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5.0 out of 5 stars
Looking back on the future is a strange mirror., September 10, 2011
This review is from: The Coming of the Terrans (Mass Market Paperback)
I first read Leigh Brackett's Coming of the Terrans when I was a kid, and didn't see the book again for fifty years. In those years that passed, things changed. Back then was a world of 33 1/3 records ( in stereo ), a Western Union office on the main street and, unless you bought an airmail stamp, your letter was whisked across the country by a modern streamliner*. Back then, Brackett's Mars wasn't really plausible, but it was possible.
Reading the book again provides a few annoyances, after Brackett makes a masterful description of a Martian house with embers glowing on a brazier, a small voice in the head mentions that you can't have a fire in Mar's atmosphere. The drama of the main characters getting lost in the ancient Martian desert makes you realize that they don't have GPS. It's the little things that date the stories. They do, however, seem to have something similar to a Kindle.
To make matters even worse, Brackett has given dates to her stories. The first story occurred on Mars in 1998, fifty years after she wrote the story. The next story is five years from now. We're running late!
Stuff like that is why I love old science fiction.
Her characters, however, are fairly timeless. The one representative of the smug age in which these stories were written is soundly and ritually humiliated in "Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon". Otherwise, they are the sort one would expect to have found in early Portuguese Goa, Dodge City, or along the old Silk Road. A type that does not really belong much to any time or place.
I don't think her readers have changed all that much either. The veiled eroticism of "The Beast Jewel of Mars" seems more obvious than when I first read it. "Mars Minus Bisha" seems a more poignant view of a preadolescent outlook, before the dawning awareness of the absoluteness of our uniqueness and mortality, now than it did then. I suspect these topics will resonate with readers in the future as well.
Some people insist that her work is more fantasy than true science fiction. I have a more radical view. I think science fiction always wanted to be fantasy and the scientific pretensions were just to coax the reader into joining the story.
Old science fiction has not been discredited, it has become a genre of adventure into a future that never was. Although nobody wants to admit it now, when we sent Mariner to look at Mars, we wanted to find cities. It isn't science that guides us into the future, but our imaginations.
* My spell checker never heard of a steamliner.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Return to the Lost Planet, January 22, 2012
This review is from: The Coming of the Terrans (Mass Market Paperback)
The fan of classic SF remembers stories set in Percival Lowell's Mars--the ancient abode of civilization, now drying and dying, kept alive by a network of canals. It's a place of romance, mystery and (sometimes) super-science--the setting of Burrough's "John Carter of Mars" some of CL Moore's "Northwest Smith" stories, some of early Heinlein and Zelazny's "A Rose for Ecclesiastes."
Leigh Brackett was the best of them: a first-rate stylist capable of tight plotting and believable unforgettable characters. This book contains five short stories in this setting, all originally published in magazines: "Beast Jewel of Mars" "Last Days of Shandakor" "Mars Minus Bisha" "Road to Sinharat" and "Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon." I particularly recommend "Sinharat" which is a sort of travelogue revisiting most of her Martial settings, and "Priestess" which is her last word to her critics, but there isn't a bad story in the lot. If you like this--and you will--look for "Secret of Sinharat" "Nemesis from Terra" "People of the Talisman" and "Sword of Rhiannon" which share the setting. Also look for the Haffner Press collections of Brackett in hard covers.
And remember: "I can vouch for every one of these adventures. After all, I was there."
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