But to the hardcore fans, she will always be most fondly remembered for her earliest pulp work, her so-called Planet Stories tales, although not all of them appeared exclusively in that one magazine. The current volume, masterfully assembled by publisher Stephen Haffner and with an insightful, nostalgic introduction by Michael Moorcock, collects 20 stories from Brackett's youth, starting with the title one, her first sale, up till the 1943 appearance of "The Citadel of Lost Ships." Among the highlights:
In Brackett's debut, immigrant Martin Drake finds that the Martian refuge he had hoped for is doomed—unless he takes a stand and fights the alien Khom. Two men vie for "The Treasure of Ptakuth," little reckoning with the mysterious radiant devices at the heart of the deserted city. A Venusian redoubt is defended by "The Stellar Legion," which stands ready to be wiped out to the last soldier—until inspiration strikes. Mercury's deadly benighted hemisphere has always been off limits, but desperation drives Barry Garth there in "The Demons of Darkside."
"It was early in 2418 that the Solar System realized there was a Water Pirate." So begins the story titled "Water Pirate," but its ending is far from obvious, until the unlikely culprit behind the hijackings is finally revealed. Chris Barton is the "Interplanetary Reporter," and as war between Mars and Venus breaks out, he risks his life for the biggest scoop of all. When "The Dragon Queen of Venus" attacks, she and her troops outmatch the guns of the defenders by employing living weapons that include portable droughts!
Geoffrey Dana runs the "No Man's Land in Space," a refuge for criminals. But when his men start getting slaughtered by an invisible beast, he finds robbery the last thing on his mind. Trying to homestead Mercury, Mel Gray is a reluctant pioneer. Yet once greedy men come calling to steal the planet's riches, he finds his attitude changing, helped by the lovely Jill Moulton. An energy being in "Child of the Sun" uses humankind as its playthings, but has a change of heart when it finally finds a man it cannot break. Forced to work in deadly mines, the war prisoners in the "Outpost on Io" are a hopeless lot—until Chris MacVickers joins their ragtag crew.
The colorful atmospheres of other worlds
The majority of these tales all inhabit the consensus version of the solar system that was prevalent during the 1940s: Mars is dry, dusty, but livable; Venus is swampy and thrives with life; Mercury is perpetually half dark, half lighted and capable of colonization; Jupiter and its moons support odd life forms; the asteroid belt is home to outlaws and refugees; old Earth is sometimes despotic. All the worlds boast different sentient beings who squabble endlessly and sometimes collaborate. Interstellar menaces can pop up without notice. Psionic powers are taken for granted. It's an obsolete yet endearing off-the-shelf cosmos that once allowed instant storytelling without worrying about fresh invention. Given this familiar milieu—which at this late date seems almost as natural and reassuring a narrative landscape as the Europe of Grimm's fairy tales—we need to ask what made Brackett's tales so superior to all the others by lesser writers who shared this venue. The answer is fourfold: characterization, tone, details and pacing. Maybe all four aspects can be subsumed in the catchall of "style."
Brackett loved male protagonists who bordered on antiheroes. Criminals, exiles, spies, avaricious and disgraced men: She focused most often on leads who were the antithesis of the steely-jawed goody-two-shoes who populated most SF stories of the time. Plainly, Brackett found these types of men sexy, and her portrayal of them clearly conveyed her attraction. Brackett's men have failed, been burnt by life, are hesitant to commit to new heroisms. Often they do so reluctantly, only to die or be further disdained. This struggle between selfishness and selflessness is deeply appealing. In "Cube from Space," this tactic reaches something of a pinnacle in Red, the brute space pirate, who might remind readers of Bester's Gully Foyle. And the women Brackett pairs her men with are not madonnas, but equally tough, though never generally on the wrong side of civilization. The sexual dynamics between such couples, though not explicit, form a roaring cataract through these tales. One exception to the subtextual nature of the sex is "The Halfling," in which the erotic current between circus owner Jade Greene and exotic dancer Laura Darrow might have graced a Zelazny tale twenty years later.
Brackett's tone derives more from the noir writers than from her fellow SF authors. Life is hard, brutal and treacherous, and demands constant alertness and ingenuity from those who wish to survive. And although she uses stock landscapes, there is always a wealth of sensual details—sweat down a spacesuit's collar; the hot control handles of a ship close to the sun—to render everything vivid. Finally, her pacing is relentless. She starts each story with a bang and never lets up. Combine all these skills and predispositions into one package and you are talking about a writer who simply imprinted her forceful style and worldview onto everything she wrote.
And as this volume goes on to show, Brackett was not bound by even such a rich format. She tackled dystopias ("Retreat to the Stars" and "Child of the Sun"). She did time travel to a quasi-sword-and-sorcery setting in "Lord of the Earthquake." "Child of the Green Light" exhibits a Tiptree level of bizarre human-alien interaction. "Out of the Sea" has a contemporary (World War II) setting. And "The Sorceror of Rhiannon" injects the horror stylings of The Mummy's Curse (1944) into the Martian landscape. Plainly, Brackett was growing with every story she wrote, not yet 30 years old by the volume's end, with the best yet to come.
This volume should be an essential part of every hardcore SF reader's collection. And Haffner promises a followup volume focusing on Brackett's most famous creation, Eric John Stark. — Paul
