Retro Review: "Garden of Evil" by Margaret St. Clair

Not an illustration of "Garden of Evil", but a white-washed Eric John Stark from Leigh Brackett's "Queen of the Martian Catacombs".

 

"Garden of Evil" by Margaret St. Clair is a planetary romance short story, which appeared in the summer 1949 issue of Planet Stories and is therefore eligible for the 1950 Retro Hugos, should they ever be held. The story may be found online here.

I came across this story when SFFAudio pointed out on Twitter that the entire summer 1949 issue of Planet Stories, including "Garden of Evil" was now public domain. And since I've enjoyed everything I've read by Margaret St. Clair so far, I decided to make it the subject of my next Retro Review.

Warning: There will be spoilers in the following!

The story begins with a man called Ericson – we never learn his first name – waking  up after spending what appears to be several months in a haze. Ericson is not alone. There is a green-skinned woman named Mnathl with him, who gives him something to eat.

We gradually learn that Ericson is on a planet named Fyhon that is not unlike the Venus of the shared pulp science fiction solar system – a place of jungles and seas – except that it has sunshine on occasion. And in fact I suspect that the reason that Margaret St. Clair did not set her story on Venus is because her alien planet needed to have direct sunlight.

Ericson is an ethnographer supposed to study Fyhon and its people. He fell in love with the lush planet and decided to stay. All would have been well, if Ericson hadn't managed to get himself addicted to a drug called byhror, when he got lost in the jungles of Fyhon during a one-man expedition without supplies or food and had to resort to taking the drug to survive.

When we meet Ericson, he has just been through a lengthy and painful withdrawal and is clean for the first time in three years. Mnathl helped him to get clean by taking him to an otherwise deserted island, strapping him down and subjecting him to a combination of injections of human drugs and the healing properties of some local herbs. The treatment is extremely painful and makes Ericson intermittently violent.

The story made me curious whether medical addiction therapy was already a thing in the 1940s, so I did some research. The results, however, were inconclusive. Methadone, the most commonly used substitution drug, had been developed by German chemists in the late 1930s and was introduced to the US market in 1947, after the US had stolen (and yes, that's what it was) German patents and brand names post WWII, so it was already available by 1949. However, methadone was originally marketed as a painkiller and only was used for drug substitution therapy from the 1960s onwards. However, there had been other attempts at medical addiction therapy before, going back to the late 19^th century. To help them get clean, addicts were injected with all sorts of substances such as cocaine, a solution of gold and strychnine in alcohol, bromide, insulin and even heroin with predictably horrible results. Was Margaret St. Clair familiar with such treatments? It's certainly possible.

Once Ericson is clean again, he is eager to get back to the human settlement of Penhairn and find a job. However, Mnathl insists that they instead go to a place called Dridihad in the unknown heart of the south polar continent of Fyhon. Ericson doesn't want to go to Dridihad, but he doesn't have any choice in the matter, for Mnathl injects him with a drug that saps his will. "Mnathl had made other things in her cooking pots besides soup", a resigned Ericson notes.

Mnathl's drug eventually wears off, but by now Ericson is no longer unwilling to go to Dridihad. After all, the ethnographic paper he plans to publish about this adventure will hopefully help to get him his old job back. Mnathl teaches Ericson how to kindle a fire and hunt, but she refuses to answer any questions about why they are going to Dridihad and what they will find there.

After a few days, Ericson and Mnathl come across a giant pyramid in the jungle. Ericson is fascinated, Mnathl less so. When he asks her who built the pyramid, Mnathl replies that her people built it.

More days pass and Ericson is bitten by a venomous snake. Once again, Mnathl saves him by sucking the poison from the wound, risking her own life in the process. If you're thinking by now that Mnathl is a little too good and too self-sacrificing to be true, you're not alone.

After sixty-six days, Ericson and Mnathl finally reach the foot of the plateau upon which the city of Dridihad lies. After a laborious climb up the plateau, the gates of Dridihad finally open for Mnathl and Ericson.

The people of Dridihad treat Ericson like a prince, while Ericson dreams of the fame and fortune his paper will bring him. After all, none of the human scientists on Fyhon even knew that there was such an ancient and populous city in the heart of the supposedly deserted south polar continent. Too bad that no one in Dridihad will give Ericson any writing materials.

When Mnathl reappears, she is dressed in splendid robes like a queen or a priestess. She takes Ericson hunting on the plateau, shows him around the city and takes him to a ritual in the main temple of Dridihad, which involves sacrificing an animal and eating it. Mnathl officiates at the ritual, which confirms Ericson's suspicions that she is a priestess.

Ericson also wonders why such an important personage even bothered to help an alien drug addict like him and comes to the conclusion that Mnathl is in love with him. This is a problem, because Ericson is not remotely attracted to her.

After several more days and more rituals, rituals which seem to be leading up to some kind of climax, Mnathl takes Ericson to the top of the pyramid-shaped temple. Ericson tries to have an awkward, "It's not you, it's me" conversation with her, but Mnathl blows him off and starts to laugh. She definitely does not love him, but instead wants Ericson to be the messenger of her people to the gods. "And then", Mnathl says, "we eat."

Mnathl's people, she tells him, became interested in Ericson when they heard of his ill-fated solo expedition into the interior of the continent. They were particularly fascinated by Ericson's unusual colouring, a combination of near golden tanned skin and blonde hair. And so they decided that he would be an excellent messenger to their gods and sent Mnathl to find him, nurse him back to health and bring him back to Dridihad.

Ericson now knows what his fate will be. Not only has he witnessed several religious rites by now, he also recalls a remark in another ethnographer's paper that the people of Fyhon are definitely not engaging in ritual cannibalism, which strikes him as very ironic.

However, Ericson is also remarkably resigned to his fate. After all, he is free of his drug addiction now and besides, he got the ethnographic experience of a lifetime, even if he never got to write that paper and never got tenure either. And so Ericson smiles, as the temple guards chop off his head. Mercifully, Margaret St. Clair spares us what comes after.

 

Margaret St. Clair in the 1940s

This is a fascinating story, in spite of the downer ending. On the one hand, it's pure pulp science fiction with a human explorer on an alien planet who falls in with an indigenous beauty and comes to a sticky end. And indeed, if you're the protagonist of a pulp science fiction story, it's never a good idea to hang out with alien women, no matter how beautiful, seductive and helpful they seem to be, because they will inevitably want to enslave you, steal your body, kill you or eat you. Just ask Northwest Smith and Eric John Stark, who narrowly escaped such a fate more than once. In fact, Eric John Stark escapes a similar fate in "Queen of the Martian Catacombs", the lead novella of that very same issue of Planet Stories.

However, Ericson is no Eric John Stark or Northwest Smith. He's a nerdy academic and a recovering drug addict besides. And indeed, the fact that the protagonist is a junkie makes "Garden of Evil" feel almost like a New Wave story from the 1960s at times. Not that the drugs never appeared in the science fiction and fantasy of the pulp era – indeed, a lot of SFF of the 1930s and 1940s is absolutely drug-soaked to the point that I'm glad all that stuff went over my head as a teenager. But while descriptions of alien landscapes may be nigh hallucinogenic and alien opium dens abound in golden age science fiction, the protagonists usually do not dabble in mind-altering substances.

In fact, the only other golden age science fiction story with a drug-addicted protagonist I can think of is Leigh Brackett's "The Moon That Vanished" from 1948 (the protagonist of Brackett's 1944 novelette "Terror Out Of Space" is also high as a kite on amphetamines for most of the story, but he's not an addict). Interestingly, "The Moon That Vanished" bears striking similarities to Margaret St. Clair's 1952 story "Island of the Hands", which I reviewed for Galactic Journey last year. In fact, I wonder whether Brackett and St. Clair knew each other, especially since they both lived in California at the same time, published in the same magazines and tackled similar themes.

Both Brackett and St. Clair deal with colonialism in many of their stories from the 1940s. "Garden of Evil" is no exception, because it's a story about indigenous people turning the tables on a western explorer. Even though he's an ethnographer, Ericson assumes a lot about the indigenous people of Fyhon, that they're primitive, but harmless, that they're stoic and unemotional, that Mnathl is in love with him, that her people definitely do not practice ritual cannibalism. Every single one of those assumptions is wrong. And what makes Ericson a target is his blonde hair and golden tanned skin.

Aliens in pulp science fiction are often stand-ins for indigenous people, usually the indigenous people of North America. "Garden of Evil" is an exception here, because the names, the religious practices and the pyramid-like temples are reminiscent of Central America. Furthermore, the drug that Ericson gets himself addicted to is a powerful natural stimulant found in a type of leaves native to Fyhon, which brings to mind cocaine.

Planet Stories is often dismissed as a purveyor of cliched space opera adventures and indeed, there are many of those to be found in its pages. However, even at its most cliched, the fiction in Planet Stories is always entertaining. Furthermore, the magazine also offered a home to stories, which did not fit the rather narrow editorial standards of the more upscale science fiction mags like Astounding or The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which had only just started in 1949, or Galaxy, which would start up the following year and would never publish "that pulp stuff". Or can you imagine John W. Campbell publishing a story like "Garden of Evil", where the protagonist is a down and out drug addict (even if he also is a scientist), who does not triumph due to his human ingenuity, but instead loses his head at the end?

Margaret St. Clair is one of the neglected woman authors of the golden age (though her careers spans both the silver age and the New Wave as well and she kept writing into the early 1980s). I have no idea why she isn't better known, since Margaret St. Clair can easily stand alongside Leigh Brackett, C.L. Moore and Andre Norton with regard to quality of her fiction. She was also very versatile – more versatile than any of the others except maybe C.L. Moore with her work spanning science fiction, fantasy and horror and ranging from screwballs comedies like "The Sacred Martian Pig" (which I should really review for Retro Reviews sometime, since it's such a delightful story) to downers like "Garden of Evil".

Yet when her name comes up at all these days, it's usually in connection with Appendix N, the one page list of inspirational science fiction and fantasy authors and novels for further reading to be found in the back of the first Dungeon & Dragons Dungeon Masters Guide. Even though the Dungeon Masters Guide was published more than forty years ago, there has been a renewed interested in works listed in Appendix N in the past few years. And whenever Appendix N is discussed, Margaret St. Clair is often mentioned as the most obscure author on the list (here is a recent example), though personally I find several others (John Bellairs, Sterling Lanier, Andrew J. Offutt) more obscure.

Like many of Margaret St. Clair's stories, "Garden of Evil" has never been reprinted, which is a pity because it's a fascinating story which combines the adventure of pulp science fiction with the sensibilities of the New Wave. Highly recommended.

Retro Review: "Shadow Over Mars" a.k.a. "The Nemesis from Terra" by Leigh Brackett

Mayo wears a sensible coverall for most of the novel, but the cover artist had to give her a brass bikini

Shadow Over Mars by Leigh Brackett is a planetary romance novel, which appeared in the fall 1944 issue of Startling Stories and is therefore eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugos. The magazine version of the novel may be found here.

Many people will probably also know this novel under its alternate title The Nemesis from Terra, under which it was reprinted as one half of an Ace Double (the other half was Collision Course by Robert Silverberg) in 1961 and a few times since. Though unlike the Ace Double reprints of two Eric John Stark stories, which I reviewed for Galactic Journey last year, the only difference between Shadow Over Mars and The Nemesis from Terra seems to be the title. The text is otherwise unchanged, including a persistent misspelling of the Mars moon Deimos as "Diemos".

Warning: There will be spoilers in the following!

Shadow Over Mars starts off in the ancient Martian city of Ruh, a location that I at least don't remember from any other of Leigh Brackett's Martian adventures. Protagonist Rick Gunn Urquart is on the run, trying to avoid the press gangs of the charmingly named Terran Exploitations Company (well, at least they're honest and there's something to be said for truth in advertising) who are hunting slaves for the mines they operate on Mars. Anybody who doesn't run fast enough is fair game, because evil capitalists need cheap labour.

Rick is a typical Leigh Brackett outlaw protagonist, someone who ekes out a living on the margins of his society. Rick is a drifter, born in space, "in the hull of a tramp freighter…" he proudly declares at one point, "…and never left it since." To the native Martians, Rick is an Earthman (and the titular nemesis from Terra), but that's not how he views himself. And indeed it's interesting that even though most of Leigh Brackett's protagonists are nominally Earthpeople, they have little connection or loyalty to Earth and usually view themselves as something else.

Rick ended up stranded on Mars, when he was fired from his latest job on a spaceship crew after slugging a mate (we're certain he deserved it). He's dead broke, because he left what little money he had in the brothels of Mars. And so he is fair game for the press gangs of the Terran Exploitations Company, press gangs that consist of apelike Martian beings called anthropoids.

Rick easily kills the first batch of anthropoids with his trusty blaster, but the shots draw others and Rick has gotten trapped in a dead end in the maze-like streets of Ruh. Lucky for him, he spots the crack of light of an open door and forces his way inside.

The house is inhabited by an old Martian woman and her grandson. Rick tells them that he means them no harm, but that he will hide out until the press gangs have gone. The old woman offers to read his fortune. Rick doesn't really believe in such things, but he humours the old woman anyway. Her pronouncements regarding his origin turn out to be surprisingly accurate. Then she tells Rick that he is the titular shadow that will fall upon Mars and suddenly attacks him with a knife. Ricks shoots her in self-defence and flees, only to promptly run into the arms of a press gang and end up in the very slave mines he tried so hard to avoid.

In the next few chapters, we encounter the rest of the players and the fractions that are fighting for control of Mars. For starters, there is the Terran Exploitations Company with its director Ed Fallon. Fallon's righthand man is Jaffa Storm, a human telepath from Mercury who is described as tall and dark-skinned. So we have another main character of colour in this novel. But unlike Eric John Stark, Leigh Brackett's other tell and dark-skinned Earthman from Mercury, Jaffa Storm is an unambiguous villain and a particularly nasty one, too.

On the Martian side, we have the boy king Haral and his general Beudach who are plotting to start a rebellion and kick the Earthpeople off Mars. The grandson of the old woman Rick killed immediately runs to Haral and Beudach to inform them about the prophecy and to demand the head of Rick Gunn Urquart as vengeance for his grandmother. Haral, Beudach and their supporters are only too happy to oblige, because they don't want any Earthpeople ruling Mars, whether it's the Terran Exploitations Company or Rick Urquart whose shadow will fall upon Mars. And so the hunt is on for Rick.

The third fraction is the Union Party (I'm sure it's purely coincidental that the name of the party is reminiscent of the term "trade union), a group headed by Earthman Hugh St. John and Martian Eran Mak. They want to unite Earthpeople and Martians and establish a better society on Mars for everybody. However, that requires getting rid of Ed Fallon and his Terran Exploitations Company first. And so Fallon tries to bribe St. John with large sums of money, which St. John gratefully pockets while trying to find proof that Fallon is using slave labour in his mines, so he can report him to the authorities, because even the imperialist Terran Empire of Leigh Brackett's stories frowns upon slavery. You'd figure that the press gangs roaming the streets of Martian cities and snatching people would be proof enough, but apparently not. And so St. John has sent a spy into Fallon's lair, a young Earthwoman named Mayo McCall.

Mayo McCall is a spunky heroine and an all around awesome character. When Jaffa Storm forces a kiss on her, she kicks him in the balls. Nor does she take shit from anybody else. She's probably my favourite female Leigh Brackett character. Mayo works as a technician for the Terran Exploitations Company and absolutely no one finds anything unusual about a woman working as a testing technician for a mining company. Of course, when Shadow Over Mars was written, plenty of women in the real world were working in factories, building airplanes and tanks, testing military equipment, etc… But in the speculative fiction of the golden age, spaceship crews, lab technicians, miners, etc… are all male and women only appear in a few stereotyped roles such as wife, mother, daughter, girlfriend/love interest, housewife, actress, nurse, etc… In this environment, Mayo McCall is a breath of fresh air.

Mayo just happens to be at work, when Rick stages a slave mutiny, because he's not going to let himself be worked to death by the Terran Exploitations Company. At first, Rick's revolt seems to be successful, until Jaffa Storm brings in a Banning Shocker, a weapon that also appears in "Queen of the Martian Catacombs", the first Eric John Stark story. Eric John Stark is only threatened with the Banning Shocker, but in Shadow Over Mars we see it in action. And so Rick's fellow mutineers are either killed or surrender one by one. Rick refuses to surrender and is about to be killed by Jaffa Storm and his men, when Mayo intervenes and tries to get Storm and Fallon to confess that they're using slave labour. Unfortunately, Mayo is unmasked as a spy instead. In the resulting shoot-out, Rick and Mayo flee into the mine tunnels and eventually escape into a maze of fossilised bore tunnels left behind by the long extinct mud-worms of Mars.

If the huge Martian mud-worms seem a tad familiar to you, you're not alone. Because those mud-worms are very clearly the ancestors of the sandworms from Frank Herbert's classic novel Dune. And indeed, there is quite a bit of Brackett influence detectable in Dune. I guess Frank Herbert was a fan.

Rick and Mayo eventually escape the tunnels and find themselves in the Martian dessert, where they encounter a group of tiny winged people, a native Martian race that also appears elsewhere in Leigh Brackett's work such as her 1949 novel Sea-Kings of Mars a.k.a. The Sword of Rhiannon. The winged people are allied with Haral and therefore immediately recognise Rick as the man all Mars is looking for. So he and Mayo are taken prisoner.

The winged people are planning to hand Rick over to Haral, Beudach and the grandson of the prophetess. Only a young woman named Kyra takes a liking to Rick, because he is so alive and she believes he could bring that life to dying Mars. Mayo agrees and thinks that Rick might be an asset to the Union Party. Rick himself isn't sure what he believes except that he wouldn't mind ruling Mars with Mayo by his side. Mayo points out that that's not what she meant. She also tells Rick that she loves him, even though she isn't sure if he is able to love anybody except himself.

Now I'm a big fan of Leigh Brackett, but one thing that often bothers me about her stories is that her characters tend to fall in love with each other a little too quickly. The most glaring example is Eric John Stark falling in love with the titular character of "Black Amazon of Mars" as soon as he realises that the masked Martian warlord he has been fighting is really an attractive woman, completely forgetting that she had him whipped nearly to death only two days before. The romance between Rick and Mayo does not come quite so out of nowhere – after all, they did survive the ordeal in the worm tunnels together. And to be fair, Rick isn't entirely sure at this point whether he loves Mayo. He just knows that there is a connection between them and wants to see where it goes.

Nor are Rick and Mayo the only characters affected by insta-love. Kyra also falls in love with Rick at first sight, even though she knows that he doesn't feel the same. Hugh St. John quietly pines for Mayo and Jaffa Storm also wants to possess her, even though Mayo kicked him in the balls at their first meeting. Maybe, humans from Mercury have a touch of masochism in Leigh Brackett's version of the solar system.

What is more, believable romantic relationships are fairly rare in golden age science fiction. Leigh Brackett may tend towards insta-love, but at least her characters do get to have feeling at all, which is more than you can say for many other stories of the period. Of all the stories I reviewed for the Retro Reviews project, the most affecting love story not written by Leigh Brackett was that between a man and his spaceship. And I liked Rick and Mayo very much. They definitely have chemistry and I could easily imagine them being played by Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in a movie. Nonetheless, I would have preferred it if the relationship between Rick and Mayo had developed a little more slowly.

Though Rick and Mayo haven't got much time, before their captors take them to Haral and his court. Rick won't beg for his own life, but asks the Martians to let Mayo go. The Martians, however, have no intention of letting anybody go. And so Rick is crucified against the nearest wall, while the Martian chiefs continue to plot the overthrow of the Terran Exploitations Company.

The Martian war council is interrupted by Jaffa Storm and his troops, who kill the Martians, kidnap Mayo and leave Rick for dead. However, Rick is not dead, not yet. Nor is he the only survivor of the massacre. Haral's general Beudach and the winged girl Kyra survived as well. Together, they free Rick. Beudach, who has been quite impressed by Rick's courage and strength, clamps the collar of Ruh, symbol of the rulership over Mars, around Rick's neck before succumbing to his injuries.

Now Rick has the collar and the prophecy to back him up, he and Kyra gather the troops. They persuade Martians and Earthpeople living on Mars to work together to bring down the Terran Exploitations Company. Rick also enlists the help of Hugh St. John and Eran Mak and their Union Party.

The cover of the 1951 edition

Meanwhile, Jaffa Storm hasn't been idle. He killed his boss Ed Fallon to take his place and is using his telepathic abilities to learn of his enemies' plans before they can put them into action. To counter Storm's abilities, Rick decides to do something completely unpredictable and crashes a spaceship into the headquarters of the Terran Exploitations Company. The element of surprise gives Rick the edge and the combined army of Martians and Earthpeople manage to overcome Storm's forces. However, Storm has fled and taken Mayo with him.

Rick is determined to go after them, but first he has to deal with treachery from his own allies, when Hugh St. John and Eran Mak double-cross him. They knock Rick out, steal the collar of Ruh and tell Earthpeople and Martians that he betrayed them both. Then they put Rick on a spaceship bound for Earth with fifty thousand credits to make him go away. But Rick isn't someone you can get rid of that easily. He uses the fifty thousand credits to bribe his way off the ship.

He finds Kyra who was mortally wounded in the attack on the Terran Exploitations Company. She dies in Rick's arms, but not before telling him where Storm has fled with Mayo. I have to admit that I was disappointed that poor Kyra was fridged like that. Yes, obviously there was no future for Rick and her, but couldn't Brackett have found someone else for her? Or have Kyra remain happily single and working to build a better Mars?

After many more ordeals, Rick finally tracks down Jaffa Storm in the polar cities of Mars, where an ancient non-human race lies in stasis and dreams, while their marvellous technology still lies around, ripe for the taking. Rick has no weapons, but nonetheless he manages to outwit Storm by using his telepathy against him. For while Storm can sense which move Rick is going to make next, he is unaware that Rick is lefthanded and therefore miscalculates his countermoves.

Rick kills Storm and rescues Mayo. Together, they head back to confront the treacherous Hugh St. John and Eran Mak. Rick tells them in no unclear terms that he will not be bought off with fifty thousand credits. After all, Rick tells them, he was the one who suffered, was crucified and almost killed on more than one occasion, while St. John and Mak sat around in their office twiddling their thumbs. Also, Rick knows the secrets of the polar cities with their fantastic weapons and he will use them if he has to.

Luckily, Rick has no interest in ruling Mars. St. John and Mak can have that job, thank you very much. Rick would much rather have Mayo – as well as a spaceship and a crew to explore the asteroid belt and Jupiter plus trading privileges. After all, he was born in space and that's where he will return.

The cover of the 1961 Acve Double edition shows Rick in chains.

No one wrote better planetary adventures than Leigh Brackett and Shadow Over Mars perfectly showcases her skills. There are thrills and action aplenty as well as twists and turns and the nigh psychedelic descriptions of alien landscapes that Brackett excelled at.

Shadow Over Mars was Brackett's first science fiction novel (she also penned a hardboiled crime novel entitled No Good From a Corpse in the same year). In many ways it feels like a prototype for her later work, particularly the Eric John Stark stories as well as her 1949 novel Sea-Kings of Mars a.k.a. The Sword of Rhiannon. A lot of elements from this novel – the prophecy, the slave rebellion, the Banning Shocker, the polar cities of Mars with their mysterious non-human inhabitants, the winged people of Mars and the dark-skinned humans of Mercury – would all show up again in future stories.

But while Eric John Stark may be physically closer to Jaffa Storm, there are also many similarities between his character and Rick Urquart. Both are drifters without a home or a loyalty to any particular planet. Erik John Stark was an orphan raised by a Mercurian natives and refers to himself as N'chaka, the man without a tribe. Meanwhile, Rick was born in space and doesn't belong on any planet.

Now most of Leigh Brackett's protagonists are drifters and outlaws, but Rick Urquart is a little more cynical than most of them. Eric John Stark's involvement with various uprisings against villainous capitalists and colonialists are inevitably motivated by idealism, even if he calls himself a mercenary. Rick, on the other hand, is mainly out for himself. His love for Mayo softens him somewhat, but he still has no qualms about blackmailing St. John and Mak to get what he wants. Though to be fair, St. John and Mak have it coming.
 
I can't even blame them for not wanting Rick in charge of Mars, because Rick really isn't the sort of person you'd want to put in charge of anything larger than a spaceship. Never mind that history has shown again and again that the people who lead the revolution are usually not the ones who end up ruling the country afterwards. Nonetheless, Rick is right. St. John and Mak did let him fight and suffer and bleed for their cause and then promptly turned on him. And even if Rick is plainly unsuited to ruling Mars, I can't help but wonder how well Mars will do under the control of the backstabbing St. John and Mak. They are marginally better than Fallon and Storm, if only because they don't enslave anybody (yet). But I can't really imagine them being good rulers. Most likely, they will become the villainous government that the next outlaw hero has to take down in ten or twenty years' time. Leigh Brackett obviously had a strong dislike of politicians and government and it often shows through in her fiction.

The cover of the edition I own has nothing whatsoever to do with the story.

The Sad and Rabid Puppies generally seem to like Leigh Brackett, probably because of the 1970s Skaith trilogy with its evil space hippies and evil space socialists bleeding a beleaguered population dry. However, Leigh Brackett's stories from the 1940s and early 1950s are extremely critical of colonialism, imperialism and capitalism and her heroes are often literal social justice warriors, fighting to liberate a downtrodden native population. These tendencies can be seen in the Eric John Stark stories as well as in the 1944 Retro Hugo finalist "The Citadel of Lost Ships". Shadow Over Mars is another example of Leigh Brackett in social justice warrior mode. And the Terran Exploitations Company are the most blatantly evil capitalists I've ever come across in any Brackett story.

Rick and the kidnapped men slaving away in the mines of the Terran Exploitations Company wear chains and manacles and Rick is often depicted in chains on several of the covers this novel had over the years. Those chains bring to mind not only slavery in the antebellum South – abolished for not quite eighty years when this novel was published and therefore as far removed for 1940s audience as WWII and the Great Depression are for us – but also the chain gangs of convicts that still toiled in fields and built roads in the US South at the time Shadow Over Mars was published. Leigh Brackett often tackled contemporary social issues in her stories, which is why I'm so surprised that those who believe that good science fiction should be apolitical tend to embrace her work. But then, Leigh Brackett also wrote cracking good action, so maybe that makes it easier to overlook the blatantly political messages in her stories.

Like pretty much all stories of the golden age, Shadow Over Mars is dated in places. The apelike anthropoids the Terran Exploitations Company uses as disposable muscle are referred to as "black boys" by those on the receiving end of their fists, which is not a word choice anybody would make today. The smoking, always present in golden age speculative fiction, is also really notable here. Rick, Jaffa Storm and pretty much every other male character smokes. At one point, his trusty pack of cigarettes even save Rick from a pit full of flesh-eating psychedelic killer flowers.

But in spite of the dated aspects, Shadow Over Mars is another great and glorious adventure from the queen of space opera. It would make a great addition to the 1945 Retro Hugo ballot, especially since 1944 wasn't a strong year for SFF novels.

Retro Review: "Double-Cross" by James MacCreigh a.k.a. Fredrik Pohl

"Double-Cross" by James MacCreigh is a science fiction short story, which appeared in the winter 1944 issue of Planet Stories and is therefore eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugos. The magazine version may be found here.

And in case you're wondering about the author, James MacCreigh was a pen name Frederik Pohl used several times in the 1940s for his solo stories.

Warning: There will be spoilers in the following!

"Double-Cross" takes us once more to the fog-shrouded. swampy and permanently cloudy Venus that never was that is a familiar setting in pulp science fiction published in Planet Stories, Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories and similar magazines.

The story starts with some exposition heavy dialogue between Lowrey, Officer of the Deck aboard an Earth spaceship, and the Executive Officer who never gets a name. Lowrey remarks that everything is quiet and that he cannot even note anything in his logbook, because nothing is happening.

The Executive Officer is more sceptical, because he doesn't trust the "natives". When Lowrey points out that those "natives" are human just like them, descendants of the crew of the first starship to Venus, the Executive Officer declares that they might have been human once, four or five generations ago, but that Venus has changed them into something else. And so the Venusians have pallid white skin due to lack of sunshine and they have no hair either. That's not how evolution works, at least not that quickly, but then the Executive Officer is something of a bigot.

Lowrey, on the other hand, thinks that the natives are friendly enough. Some of them are hostile, worried that now humans know that Venus is habitable, the planet will be overrun with immigrants from Earth who will displace the original settlers. There is an underground movement as well, which Lowrey dismisses as paltry and unimportant. Though he is not bothered that settlers from Earth will displace the Venusians. After all, survival of the fittest is the basic law of evolution. We suspect that Lowrey doesn't know how evolution works either. Lowrey's musings are interrupted, when the sensors detect that a spy ray is aimed at the Earth ship.

If there was a ranking of "As you know, Bob…" scenes in golden age science fiction, Frederik Pohl's version in "Double-Cross" would rank higher than Isaac Asimov's various attempts, if only because Pohl's dialogue is less clumsy than Asimov's. On the other hand, Asimov gets points for cleverly using an "As you know, Bob…" scene as a vital clue in a mystery in "The Big and the Little" and just making fun of the convention in "Catch That Rabbit".

It's also interesting that Pohl's "As you know, Bob…" scene takes the form of a conversation between two ship officers. Idle conversations about the plot between random guards, soldiers, crewmembers, etc…, who often will never appear in the story again, are a common convention in space opera and military science fiction (and elsewhere) that predates the pulp era by centuries (you can find variations of this scene in Shakespeare plays) and one that still persists to this day. A recent example, played for laughs, was the scene with the two idiotic Stormtroopers who punched Baby Yoda (Boo, hiss) in The Mandalorian.

At any rate, the scene between Lowrey and the Executive Officer does its job of setting up the central conflict between the original settlers of Venus and the newcomers from Earth neatly enough. Any parallels to historical events are entirely coincidental, I'm sure.

The scene then switches to what is going on at the other end of the spy ray, where the Venusian underground has been listening in on the two Earth officers and are now convinced that the worries about immigrants from Earth displacing the Venusians are justified. We meet Svan, leader of the underground, and also learn that the underground has the support of the Venusian council.

Svan is a militant and wants to make sure that the spaceship never returns to Earth. And in order to ensure that the Earth ship never makes it home, Svan has a handy Atomite bomb. He also has a plan how to plant it aboard the ship. Svan and his co-conspirators will go to see the Earth ship like the rest of the town. On the way back, they will feign a car accident to draw away the ship guards, giving one of the conspirators the chance to get close enough to the ship to plant the bomb.

Svan's followers are a lot less militant than he is. An old man named Toller has issues with the fact that planting a bomb aboard the Earth vessel is essentially murder. And a young woman named Ingra remarks that their ancestors came from Earth, too, and therefore Venusians and Earthpeople are of one blood. Svan rightly points out that according to the Executive Officer aboard the Earth ship, the Venusians aren't even human anymore.

Because none of Svan's followers are volunteering to plant the bomb, Svan has them draw lots. Svan draws a blank, but when he looks around, none of his followers announce that they have drawn the lot that makes them the bomber. Therefore, Svan assumes that one of his followers is a coward or worse, a traitor. But if he accuses his followers of treason an cowardice, the traitor will be warned. So Svan quickly marks his own piece of paper, while the others aren't watching, and announces that he will plant the bomb. Why Svan didn't volunteer in the first place, especially since it was his plan and he is the most militant of the bunch anyway, remains a mystery.

Svan's plan hits a not entirely unexpected snag, when he and his party are stopped by a Venusian guard who announces that no one is allowed near the Earth ship anymore, because Svan's spy ray warned the Earthpeople that there was something afoot. Svan signals to the guard that he is on Council business. But the guard refuses to budge and is not a fan of the Council (which we learn is not an official administrative body, but the name of Svan's underground group) either, so Svan attacks and kills the man to the shock of his co-conspirators.

The conspirators go forth with their plan. They drop off Svan at some distance from the ship and drive onwards, unaware that Svan has planted a second bomb in the car. Since he can't trust his followers anymore, he has decided to blow them up, because an explosion will make a much better diversion than a car accident. He does briefly waver, when Ingra kisses him good-bye and wishes him good luck. But then Svan decides that even if she isn't a traitor, Ingra is weak, so she must die for the cause with the others. This confirms that Svan is a murderous arsehole, in case there was any doubt.

Svan makes his way to the ship and waits for the explosion to draw the guards away, while fingering the lot he has drawn and wondering once again who the traitor might be. As terrorists go, Svan is certainly unlucky. For once more, his grand plan goes awry, when the car unexpectedly returns, driven by the loyal Ingra. Ingra tells Svan to jump into the car, because the dead Venusian guard has been found and both Earthpeople and Venusians are now after them. Svan just screams, "Go away!", at Ingra and the car and tries to leg it, because he knows that the bomb is about to go off. But he never makes it.

After the explosion, Lowrey and the ship surgeon find the dying Svan. They also find the second bomb and realise that the Venusians were trying to bomb them.

"Poetic justice if I ever saw it," Lowrey says. Then he notices the piece of paper that Svan is still clutching in death and frowns.

The surgeon asks him what's the matter, whereupon Svan shows him the piece of paper and notes that it is marked with a cross on both sides. So there never was a traitor – Svan was just too stupid to turn over the paper.

"Double-Cross" is a neat science fiction thriller with a surprising, if somewhat contrived conclusion. The title (a good title, which I have used a for science fiction story myself) is also doubly relevant, both the in metaphorical (Svan double-crossing his own followers) and literal (there are two crosses on the piece of paper) sense. It also a good example of the twist ending stories that were so popular during the golden age.

Not a lot of stories surprise me these days – I can usually tell where they're going in a few pages. "Double-Cross", however, did surprise me. Initially, I was expecting something along the lines of a Leigh Brackett story about a revolt of native people against the invading Earth capitalists similar to the 1944 Retro Hugo finalist "Citadel of Lost Ships" or the later Eric John Stark stories. Never mind that forty years of Star Wars and its imitators have primed us to inevitably assume that the plucky rebels fighting against overwhelming forces are the good guys. But sometimes, the plucky rebels are just terrorists. And sometimes, those terrorists become paranoid and turn on their own.

Though Lowrey and the unnamed other members of the spaceship crew don't come across all that well either. And indeed, various remarks made by Lowrey and the unnamed Executive Officer suggest that the Venusians were right to worry about the influx of Earthpeople. "Double-Cross" is a story, where there are no good guys, which shows again that morality was not always black and white during the golden age and that there were shades of grey. Furthermore, "Double-Cross" also belies claims from certain quarters that golden age science fiction was just apolitical fun.

Of the named characters in the story, Svan is the only one who has a personality, though it's not a very pleasant one. He is domineering, militant and paranoid to boot. Even if the cause of the Venusian underground is justified (and Pohl hints that it might be), Svan's zeal goes beyond any reasonable boundaries. Svan only lives for the cause and is willing to sacrifice anything and anybody to achieve his aims, whether it's the innocent crew of the Earth spaceship (and while Lowrey and company might not be the most pleasant people, they haven't harmed any Venusians), the Venusians guard who gets in his way or his own followers. In short, Svan is a murderous arsehole. His character also rings true, because revolutionary movements tend to attract people who just want to cause mayhem and will turn on their own comrades at the slightest provocation. In many ways, Svan is an interplanetary Andreas Baader (de facto leader of the West German terrorist group Red Army Fraction) or Charles Manson, even though Baader was only one year old and Manson ten, when "Double-Cross" was published.

Frederik Pohl's left political leanings are well known and he was a member and even chapter president of the Young Communist League for a few years in the 1930s. I wonder whether Pohl encountered types like Svan during his time with the League, especially since Communist groups during the Stalin era were often riddled with paranoia.

The solution with the piece of paper marked on both sides may seem a bit contrived, though it's not entirely unrealistic, because thankfully, quite a lot of terrorists are stupid and tend to blow up themselves rather than their targets. The ideological bent doesn't matter, stupid terrorists come in all political and ideological flavours. Here is an article listing some exceptionally stupid Al Qaeda terrorists and here is one about their equivalents in the IRA.

"Double-Cross is short, only six pages long, including an illustration that takes up three quarters of a page. Most of those six pages are dialogue. We get little in the way of description, unlike what you'd find in a Leigh Brackett, Ray Bradbury, Clifford D. Simak or C.L. Moore story. But if you've read enough golden age science fiction, you know what Venus looked like during the golden age and don't really need it. And while Pohl may not have been a particularly poetic writer, his prose is less clunky than Asimov's.

Like several of the stories I have reviewed for the Retro Reviews project, particularly those originally published in Planet Stories, "Double-Cross" has only been reprinted once, in a 1976 collection entitled fittingly enough The Early Pohl. It consistently surprises me how many of the stories that have rarely or never been reprinted are pretty good, sometimes better than the stuff that was reprinted.
A short and punchy science fiction thriller, that offers no heroes to root for, but some genuine surprises.

Retro Review: "The Jewel of Bas" by Leigh Brackett

"The Jewel of Bas" by Leigh Brackett is a science fiction novella, which appeared in the spring 1944 issue of Planet Stories and is therefore eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugos. The magazine version may be found here.

Warning: There will be spoilers in the following!

The protagonists of "The Jewel of Bas" are two newlyweds, Ciaran (a name Brackett would reuse for the 1951 Eric John Stark story "Black Amazon of Mars") and Mouse. Ciaran and Mouse are drifters. Ciaran is a wandering balladeer who carries a harp and sings songs about the old legends of his planet, while Mouse is primarily a pickpocket and petty thief. Both these skills will serve them well in the adventure to come. Ciaran and Mouse call themselves gypsies, a term which is considered offensive now, but was still in common use in 1944. Ciaran and Mouse are not even the only self-proclaimed Romani in Leigh Brackett's planetary romances of the 1940s. "The Citadel of Lost Ships", a finalist for the 1944 Retro Hugo, features an entire space station full of intergalactic drifters who refer to themselves by the g-word. Uncommon for the time, Leigh Brackett has a lot of sympathy for her Romani protagonists.

Unlike Isaac Asimov, Leigh Brackett does give us pretty detailed descriptions of her characters. And so we learn that both Ciaran and Mouse are fairly short and skinny, probably due to not always having had sufficient food, and Ciaran has bent legs, too. Ciaran has a scar on his lip and is missing a tooth, Mouse has curly dark hair and a brand between her eyes that marks her as a thief. Both Ciaran and Mouse have brown skin, so here we have a golden age story with two unambiguous protagonists of colour.

Ciaran and Mouse are more typical characters for a Leigh Brackett story than Lundy from "Terror Out of Space". For most of Brackett's protagonists are outsiders who live on the margins of their respective societies. Many are thieves or criminals of sorts and quite a few are people of colour, including what is probably Leigh Brackett's most famous character, Eric John Stark. But unlike Eric John Stark and other Brackett protagonists, Ciaran and Mouse are not physically impressive. And though we are never given their age, but Ciaran and Mouse feel young, late teens or early twenties. Younger than most other Brackett protagonists, at any rate. Their relationship is volatile and they quarrel a lot, occasionally escalating into violence, even though they clearly love each other.

In fact, the story starts with Ciaran and Mouse quarrelling, as they are having dinner on a ledge overlooking an area called the Forbidden Plains. Mouse is scared, because she has never been outside the city before. And besides, there are rumours about people going missing near the Forbidden Plains. But Ciaran assures her that the shortcut they took is perfectly safe, even if it passes by the Forbidden Plains. While he's at it, Ciaran also gives us a handy introduction to the old legends of his world, which he uses as fodder for his ballads, such as the story of Bas the Immortal who lives inside Ben Beatha, the Mountain of Life which overlooks the Forbidden Plains, with his android servants and a non-human slave race called the Kald. Bas the Immortal owns the Stone of Destiny, a powerful jewel that allows him to rule the world. Ciaran assures Mouse that those are just legends, stories to frighten children with, though he also dreams of climbing Ben Beatha and getting his hands on the jewel one day. He will get his wish.

Mouse and Ciaran's dinner is interrupted by a shadow falling onto the ledge where they're resting. They are frightened, for their world knows no night. By now, we are wondering just where exactly "The Jewel of Bas" is set. Leigh Brackett normally set her planetary romances in pre-spaceflight consensus version of our solar system that never was with Mars and Venus being particularly popular settings. However, the world of "The Jewel of Bas" with its sun balls and permanent daylight doesn't match Brackett's version of Mars or Venus or Mercury or indeed any other planet of the solar system. So did Leigh Brackett actually write a story set on an extrasolar world, thirty years before the Skaith trilogy? Or is something else going on here? It's a mystery that will be resolved by the end of the story.

Soon after the incident with the shadow, Ciaran and Mouse find themselves in even worse trouble, when they are attacked and kidnapped by vaguely humanoid creatures with grey skin and pink eyes. Before he is knocked out, Ciaran recognises their attackers as Kalds, the non-human servants of Bas the Immortal. So if that part of the legend is true, maybe the rest is true as well?

When Ciaran comes to again, he and Mouse find themselves chained together with other people abducted by the Kalds and herded across the Forbidden Plains towards Ben Beatha. However, Mouse's unconventional upbringing has also given her some mean lockpicking skills, which she uses to free herself, Ciaran and several other prisoners from their chains. The prisoners revolt and attack the Kalds, when another shadow falls onto a world that doesn't know darkness. Ciaran and Mouse manage to escape in the ensuing chaos. The join forces with some of their fellow escapees, a big red-haired, nearly naked hunter, a wild-eyed hermit who appears to be insane and a dark-skinned trapper named Ram, whose wife and son were also abducted by the Kalds.

Because the Kalds have closed off all other escape routes, Ciaran, Mouse and their comrades have no choice but to head further towards Ben Beatha. Ram is killed in a fight with the Kalds, though not before finding his wife and son dead by the wayside. Meanwhile, Ciaran, Mouse, the hunter and the hermit sneak into a cave at the foot of Ben Beatha and find themselves staring into a pit, wherein a huge machine is being built. The human prisoners are used as slave labour to build the machine. They also seem to be drugged or hypnotised, not caring whether they live or die. And in fact, several slaves drop dead from exhaustion right in front of the eyes of Ciaran and his companions.

Ciaran and friends make it to the bottom of the pit undetected. Here, Ciaran finds proof that yet more of the old legends he used to sing about are true, for they witness one of the androids of Bas the Immortal hypnotising the new prisoners via some kind of mesmerising light. Mouse and the hermit are also affected by the light – only Ciaran and the hunter manage to escape, though not before overhearing that the androids are worried about something failing and that the machine will not be finished in time. They also overhear that the androids are planning to overthrow Bas the Immortal and rule the world themselves.

During their escape, Ciaran and the hunter are separated. Ciaran knows that the slaves are being worked to death and that things will only get worse with the androids in charge. Desperate to save Mouse from that fate, he decides to climb Ben Beatha to find Bas the Immortal and enlist his help against the androids. While he is climbing, Ciaran also notes that the sunballs which provide his world with light and warmth are dimmer than they used to be.

Ciaran eventually reaches an outcropping near the top of the mountain, which turns out to be a balcony leading to the quarters of Bas. He ventures inside and gets the surprise of his life, when he finally finds Bas, asleep on a bed which is shaped like an ankh, the Egyptian symbol of life (though Brackett uses the Latin term "crux ansata" for the symbol). For Bas is not the ancient and godlike immortal Ciaran has envisioned. Instead, he is a teenaged boy, perpetually young due to his immortality. At this point, Ciaran also remembers another legend, older than most, about the Shining Youth from Beyond, a boy who never grows old. So that legend is true as well.

Ciaran tries to wake Bas, only to be thwarted by the curtain of light that surrounds Bas and his ankh-shaped bed. When the curtain of light flickers out due to a convenient power failure (The frequent power failures in the story are timed very conveniently, even though there is an in-story reason for them), Ciaran still cannot get Bas to wake up. Desperate, Ciaran finally sits down on Bas' bed and begins to play sad songs on his harp, which does the trick. Bas is awake at last, though not exactly happy about it.

We now get a brief rundown of the long history of Bas the Immortal. Bas, we learn, was a fisherman's son from Atlantis. He gained his immortality as well as the Stone of Destiny from a meteor strike. Now Bas had eternal life and the powers of a god, but because of his youth he was never respected, only hated. Eventually, he left Earth with his androids and the Stone of Destiny and settled on the tenth planet of the solar system. Inside the hollow tenth planet, Bas built a world of his own, lit by sunballs and powered by the Stone of Destiny, and populated it with humans imported from Earth as well as the alien Kalds. But the people of this world also quickly came to hate Bas and so he went to sleep to live in his own dream world and left the androids in charge of the world he had created.

This conversation occurs in the penultimate chapter of the novella and finally clarifies where exactly the story is set, namely on or rather inside a hypothetical tenth planet of our solar system (Pluto was still considered the ninth planet back then). In fact, I wonder why Leigh Brackett didn't simply use Pluto instead, especially since hardly anything was known about Pluto a mere fourteen years after its discovery. But then, hypothetical trans-Neptunian planets are very common in science fiction well into the twenty-first century, almost as common as real trans-Neptunian objects.

But though the revelation of where exactly the story is set only happens towards the end, Brackett weaves in hints regarding the nature of this world throughout the story such as the sunballs or the fact that neither Ciaran nor Mouse have ever experienced darkness before and are terrified by it as well as a moment early on where Ciaran recalls one of the legends surrounding Bas the Immortal, according to which Bas was born on a world with only one big sunball, where the sky changes from light to dark "like a woman's fancy" and where the horizon curves down. So yes, the clues to the nature of this world are there from the beginning, even though I completely managed to miss them upon first reading.

The world of Ciaran, Mouse and Bas is also highly reminiscent of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Pellucidar (which is eligible for the 1945 Best Series Retro Hugo), for Pellucidar also has a horizon that curves upwards, is also lit by a sunball and also knows no night. And considering Leigh Brackett has stated that she was a fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs and that Burroughs' Tarzan was a big influence on Eric John Stark, it's very likely that she read the Pellucidar novels. However, Burroughs places his Pellucidar "At the Earth's Core", whereas Brackett places her world on a planet beyond Neptune. It's certainly a fascinating world and I wonder why Leigh Brackett never revisited it in future stories like she kept revisiting her versions of Mars and Venus.

However, Ciaran and Bas don't have much time to dwell on the exact nature of their world. For the Stone of Destiny, which powers the sunballs and keeps the world habitable, is failing. Once it does fail, everybody in this world except for Bas and his androids will die. And life won't exactly be pleasant for Bas and the androids either, considering they will be trapped on a frozen rock in space. Ciaran also deduces that this is why the androids are using the human slaves to build the gigantic machine he saw earlier, as a replacement power source for the failing Stone of Destiny.

Ciaran has the hardest time convincing Bas, the solar system's oldest emo teenager, to help, since the fatalistic Bas declares that thousands of people dying is no big deal, since human lifespans are so short anyway. And besides, he'd much rather sleep. It's only when Bas realises that the androids plan to do away with him as well that he agrees to help.

Together, Bas and Ciaran set out to confront the androids, just as the machine the slaves built starts up. The androids try to hold Ciaran and Bas back by siccing the Kalds on them. But the Kalds succumb to Bas' telepathy, so the androids have the hypnotised human slaves block the way. Bas cannot see a way past the slaves without hurting or killing anybody. So Ciaran draws the human slaves away with his harp, pied piper style, while Bas turns the last bits of power in the Stone of Destiny against the androids, destroying them. The slaves are freed and the world is saved.

Ciaran and Mouse try to persuade Bas to stay with the people he saved, but Bas won't hear anything about that. Sooner or later, in a couple of generations, they'll only hate him again, he says fatalistically and goes back to sleep to live in his dream world with his perfect dream girl. Ciaran and Mouse bid him good-bye and realise that even if their lives are limited, they are much happier than Bas the Immortal will ever be.

"The Jewel of Bas" is a glorious pulpy adventure story that manages to offer up plenty of twists and turns, whether it's the revelation where the story is set or Bas the legendary Immortal turning out to be a sullen emo teenager whose initial response to the impending end of his world is a shrug and "Whatever". Bas only appears in the final three chapters of the novella, but he is certainly a memorable character, both a tragic figure and an annoying brat.

Dying worlds, mysterious relics and ancient legends that turn out to contain considerably more than a kernel of truth are common themes in Leigh Brackett's work and "The Jewel of Bas" has all of them in spades. Leigh Brackett's stories often inhabit the borderland between science fiction and fantasy. "The Jewel of Bas" tilts further towards fantasy than most. Yes, the story is set on another planet, there is a mysterious machine and there are androids, but Leigh Brackett isn't particularly concerned about how any of this works. If this novella had been published in Astounding, we would have been treated to pages of technobabble about how the machine powering the planet works and how the androids were built. Leigh Brackett, however, isn't interested in the details of her wholly imaginary technology. We get a few lines that the machine is powered by the rotation of the planet and by vibration, before we get back to the adventure and the crisis at hand. And the androids are no Asimovian robots with positronic brains and careful programming, they're just a monster to fight and an obstacle to be overcome. Indeed, the story would have worked just as well, if Leigh Brackett had simply waved her hand and said "magic", when asked how exactly the imaginary technology works. And indeed, the Stone of Destiny is pretty much magic. "The Jewel of Bas" is wallpaper science fiction, but it is also an excellent example why wallpaper science fiction often endures long after harder science fiction has become hopelessly dated.

Leigh Brackett's planetary romances are exactly what the term "sword and planet" as an analogue to sword and sorcery was invented to describe. In fact, Adventures Fantastic notes in their review of "The Jewel of Bas" that the story not only feels like a sword and sorcery tale, but that it also pays homage to several popular sword and sorcery works. And so Ciaran plays a tune played at the funerals of Cimmerian chieftains at one point and mentions an ancient legend from the forests of Hyperborea at another, paying homage to both Robert E. Howard's Conan (who hails from Cimmeria and visits Hyperborea) and Clark Ashton Smith's Hyperborean Cycle. And we know that Leigh Brackett was a fan of Robert E. Howard's work and even named a character in "Lorelei of the Red Mist", her 1946 collaboration with Ray Bradbury, Conan after Howard's barbarian, a decision she later regretted when the Conan stories were reprinted to huge success in the 1960s and the name became forever associated with the Cimmerian barbarian.

Adventures Fantastic also points out that the red-headed hunter who aids Ciaran and Mouse during their escape is reminiscent of Fritz Leiber's red-headed barbarian Fafhrd. In this case, the link is more tenuous than in the previous example, but the interactions between Ciaran and the hunter are a little reminiscent of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser down to the hunter calling Ciaran "little man", which is how Fafhrd often refers to the Mouser. Though Fafhrd is the bard in that legendary partnership. Furthermore, it's also notable that there is a character, albeit a female one, called Mouse in "The Jewel of Bas", considering that Mouse was the Gray Mouser's original name, before he decided to rebrand himself. Though this little tidbit would not be revealed until the novelette "The Unholy Grail" in 1962, i.e. eighteen years after "The Jewel of Bas". Though it is pretty obvious that the various SFF authors of the golden age were all reading each other's work, even if they didn't know each other personally, and so occasionally dropped little Easter eggs into their stories.

The stereotypical protagonist of golden age science fiction is the competent man (and it is almost always a man, the occasional Susan Calvin notwithstanding) who uses his brains and his specialist knowledge to solve the problem at hand. Astounding was the realm of that particular breed of competent man, even though there were many stories published in Astounding that don't match that stereotype at all. Leigh Brackett's protagonists are certainly all competent, though they couldn't be any more different from the heroic engineers and scientists found in the pages of Astounding. Instead, Leigh Brackett's protagonists are usually outsiders living on the margins of their respective societies. Many are borderline or outright criminals. And while these marginalised outsiders do apply their specialist skills to the problem at hand, these specialist skills usually have very little to do with superior scientific knowledge.

Instead, Eric John Stark survives thanks to the instincts he acquired as a child growing up with a tribe of semi-primitive aliens on Mercury. Matt Carse from the 1949 novel The Sword of Rhiannon uses his knowledge of Martian history and legends to save the day, as does Carey from the 1963 story "The Road to Sinharat". Meanwhile, Ciaran uses both his knowledge of the old legends of his world and his skills as a musician to save himself, his beloved Mouse and his world. SFF does have its share of heroic bards and balladeers from Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd via Tom Bombadil and Manly Wade Wellman's Silver John to Jaskier/Dandelion/insert flower name here from Andrzej Sapkowski's The Witcher and the eponymous TV series. Ciaran, however, is one of the earliest examples of this character type – only Fafhrd (and if one counts his first appearance in a poem, Tom Bombadil) predates him.

As for Mouse, all of Leigh Brackett's female characters are as competent as their male counterparts. Scrappy little Mouse, though far from a typical female Leigh Brackett character (Brackett tended to go for femme fatales rather than tomboys), is no exception. After all, the initial escape wouldn't even have been possible without the lockpicking skills she acquired in her past as a thief.

"The Jewel of Bas" is a great example of the kind of grand planetary adventure that Leigh Brackett specialised in and just as exciting and enjoyable as it was seventy-five years ago.

Retro Review: "Terror Out of Space" by Leigh Brackett

This scene does not actually appear in the story.

"Terror Out of Space" by Leigh Brackett is a science fiction novelette, which appeared in the summer 1944 issue of Planet Stories and is therefore eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugos. You can find the story online here.

Warning: There will be spoilers in the following!

The story starts with the protagonist, an officer of the Tri-Worlds Police, Special Branch called Lundy (no first name given), in a fistful of trouble. He's flying solo through the clouds of Venus, desperate to deliver his cargo to a destination he will never reach.

Gradually, we learn that a mysterious alien lifeform has crash-landed on Venus and caused a wave of madness. For this mysterious alien lifeform is telepathic and appears to every heterosexual male as the most desirable woman ever. However, no one has ever looked into her eyes and lived to tell the tale. Apparently, the alien has zero interest in heterosexual women or gay people of any gender. Lundy and his partner Jackie Smith have been tasked with capturing one of those alien lifeforms and delivering it to a group of scientists for analysis. They got lucky and managed to apprehend both the creature as well as its latest victim, a man named Farrell.

At the beginning of the story, the creature is locked in a safe aboard Lundy's ship. Lundy also drugged and strapped down its victim, though not before Farrell managed to knock out Jackie Smith. And so Lundy is flying solo, while Smith is unconscious and Farrell is screaming his lungs out in the hold.

When Farrell falls suspiciously silent, Lundy goes to check on him and finds that the man has torn himself loose from his restraints, the straps cutting his flesh to the bone. The gravely injured Farrell demands that Lundy let the creature out of the strongbox, because "she" is afraid of the dark. Lundy refuses only to find himself looking into the barrel of Jackie Smith's gun, for Smith has also fallen under the creature's spell.

The resulting fight causes the craft to crash into the Venusian ocean. Only Lundy survives – Farrell succumbs to his injuries and Smith drowns, an expression of horror frozen on his face. The safe is open, the creature gone.

So Lundy puts on a pressure suit, grabs some meds and oxygen tanks and decides to walk across the Venusian ocean floor to the destination he was trying to reach. This trek across the ocean floor is a highlight of the story. Atmospheric descriptions of alien worlds are one of Leigh Brackett's great strengths as a writer and she employs it to the fullest here, offering up vivid and nigh psychedelic depictions of the Venusian ocean floor, complete with ruined underwater cities and flesh-eating monster flowers. On the way to one the former, Lundy nearly succumbs to the latter, but just as the flowers are about to devour him, he is rescued by a group of telepathic Venusian kelp people.

The friendly kelp people tell Lundy that they live in a nearby ruined city. The kelp people are all female, because the males abandoned their partners to follow a mysterious women who passed through. Lundy recognises the creature's handiwork at once. The kelp women ask Lundy for help to rescue their menfolk, because the kelp people are periodically besieged by creatures they call the Others who prey on them. The women know how to keep themselves and their seedlings safe, but the men are so besotted by "her" that they are sitting ducks.

Lundy, being a heroic type, at once promises to help the kelp people. Besides, he sees a chance to finally apprehend the creature, which has caused so much pain and misery. However – and this is something you would never find in the pages of Astounding Science Fiction – Lundy also has doubts whether he is up to the task, whether he will be able to resist the creature, when Jackie Smith, Farrell and the kelp men all succumbed to "her". Just as Lundy is scared much of the time during his trek across the ocean floor and his pursuit of 'her". Nonetheless, he is going to bring "her" in or die trying.

Things come to a head, when Lundy tracks the kelp men and the creature to the heart of the ruined city. He manages to catch the creature inside a net and promptly finds himself assaulted by the kelp men who are desperate to free "her". But lacking human hands, they cannot. At the same time, the Others – also kelp beings, but vicious, cannibalistic ones – attack. Leigh Brackett is not the first author who comes to mind when thinking of aliens who are truly alien – she was simply more interested in humans than aliens. The kelp people, the creature and the Others are some of the more interesting alien beings in Brackett's fiction.

Lundy knows that the kelp men are so focussed on freeing the creature from the net that they are easy prey for the Others. So Lundy does the very thing he'd been terrified to do, he telepathically communicates with the creature, telling her that he is the only one who can free her, but that he won't, unless she lets the kelp men go.

The creature obeys and just in time, too, for the Others are almost upon them. The kelp men escape. Lundy tries to hold off the Others with his blaster and finally hides in one of the ruined houses. He finds himself trapped in a Venusian execution chamber together with the creature, while the Others are swarming outside. Worse, Lundy's oxygen supply is getting low.

The creature tries to persuade Lundy to let her go, but he lets her know in no uncertain terms that he will never let her go after what she has done to Jackie Smith and Farrell and so many others. Now Lundy – and the reader – finally gets to see "her" in the form of a small, naked and angelically perfect woman. Her eyes, however, remain hidden for now. In many ways, "she" reminded me of the alien angel from Edgar Pangborn's debut story "Angel's Egg", which appeared seven years after "Terror Out of Space".

Though exhausted and high on stimulants, Lundy still manages to resist "her" and asks the creature at one point why precisely she drives men crazy and eventually kills them. The creature does not understand. The men worship her and it's nice to be worshipped. Nor does she understand the meaning of death, because in deep space, where her species lives, there is no such thing as death. On Venus, however, the creature is not immortal, because she cannot withstand the gravity. Sooner or later, it is going to crush her.

Once Lundy understands the creature's motivations, he makes a deal with "her". Lundy will make sure that everybody knows her story and that she will be remembered and yes, worshipped, as a hero, if she leads the Others away from Lundy and the kelp people into a convenient nearby undersea volcano. The creature agrees because dying while being worshipped and remembered is better than dying in a net and forgotten.

So Lundy lets her go free and she goes off to fulfil her part of the deal. However, Lundy makes one fatal mistake. He asks her to let him look into her eyes. And once he does, he finally understands why Jackie Smith died with an expression of pure horror frozen on his face. Because behind her eyes, there is nothing.

I encountered "Terror Out of Space" in the Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks collection "Sea Kings of Mars and Other Stories".

"Terror Out of Space" is a fairly uncommon Leigh Brackett story. Her talent at writing action scenes and evocative descriptions of alien landscapes is evident here, but both protagonist and plot are quite unlike Brackett's usual work. For starters, Leigh Brackett's protagonists tend to be outsiders and even outlaws, people living on the margins of the future society she depicts. Lundy, on the other hand, is an officer of the Tri-Worlds Police, Special Branch. Interplanetary police officers occasionally show up in Brackett's stories, but mostly they are faceless antagonists who pursue her outlaw heroes. Lundy is one of only two sympathetic representatives of the official authorities of the solar system I have ever encountered in Leigh Brackett's fiction. The other is Eric John Stark's mentor and surrogate father Simon Ashton, who appears briefly at the beginning of "Queen of the Martian Catacombs" in 1948 and less briefly in the Skaith trilogy of the 1970s.

Regarding the plot, "Terror Out of Space" is very much a hunt for an alien monster tale, which is not a type of science fiction story that Leigh Brackett wrote very often. There is something almost Lovecraftian about the idea of a mysterious creature that drives men (and only men) mad. But whereas the creature would have remained unknowable in a Lovecraft story, while the protagonist succumbs to madness, Lundy remains sane long enough to negotiate with the creature and learn about her real motives. "Terror Out of Space" certainly has its share of moments of horror – Farrell, who cuts himself to the bone trying to escape and bleeds to death, the dead Jackie Smith with an expression of nameless horror frozen on his face, the alien plantlife trying to devour Lundy and of course the beautiful woman with nothing where her eyes should be. Nonetheless, "Terror Out of Space" is not a science fiction horror story like John W. Campbell's "Who Goes There?" or H.P. Lovecraft's "Color Out of Space".

It is also unusual for a Golden Age story that the alien creature is not so much evil, but misunderstood and has no idea about the damage she is causing. Just try to imagine what this story would have been like, if it had been published in John W. Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction. For starters, Lundy would never have been allowed to have doubts and fear, even though this sets him apart from the stereotypical square-jawed heroes of the Golden Age. And the creature would have been unambiguously villainous, only to be outsmarted by superior human intelligence. But then, Leigh Brackett had stopped publishing in Astounding by this point, having found a more sympathetic audience for her brand of science fiction in Planet Stories.

Of course, Leigh Brackett, whose penchant for femme fatales is well known, could not resist turning even her very alien antagonist into a femme fatale. And not just any old femme fatale either, but the ultimate femme fatale who literally drives men of any species mad with a single look into her eyes.
When reading "Terror out of Space", there is never any doubt that this is vintage science fiction. Whether it's the vivid description of an ocean covered Venus that never was or Lundy's old-fashioned rocketship, complete with an autopilot named Iron Mike who is a literal robot or the aggressive heterosexuality of the creature, it is always very obvious that we are reading a story that's seventy-five years old. However, "Terror Out of Space" is also dated in other less obvious ways. For example, the medication Lundy takes along on his long trek across the Venusian ocean floor is a drug called Benzedrine, which left me puzzled, thinking, "But isn't that the trade name of an allergy medication?"

It turns out that I got the names mixed up (I was thinking of Benadryl, which is indeed an allergy medication) and that Benzedrine was an early amphetamine, which actually was used as a nasal decongestant, before people figured out that it also was a very effective stimulant. In the 1930s to 1950s, Benzedrine was widely used, both by soldiers in WWII as well as by scientists, mathematicians, writers and artists who used it to focus, stay awake and be more productive. And considering the conditions under which pulp fiction writers worked, sometimes cranking out one or two short novels per month, it's obvious why a stimulant like Benzedrine would be popular. And indeed, Wikipedia has a long list of references to Benzedrine in pop culture.

So a science fiction reader in 1944 would have known what Benzedrine was and what its effects were at once, whereas I – reading the story seventy-five years later – had to look it up. Leigh Brackett also namedrops another drug, Avertin, which Lundy uses to sedate the raging Farrell. I initially assumed Avertin was a made up name, but when I googled it, I found that Avertin is the trade name for an anaesthetic called tribromoethanol, which is still used in veterinary medicine today and which was used for humans in the first half of the twentieth century, before safer substances were developed. So again, a reader in 1944 would likely have known what it was.

The story provides enough context that it is obvious what these drugs do, even if – like me – you have never heard of them. Nonetheless, the takeway here is that a science fiction writer should never assume that something ubiquitous in your day will still be recognised by latter day readers, let alone in whatever future you depict. And indeed, when mentioning medication (which occasionally comes up in the In Love and War stories in particular), I never use real brand names, but either make up a name or just describe what it does.

I'm also very glad that the many references to drug use you can find in science fiction from the Golden Age all the way through the New Wave and beyond went completely over my head, when I read these stories as a teenager (not "Terror Out of Space", but other stories by Leigh Brackett). Because I wouldn't have been able to enjoy those stories, if I had realised how drug-soaked many of them were. For back when I read them in the late 1980s, it was a serious topic of debate among my friends whether it was morally acceptable to consume art that had been produced under the influence of drugs. I resolved the issue for myself by declaring that none of my favourites would ever as much as look at drugs – after all, they were science fiction writers and should know better (Yes, I know. I was very naïve) – so the question was moot. When I saw a documentary about Hollywood on TV and some fellow held up a bag of what he claimed was cocaine and said every movie or TV series produced in Hollywood was made by mediocre people under the influence of cocaine, I was utterly crestfallen and depressed, because it that were true, it would mean no more US movies or TV shows ever. In the end, after an avid discussion with friends, we decided that the man in the documentary must have referred to dull Hollywood movies, Wall Street, Fatal Attraction, Terms of Endearment, Basic Instinct and the like, that nobody liked anyway.

Among Leigh Brackett's extensive oeuvre, "Terror Out of Space" is one of the more obscure stories. It hasn't been reprinted very often – once in 1959 in an anthology of Venus stories edited by Donald A. Wollheim and then not again until 2005 in the Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks edition Sea Kings of Mars and Other Stories, which is also where I encountered it. But while "Terror Out of Space" is fairly obscure and also atypical for Leigh Brackett, it is nonetheless a fine and entertaining story, featuring some of the more interesting alien creatures of the Golden Age.