Brackett and Bradbury Team Up!

Leigh Brackett--one of the finest writers of Space Opera who ever put pen to paper--was a little more than halfway through writing a story titled "Lorelei of the Red Mist" when an opportunity to write the screenplay for the classic Bogie film The Big Sleep dropped in her lap. So she handed the manuscript to Ray Bradbury and let him take the story wherever he wished.

The result is one of the finest Space Opera yarns that ever appeared in Planet Stories. And that's saying a lot.

By the way, in her introduction to the 1974 Anthology The Best of Planet Stories, Brackett mentions how many readers try to deduce which elements of the story were hers and which were Bradbury's. It's really very simple. Everything before the sentence "He saw the flock, herded by more of the golden hounds" is Brackett. Everything else from that time on is Bradbury's.

The story starts out with a criminal named Hugh Starke, having just stolen a fortune from the Terro-Venus Mines, Inc., flying his ship over the Mountains of White Cloud on Venus, trying to dodge the company detectives. This doesn't work out very well for him. His ship crashes and he is fatally injured.

But that's not the end of him. Starke's mind is transfered into another body by a beautiful Venusian sea-woman named Rann. This body used to belong to a warrior named Conan, but Conan's mind was broken by torture and now Starke has sort of moved in and taken over.

Brackett mentions in the Best of Planet Stories introduction that she named the protagonist's new body Conan as a tribute to Robert E. Howard, as she admired his work. But she later considered this to be a mistake, as her Conan and Howard's Conan are such different characters.



Anyway, Hugh-Starke-as-Conan finds himself in a violent and complex political situation. A kingdom of land-people--who are native Venusians but essentially identical to humans--are being attacked by a faction of Venusian sea-people who left the sea a long time ago. Rann is the leader of these aggressors and she plans to use mind control tricks to force Starke to kill the leaders of the land-people.

But there is another faction of sea-people who never left the sea and want to wipe out both land-based factions.

Hugh has not lived a very notable life before being thrust into a new body, but now he finds himself forced into an heroic role. As much because he's stubborn as because he's never been a murderer, he manages to (mostly) resist Rann's mental commands. At first, his intent is to figure out a way to recover the money he had stolen and get back to human civilization, figuring that his new body means he's unlikely to ever get tracked down by the cops. But a rapidly growing conscience and a growing love for a warrior woman named Beudag will bring him to the decision to stay and help the land-people.

To do this, though, he must convince that second faction of sea-people to alter their plans. That faction has been collecting the corpses of those killed in the ongoing war between the surface dwellers. They have a science that will allow them to re-animate the corpses for a short-time, using them to launch a genocidal attack.

The prose styles of the two authors mesh together smoothly and Bradbury takes the story in a great direction, bringing it to a violent but satisfying conclusion. The plot is full of tension and the setting (especially a sequence set beneath an ocean formed by a strange, breathable radiation rather than water) is often pretty spooky, with the super science in the story effectively working like magic. In fact, the story often feels more like a sword-and-sorcery tale than a Space Opera. That's not a criticism, though, "Lorelei of the Red Mist" works fine just the way it is.

The story has been anthologized a number of times and is also available to read online HERE.