Customer Reviews

Lorelei of the Red Mist: Planetary Romances

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THIS is the one you need to buy. It's a collection of Brackett's "Planetary Romances" including a dozen tales of dying sandy Mars and young swampy Venus with Brackett's trademark hard-bitten heroes and heroines. Intro by Turtledone, Foreward by Bradbury--who wrote half of the title story--illustrations by Frank Kelly Freas. The stories run from 1943 to 1950 with the bonus of a 1944 article for WRITER'S DIGEST on "The Science -Fiction Field." This is part of a three-volume collection of Brackett's short fiction, so order MARTIAN QUEST and SHANNACH--THE LAST FAREWELL TO MARS at the same time. Then go looking for her novels.
If you haven't done "planetary romance" yet, this is a good place to start. It's set in a Solar system much as astronomers imagined it prior to modern telescopes and space probes, and set in a time of interplanetary travel, but also a time in which a man took good care of his riding beast, and swords and crossbows coexist with the ray guns. If Edgar Rice Burroughs filled such worlds with Victorian men and women, Brackett's people have been around the block. Brackett scripted some classic film noir, and it shows in plot, character and dialog. But it's time for me to get back to reading--and time for you to order the book.

The late Leigh Bracket (December 7, 1915 to March 17, 1978) was on of the first and most successful professional writers of Science Fiction and Fantasy. She was of the generation of writers (that included such luminaries as Robert A. heinlein, Jack Williamson, and Ray Bradbury) who were to elevate Science Fiction and Fantasy to the status of a respectable and commercially successful literary genre. Just weeks before her death, Leigh Brackett authored and turned in the first draft of the screenplay for 'The Empire Strikes Back'. Now thirteen of her original stories have been anthologized in "Loreleigh Of The Red Mist" from Haffner Press and will well serve to introduce a major literary talent to a whole new generation of appreciative readers. In addition to the title piece (which she co-wrote with Ray Bradury), the stories include The blue Behemoth; Thralls of the endless Night; The Jewel of Bas; The Veil of Astellar; Terror Out of Space; The Vanishing Venusians; The Moon That Vanished; The Beast-Jewell of Mars; Quest of the Starhope; The Lake of the Gone Forever; The Dancing Girl of Gannymede; and The Science-Fiction Field" (a non-fiction article written for the July 1994 issue of 'Writer's Digest' magazine). Enthusiastically recommended for academic and community library Science Fiction & Fantasy collections, "Loreleigh Of The Red Mist" should be considered as a 'must read' by the legions of Leigh Brackett fans.

Contents (copied directly from the Haffner Press website):
The Blue Behemoth
Thralls of the Endless Night
The Jewel of Bas
The Veil of Astellar
Terror Out of Space
The Vanishing Venusians
Lorelei of the Red Mist (with Ray Bradbury)
The Moon That Vanished
The Beast-Jewel of Mars
Quest of the Starhope
The Lake of the Gone Forever
The Dancing Girl of Ganymede

I'm ordering it; my rating is based on my liking Brackett's writing and my memories of having read a number of these works in the past. I always liked her work for its openly escapist, suspend-disbelief feeling and a kind of haunting other-world feeling (your mileage may vary). It's expensive - a bit of an irony, since these are "pulp" stories for which the author once got only pennies per word. But there's a totally different feel to SF works written over a half-century ago, compared to today's works, and the reality is that the price of collections of old stories usually bears no relationship to the price of the original, individual works. Based on my ownership of Martian Quest: The Early Brackett (this book's predecessor), you get good paper and good bindings in a smallish print run -- not a lot of economies of scale to be had here.

Lorelei of the Red Mist is the second volume of Brackett's short fiction published by Haffner Press. Other reviewers have listed the contents and other volumes, so I need not go through that again.

If you look around the internets (and there are a lot of them) I have no doubt you can find online html versions of all of the contents of this book, all for free too! If you are a struggling student, then that is probably the best way for you to read Brackett. But remember those stories you loved, and look forward to one day buying a collection like this. This volume is more than just the text of a bunch of stories. To want this book, you have to not only be a lover of golden age sci-fi, but also a lover of books - not just a reader, a booklover. Luckily, there is a fair degree of overlap in those categories.

This is a study 500-page hardcover, with a beautiful dustjacket and interior cover art. The text is clean and clear. Its perfect for sitting in a armchair reading for pure pleasure.

You might note I have not touched on the actual contents of the book per se, apart from telling you can read them free if you really want. It's a bunch of short fiction, including a novella or two, and the titular story was finished with Ray Bradbury, who was a young protege of Brackett at the time (mind you, Brackett was still young too!). Although on reading it, I am not sure there was a character called Lorelei, and I can't recall red mist playing any particular part in that story too.

The tales are beautifully written, stories of brooding heroes and anti-heroes, in the swirling 1940's mix of today what is called science fiction, horror, fantasy and space opera. The world these characters inhabits is vividly drawn - from dirty slums to magnificent panoramas of landscape, be it the dry seabed of Mars or Jupiter hanging full in the sky. Brackett's facility as a screenwriter is on show here, giving a cinematic vision to the written word.

If I had to pick one story in this book as the best - and it's a struggle, as there are a lot of contenders - I would pick "The dancing girl on Ganymede". Its impossible to believe that if it was written today it would not be viewed as simply derivative of Blade Runner, and yet it was written 20 plus years before "Do androids dream of electric sheep", the novel on which Blade Runner was based. It has plot twists, conflict, real depth, and breathtaking imagery - all in 30 or so pages.

There is an endnote from Brackett about the craft of writing - and deliberately or not, it is androgynous: there is nothing to hint Brackett was female, and I don't know if that was widely known at the time or not.

This is a solar system reflecting the romance of exploration and adventure: from the low-canals of Jekkara on Mars to the steaming swamps of Venus, the pirate-infested Belt and the mysterious moons of Jupiter, there is a sense of wonder here. Now, reading these stories seven decades after they were written, there is also an overwhelming sadness that none of this turned out: Mars and Venus are uninhabited, and there are no dancing girls on Ganymede. But reading these tales, for just a little while, you can believe that there just might be.

Hard boiled science-fiction noir by a writer who, in my opinion, was the best of the very few who could successfully pull off these kind of stories. This book has a permanent spot in my library.