as Stark is drawn to her too, and indeed kisses her during their first scene. She has a tame falcon on her arm and she uses this to torment her husband to be Egil as he tries to master her. He ends up looking like a fool. There's more amusement among the decadent family. There's lots of tension between the two couples. There's another man and woman as well.
Treon seems a bit of a prophet and Stark is apparently one foretold. Grandmother is very angry with Varra for her lascivious ways. And Egil comes back with a stun gun which he uses to KO Stark. Amid a torrent of memories Stark awakens to find himself under the sea in the city of the lost ones. And I thought this was very atmospheric too.
But it's actually an ancient buried city of a former civilization. And the Gulf of Shuruun was once a valley containing the now dead forest and the lost city of the old ones. And the Lhari's castle is also a survivor of this long lost civilization. As is presumably some of the technology that the Lhari have since the Venetians don't make such things and are basically barbarians.
Anyway, they're supposed to work there as slaves. They all wear special colors that keep them within certain boundaries. Kind of like on the Star Trek episode, "Gamesters of Triskelion", which I just watched recently. So interesting parallels between the ongoing TOS watch going on here while Chrononauts happens. But yeah, Zareth and Malthor are both there since Malthor managed to anger Egil by asking important questions. And I guess not being competent in his slaving job and not being competent enough to hold and deliver Stark properly.
And Helvi, Stark's friend, is also there. They can't survive down there forever. Helvi's brother is gone and he thinks his own time is limited. It takes Stark's a while to recover, but once he does, they put him to work there. And well, the work is to clear the massive wreckage of a huge building in the city. And the Lhari want to get to its depths for some reason. There's been work going on for a very long time.
Sometimes at night, the slaves are allowed to go hang out on this island where there is a small power plant. There they do the chanting and their song of slavery. Although she doesn't really describe exactly what it would sound like, it was kind of fun picturing in my head what this might sound like because it's very eerie apparently. So Stark thinks of escape and Zareth is his, "little sister". Although she seems devoted to him, there's not the sexual tension aspect at all.
She's however jealous of Varra, who is always watching him when she appears. One day Varra beckons Stark out in the frightening forest. And they play for a while and make out and she tells them what she wants from him. He should slay Egil and his brother. Then they'll all be free of them and he can have her too. They'll revive the dying clan. Stark laughs and says, it's not enough for him to be a slave of the Lhari. He has to be executioner for her and pull too.
It was Varra's father who, she says, first started exploring the depths of the lost city. He found the tech and also a book with plans and maps. It said there was a mighty secret that could control life. They could make a race of giants or gods. They've been searching ever since. She thinks the destruction of the edifice was deliberate and a warning that the secret was dangerous.
She doesn't really seem to want them to find it herself. Perhaps being unsure of her own place in the new super race future. There's not much time to wait. Things escalate. Well, pretty fast. Malthor and Egil have set a trap for Stark on his return. And Malthor has his daughter captive and he beats her to goad Stark. They fight and Malthor has a knife. But Stark gets the upper hand and breaks his neck in a brutal scene.
That one scene was worth every fight scene in "The Princess of Mars". Why is she so much better at this? I don't understand. But there you go. It had excitement. It had the involvement of the people you could really believe in. The blood pumping and everything like that. And there's the rage. It didn't seem detached or like something was missing.
But then Egil comes out of the shadows with his gun. He says he'll make it look like Stark dies while trying to escape. Treon shows up too and starts banging on about prophecy and death, and that Egil will not succeed. Egil goes to shoot Treon and Stark leaps and almost gets shot too. But everyone forgets about Zareth who interposes and gets killed by Egil.
Stark is furious and basically smashes him to bits. There's a lot of sadness for the dead child. They go to hide the body somewhere so it can be buried later. Down in the crypt with Egil and his brother and all that they all thought was under the ruined building. Treon takes Stark and it's the burial vault of the ancient Inhuman Kings. He says they were a peaceful people who only used weapons for defense. He has known the secret for a time, but didn't want to reveal it to his family thinking the consequences of them knowing would be worse.
Deep in the crypts guarding a barred great door is a hideous form that utterly revolts Stark. It's dead and embalmed, but it has a message telepathic recorded. It tells the warning how the lost race harnessed the power of some cosmic force to heal. They said to use for good. This was totally like a scene out of Tom Baker Doctor Who story too. So that was cool. Yeah, with the stone people, right? "The hand of Fear".
But it was godlike knowledge that they could not control. And their bodies, they made perfect and sound. They had gradually changed into hideous monsters and the process could not be reversed. Treon goes inside and uses the apparatus so he can become a whole man straight and tall and majestic. He destroys most of the machinery afterwards.
Treon uses some of the ancient tools to free Stark of his collar and they go back to the square. Then they go to the island where the power plant is and stage a ruse to get the guards out. There's another big fight and while a couple escape Stark and Treon shut off the power, effectively freeing the slaves from their electronic bondage. The people of Shuruun will wait to see which side is safest to join before fighting. The slaves suffering some casualties but now with a few guns and swords kill the remaining guards.
There's a tunnel that leads straight to the castle. And this whole last part of the story is just action packed, just bloodshed everywhere. It's pretty satisfying actually. Treon knows all the secret passages and others of the slave comes over the cliffs and the wall into the castle where Treon and Stark enter the main hall where the Lhari are always hanging out. And Varra immediately see that Treon has found the secret and Treon announces that it's smashed, destroyed. The fight quickly starts with Cond, the other younger fellow and Treon trying to kill each other with bare hands. And Bor, the boy, rushes for guards but there's already fighting outside in the castle. And all the lari react in their own way.
Varra isn't impressed. She wanted some of this, sure, but not this way. By the way, I thought it was fun earlier on when she was trying to tempt Stark into doing her bidding. And she's like, oh yeah, if you're averse to killing children, don't worry about it, I can take care of him. But everybody else, yeah, you don't have to kill the little boy if you don't want to, I'll make sure that works out.
Yeah, so we do have a really, like, talk too much about her, but I guess she is the eponymous entrantress of Venus. I don't know, I was very confused about the title. I actually wasn't really sure who the Enchantress of Venus was actually meant to be, and for a moment, I was actually wondering if it's meant to be an abstract title and the Enchantress is the planet Venus itself. But I'm not sure, I guess especially from some of those illustrations, it does seem like maybe Varra herself is meant to be the Enchantress of Venus. But I don't know, I mean, it's not necessarily played that way. And again, like, I couldn't find any reference to this, but I sometimes wonder if, I mean, I'm sure Brackett liked these kind of titles. But just looking at all the titles of the stories in Planet Stories, because I have all 71 issues in this gigantic e-book produced by Jerry E. Books, and so many of the titles have that similar tone to them, and how Asimov's title was changed and everything. I kind of wonder sometimes how much the editors, like, decided what the titles of the stories should be. I couldn't find any evidence that this wasn't what she named the story, but I do kind of wonder about that a little bit. Even though Enchantress of Venus is a cool title and everything, it sounds a lot like "Princess of Mars", right? I don't know, I was a little confused about that, I guess. But it does seem like the artists, at least, of Planet Stories may have interpreted that she was the Enchantress.
I don't know what you think, Nate, you looked at all those images a lot.
Nate:
She's definitely featured the most prominently in all of them, out of, I guess, any of the character, including Stark. And, yeah, I don't know, it fits. I mean, she has her falconry and...
JM:
Yeah, and she's enchanted Eric John Stark to a certain extent.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I feel like that's kind of what I was leaning towards, is that she is kind of more in a seductive, sort of, like, trying to convince Stark to join her side, kind of enchanting.
JM:
Yeah, yeah. I did kind of like my abstract interpretation, though, like the Planet Venus is somehow the Enchantress.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I mean, that's cool. I do like that.
JM:
Yeah, yeah. But as the other story and the much earlier issue says, Venus has green eyes, I didn't read that one, but, you know...
Nate:
Well, here's it's very red, which again provides a cool atmosphere to this whole story of this, like, gigantic gaseous red sea that our characters have to deal with. I don't know, just the way all the pieces come together is a very cool read.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, so she does set her falcon on Stark and then stabs Treon in the side with a knife, and Con gets killed, and the old grandmother seemingly dies of apopoxy or something. And Varra gets shot by Treon, and Stark is actually disturbed by the sight of the family destroying itself. Yeah, that's kind of one of the things that I like about these stories is there's a lot of pathos for even some of the darker characters and stuff like that. Yeah, I mean, they're not just evil, right? Like, you know, some of them are victims. They're a little crazy, right? Even Treon, like, you kind of get the feeling like you might not want to spend too much time around him, even though it's kind of like the good one, right? But still, like, they're kind of relatable in a way. But nevertheless, they are terrible slavers, and the slaves are outnumbered and almost beaten. But soon the people of Shuruun do join in, goaded by Stark and Larrabee, the drunken earth man.
And Bor is killed by pen dragons in the stables, which must have looked pretty amazing. Yeah. It's a massacre and Stark is very tired. And after the fight is over, we immediately "cut" to Stark on another ship. He, Larrabee and Helvi are off for other climbs. And the moon is reflective and quiet. And Larrabee has left his children behind.
Stark is lost. And here's mournful chanting. It can't be. Is it the wind in the rocks? The savage part of him knows that it's not. It's the wailing of the lost ones, the forever lost ones, the dead under the sea. And yeah, the ending was great.
Gretchen:
Also, melancholy. Very similar to what we see with "Shambleau". There's this note of just kind of a... Yeah. Yeah, that's melancholy.
JM:
I do think these two stories do complement each other somewhat well. And I am very curious to know, if Brackett, how much she was influenced by, like, the Northwest Smith stories and stuff like that. Not that there were other kind of similar ones at the time, but definitely people, like, Moore and Brackett, seemed like they were, you know... I mean, like, looking through those Planet Stories issues, a lot of the stories sound like they'd be pretty fun. But like, someone of the authors, I haven't heard of them and that's not necessarily a mark against them. But just out of curiosity, I started reading the first issue. And yeah, I mean, there's some of the formula is there, but it just doesn't have the same energy.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
And if you have the same whether it's handled by somebody that really knows what they're doing, they really bring it to life. But the people that read the magazine knew this because they were always talking about Ray Bradbury and Leigh Brackett stories and how good they were. Right.
Nate:
Yeah, I guess it's unfortunate that Leigh Brackett didn't have the international popularity that Ray Bradbury did because he was huge pretty much everywhere. And Leigh Brackett had her publications in Planet Stories and her screenwriting credits and stuff like that, but definitely doesn't seem to really have that kind of huge reach that Bradbury did. And I don't know, I could kind of see why that is, but at the same time, I think these stories are pretty awesome and definitely deserve a larger audience of people.
JM:
Yeah. And both Bradbury and Brackett did have screenwriting work, right? So they were both involved in that pretty heavily.
Gretchen:
I've recently been watching like episodes of the Ray Bradbury Theater, so...
JM:
Oh, cool.
Gretchen:
You definitely see the ways that even his stories have been adapted to screen and to film.
JM:
I think I saw... I don't know if it was, was there a Ray Bradbury Theater movie?
Gretchen:
Not that I'm aware of. I just, I've been watching the series and I'm familiar with the show, but I don't know about the film.
JM:
There was a video I remember renting at one point when I was a kid and it had three stories in it. It was "Marionettes Incorporated", "The Crowd", and something else that I can't remember. It was like kind of one of those cool anthology productions that was pretty neat and I kind of, I've never quite been sure where it came from.
But yeah, I've not seen episodes of that show myself, so it definitely sounds interesting. And yeah, I mean, I guess Brackett could have. I mean, she definitely seemed to be experiencing a bit of a renaissance as a science fiction writer in the 70s with the mainstream kind of really starting to get into stuff like Star Wars and whatnot. Unfortunately, she died the year after that film came out. Yeah, probably Empire Strikes Back would have still been more like the movie that we saw than her script. But she could have gone on to do other science fiction films in the 80s, you know. It should have been catered around.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, there's so much of Star Wars that just feels like it would be right at home in a story like this. And yeah, you could definitely feel the influence on George Lucas.
JM:
Did either of you end up reading the script that she wrote? I did paste it in the server, but...
Nate:
No, I didn't have it get a chance to, unfortunately.
Gretchen:
Oh, I hadn't had a chance to get to that.
JM:
I wasn't saying, oh, you should all read it so we can talk about it for an hour. But it just, it is an interesting look at a very different Star Wars. Generally, Star Wars fans are not fans of it. From what I can tell, they point to the fact that George Lucas wrote "no" a lot on the script draft that he had. That he was like taking out whole parts. And yeah, the "Empire Strikes Back" script that she wrote. Darth Vader is very definitely not Luke Skywalker's father. And he, in fact, killed Luke's father. Luke's father is a completely different person who actually shows up as a kind of a force manifestation in the film script.
All the stuff on Hoth is very different. There's this, I guess, Star Wars fans would probably say it's a random horror element where they have to battle these ice giant creatures. They're like, there's something supernatural about them and stuff like that. All that happens before the Empire even shows up.
There's like, I don't know, Darth Vader is somehow a little different. There's descriptions of the force that are kind of different. But there's an interesting read to finally go through it all. And just like, oh, okay, you know, it's very different than the movie we got. But there's a lot of the elements that are in place. I'm not really the biggest Star Wars fan. So I'm not, you know, I mean, I do like that movie a lot. But I'm not going to be like, well, that's not how Star Wars is. To me, it's just interesting that she did the first draft. The only reason she wasn't able to complete it and do other drafts was, yeah, she unfortunately died of cancer not long after submitting that. So they credit her very openly and proudly. And yeah, even del Rey put her name on the novelization as a co-author, even though she had no involvement with it. It's cool that they did that. They obviously Lucas and company respected her at her contributions.
There could have been more. It would have been interesting to see what different direction it could have taken had she stuck around with the project. I suspect the Vader as father think would have still happened. Because not only is it such an iconic twist, but I guess Lucas probably thought, well, we have the Obi-Wan character already as a kind of supernatural manifestation. We don't really need the father as well. We don't need the two of them there. So why don't we just eliminate that? And then he's like, oh, but this is perfect, right? We can do the iconic scene and everything like that.
Gretchen:
It would have been interesting to have seen how like her association with Star Wars and maybe getting more attention in the public eye because of that. How popular it was, what she would have been able to do next outside of Star Wars.
Nate:
It definitely feels unfortunate that she is kind of most known for being a footnote in the Star Wars universe somewhere. But yeah, it would have been cool to see more of this stuff from her and her late career. I haven't read any of her 70s novels that are also an extension of the John Stark series, but Goodreads' views are all pretty positive and pretty good. So that might be interesting to check out. And certainly a popularity boon after a theoretical Star Wars movie with her attached to it could have produced some other works as well. She got back in the habit of writing novels and short stories in this vein.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I definitely would like to read the other Stark stories. And I would really like to see if it has a similar atmosphere as this one did because I really like the more gothic... That's what I really enjoy about the Lhari scene. It's just this bizarre, eccentric family. You have one of them with a dragon, the other is holding a falcon. It's just this really dysfunctional, cruel group of characters all placed together in this room. It's such a great scene to read.
JM:
Yeah, it almost makes you wish you'd seen more of the family. But I mean, she could have, if she'd wanted to expand it this even more, I'd made it into a longer work. But again, that we're always kind of saying that we love the shorter works, but there's room to expand, I guess. And like, it's cool that she gave us what she gave us. But yeah, maybe we just got enough to see what we needed to see. Maybe like that first scene is so good. Maybe that's all we really need. That it's very tight and economical.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, I like this, but I think it was about the right length for this kind of story. I also like how it pretty much works as a standalone, even though it is, you know, the second entry in this series.
JM:
Yeah, yeah.
Gretchen:
I read this right after reading the Burroughs, and it went by so quickly. Like you were saying, JM, I'm like the action scenes, the fight scene there. It's like so much more captivating to read. It moves so quickly.
JM:
Yeah, it's like you actually believed she knew what it was like to fight. To actually feel the blood in your veins.
Gretchen:
Yeah, yeah. Whereas I feel like the Burroughs, it took me several days to get through it. I read this one like one sitting because I think it was just so quick-paced and really all the elements worked really well. I think it is a great length. It moves fast and it leaves you wanting more, which is good.
JM:
Yeah, but I'm definitely going to be reading more soon. And yeah, if you want a very differently Leigh Brackett, not in this style at all, but still with some of the same kind of passion. "The Long Tomorrow" definitely is, you know, the outlier at her science fiction from what I can tell. Definitely a very different style, much more contemplative and quiet, I guess, in a way. But several other things have won retroactive Hugo words, I believe. "The Long Tomorrow" was certainly a nomination in 1954. So I definitely think that, yeah, I mean, if somebody deserves a renaissance, probably, yeah, bring back Leigh Brackett.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
There's supposed to be some cool reprints or something like that that were in the works. And I don't know if they materialized. You can certainly find a lot of his stuff in digital form. Yeah, I believe I do have the actual Ace Double of the "Secret of Sinharat"/"People of the Talisman". So if you search around, used bookstores, you may find stuff like that. There's the best of Leigh Brackett from the 70s. A couple of other collections that you might still be able to find around all over the place.
Yeah, like I said earlier, that the trilogy in the 70s, I'm definitely curious to see what's that like. I believe our fellow podcasters, What Mad Universe, might have actually done something on that series at some point. So, yeah.
Nate:
Well, cool. I really liked this. I don't really have too much else to say. Again, this is more of a turn-your-brain-off kind of plot, but just really a lot of fun.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
And a nice contrast to the Burroughs and really an extension of the tropes that we see in the Moore with our Venusian, I guess there was a Martian seductress and our somewhat vulnerable protagonist in our dreary space western kind of town. Yeah, definitely a lot of fun.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I agree. I think this was a really good set of works to put together. Yeah, they all really have interesting ways to compare and contrast them. So, this was a great story and I recommend people read it.
JM:
Cool. Yeah, we had a really fun time discussing these. Even the story we maybe didn't quite love as much was still really awesome time to talk about. There's a really fun batch of stories and we have another really fun one coming up of a very different kind.
We know interplanetary romance, but a return also of another author that we've already discussed on the podcast with a kind of very different work. This would be Karel Čapek. And we previously talked about his famous work, "RUR", Rossum's Universal Robots, which was a play. This is not a play. This is a novel. This is the last work he produced, I believe, officially or published, I should say, the 1936 novel "War with the Newts". That will be a really interesting excursion and something really different for us. I'm really excited to do that.
So, when we come back on Chrononauts in some weeks' time, we'll be talking about that work. In the meantime, set your solar sails, deactivate your graviton fields, and set a course for Venus. The Dark Seas await. Good night.
Bibliography:
Brackett, Leigh - introduction to "Enchantress of Venus" from "The Space Opera Renaissance" (2006)
Hartwell, David G. and Cramer, Kathryn - introduction to "The Space Opera Renaissance" (2006)
No comments:
Post a Comment