Short Story Genre Survey, Part 2

cover art by Alexander Leydenfrost

Sports

Adventure

Mystery

Horror

Science Fiction

Fantasy

Western

War

Last week, we looked at a Sports story. This week, we jump from the baseball diamond to the planet Vulcan.

No, not that Vulcan. During the 17th to 19th centuries, there was a theory that another planet, tentatively named Vulcan, was orbiting inside the orbit of Mercury. This was to explain some anomalies in Mercury's orbit that Newtonian physics couldn't explain. Eventually, Einstein's relativity theory did explain Mercury's orbit, eliminating the need for Vulcan.

It was only logical.

In her short story "Child of the Sun," Leigh Brackett (who was always making the Solar System more interesting than it is in real life) brought Vulcan back. In the story (published in the Spring 1942 issue of Planet Stories), three people are in a spaceship, fleeing the forces of the tyrant who rules the Solar System.

That tyrant uses a machine to make everyone "Happy"--content with his rule and without any desire to ever improve or advance. Those who refuse to be "Happy" are called the Unregenerates. Most of them are hidden in the outer rim of the system, slowly dying out from the harsh conditions there.

Paul Falken, a leader among the Unregenerates, and two companions are being chased by the tyrant's ships. They pull a dangerous maneuver to escape, skimming past Mercury and coming dangerously close to the sun. There, they stumble across the previously undiscovered planet Vulcan.

They land and explore. They see visions of creatures that could not possibly exist on this airless world. And then they discover a nearly immortal being who was literally born from the sun and who has incredible powers.

Will this child of the sun help them and the other Unregenerates? Or will it prove to be even more dangerous than the tyrant?

This is a great story. Brackett gives us strong characterizations among the three humans, takes the story in some unexpected directions, and creates an alien menace that is truly... well, alien. And she brings the tale to a satisfying resolution. Brackett's stories always gave us a satisfying combination of character, imagination and pure wonder. "Child of the Sun" is a prime example of her extraordinary skill as a storyteller.

Also, as I said, she made the Solar System so much more interesting than it is in real-life. Life on Mars, life on Venus, life on the moons of the outer planets. And now, life birthed in the sun!!! WHY ISN'T OUR SOLAR SYSTEM MORE LIKE THIS?

Click HERE to find the story online.

Venus: The Jungle Planet--Part 2

cover art by Rudolph Belarski

Leigh Brackett's Space Opera version of the Solar System is by far my favorite and she also gave us a Venus covered by tropical jungles and dangerous natives.

It's ironic, though, that the Venus-themed story by her I choose at random involves those jungles in only the most cursury way. Most of the story is set in orbit above the planet's sultry atmosphere.

"Interplanetary Reporter" was published in the May 1941 issue of Startling Stories, edited by future Superman editor Mort Weisinger. The main character is a war correspondent named Chris Barton, who was in the Venusian city of Vhia when war is declared between Venus and Jupiter. 

Vhia is a domed city, protecting the Earth-descended population from the heat and rain of the surrounding jungles. But when a bombardment from space cracks the dome and lets in that heat and rain, it looks like the city is doomed.

Barton himself have been trying to quit his job. Years of covering wars had left him too cynical to believe that what he did had any value other than provide a spectacle for the "boobs." 

Beyond the dome of pearly glass, on the other side of Venus, lay the swamp where he had left his boyish illusions, covering the Leng campaigns. Out beyound the steam canopy of clouds was Mars, where he had stood by a tele-transmitter until it was blown up under him, covering the Martian World War of 2504.

A protagonist who has been lost to cynicism or moral decay only to find himself again during the story is a common theme in Brackett's short stories, but she handles it well pretty much every time.  On this occasion, Barton finds himself with two other people, flying into space in a ship equipped with cameras and transmitters, hoping to get images of the Jovian fleet. One is a daredevil female Venusian/Martian pilot. The other is a terrified fellow reporter. 

But they don't find Jovian ship, but rather a ship painted black to hide it against the background of space while it lobs bombs down on Vhia. The current political situation involving the planets is complicated. Is there another faction involved, intent on seeing that the war between Venus and Jupiter doesn't end in negotiations? Someone who wants the fighting to continue until one side or the other wins?

By the time Barton deduces what is going on, his fellow reporter acts with courage despite his obvious fear and reminds the cynical reporter of the value of idealism. Now all he has to do is survive an orbital dogfight while in an unarmed ship and he can get back to Venus with information that will stop a war.

"Interplanetary Reporter" is a fast-paced and exciting story in which Brackett does some very effective and believable world-building with just a few words. 

Cover Cavalcade

Leigh Brackett's version of the Solar System is infinitely preferable to boring "real life."

Moon Mist on a Planet with No Moon

Venus is, of course, a tropical planet overrun with thick jungle and nigh-impenetrable swamps. That's how its often described in the excellent Sword-and-Planet stories of Leigh Brackett and--by golly--no one should question to will of she who wrote the first draft of The Empire Strikes Back.  Her husband, Edmond Hamilton, also wrote about a Venus like that in his Captain Future novels.

Of course, her Venus and his Venus don't quite match up with one another, nor do they match with Edgar Rice Burroughs' Venus or any of the other Venus' of fiction. So each inhabits their own universe, but still give us swamps, jungles and dinosaurian monsters of various shapes and sizes. They beat our boring Solar System in just about every area. NASA should do something about that.

Brackett's best Venus story--what is also considered one of her best short stories period--is "The Moon That Vanished," published in the October 1948 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories.  Here we meet expatriate American David Heath, who spends most of his time in a drug-induced stupor in a tavern located on the shores of the Sea of Morning Opals. Desperate to bring back a dead lover, he had once tried to sail into an area called the Moonfire--where legends say a person can become a god if he survives the ensuing agony and makes it to the center of the area. David had not gotten past the outskirts and, though he now had the minor ability to manipulate free electrons in the air and form a ghost image of his dead girlfriend, he hadn't achieved godhood.

He gets another chance when a couple of Venusians--a man named Broca and a woman named Alor--kidnap him and force him to sail his own ship back to the Moonfire. By doing this, though, they may have saved--or at least prolonged his life. The priests called the Children of the Moon figure that Heath should die for the blasphemy of entering the Moonfire and, since he hasn't been courteous enough to die on is own, they have decided to help him along.

The two Venusians are also on the priests' hit list, though Broca wants to get to the Moon fire primarily because he wants to become a god and make Alor his woman. Alor isn't necessarily on board with this. In fact, during the long voyage, she falls for David Heath. Broca is very displeased with this.



A reader might be wondering how a planet that has no moon developed a cult revolving around the idea of one. Heath's idea is that there was one once, but it eventually crashed into Venus, forming the area called the Moonfire. Whether the powers said to be available there were granted by the gods or a result of radioactive contamination doesn't really matter in a practical sense--in either case, the results are the same.

The journey itself takes up the bulk of the story, with the priests pursing them in another ship, storms and sea monsters to keep things exciting. When they reach the Moonfire, they do penetrate far enough to find out exactly what the power you get does. In a sense, it does make you a god. But it can also lead to self-destruction. David Heath has to decide whether to embrace that power and gain back an illusion that his lost-love still lives or accept that life goes on and that Alor is living and real and that he loves her now. Of course, there's also the necessity of rescuing Alor from a madman who has embraced godlike powers. But no one ever said love was easy.

That's the sort of Venus we should have. There really ought to be someone to complain to about this sort of thing.

I think in a few weeks, we'll take a look at one of the Sword-and-Planet stories of Brackett's husband Edmond Hamilton--one of my favorite pulp and comic book writers. We'll tag along with him to another solar system rather than make the short hop to Venus, but I expect we'll still have a good time.

Telepathic Undersea Plants

It's Christmas Day, so I'm writing about a Space Opera horror story because.... um, because...


SHUT UP! I just am.


Leigh Brackett's science fiction stories often have horror overtones. I've just read "Terror out of Space" (first published in the Summer 1944 issue of Planet Stories) and it is arguably the best example of this.

Some bizarre life-forms floating around in space have landed--perhaps inadvertently--on Venus. Seemingly intelligent, these creatures can gain control over males, somehow inspiring worship and complete obedience. Often, the men under their control end up dead. The creatures are called the Madness from Beyond or the Vampire Lures or simply the Things. To find a way to fight them, one of them has to be captured alive.

An attempt to bring one in alive results in an aircraft crashing in one of Venus' vast ocean with one human survivor and the Thing loose again. The survivor, named Lundy, must don a vacuum suit, gather up some extra oxygen tanks, and walk across the sea bottom to get to the coast.

Along the way, he encounters an intelligent undersea plant-life living in a ruined city. The species has two sexes, which I'm not sure makes much sense for plants, but by now the story is so engrossing that this is forgivable.  Besides, we aren't given any real details about their physiology, so there's probably any number of ways this can be explained.

The males of the species have been lured away by the escaped Thing and are now in danger of being attacked and killed by another plant species called the Others. What follows is Lundy's attempt to save the males, himself escape from the Others and re-capture the Thing. We learn the Thing's motivation along the way, which just might provide Lundy with a way to survive this whole business.

It's a great story, hitting just the right creepy vibe at the start and leading into a truly exciting sequence at the end when Lundy is trying to escape from the Others. The undersea setting adds to the atmosphere and the plant creatures have a unique vibe to them.  But the horrific elements in the tale do not overshadow the real feeling of humanity that Brackett infuses into her work. We like and care about Lundy and we easily think of him as a real person.

Brackett's protagonists are in the end heroic characters who always understand the difference between right and wrong. As a result, no matter how horrific or bizarre her stories may be, they are never without a sense of hope.

You can read or download "Terror Out of Space" HERE.

"...a tiny creature entombed in the bowels of a planet."

The fourth time Leigh Brackett took us to Mercury was in the novella "Shannach--the Last."  (Published in the November 1952 issue of Planet Stories.) And as that tale begins, we discover that a prospector named

Trevor is having a really bad day.

Trevor has been flitting around Mercury's Twilight area for years in his small ship, hoping to strike it rich by finding at least one sun-stone--a valuable radioactive mineral that exists only on our innermost planet. But his luck has turned bad--a quake "brought down a whole mountain wall on his ship, leaving him with a pocket torch, a handful of food tablets, a canteen of water, and the scant clothing he stood in."

The Twilight area is made up of self-contained valleys surrounded by mountains that climb up over the edge of the thin atmosphere. So climbing out isn't an option. Instead, Trevor finds a cave entrance and blindly hopes to find his way through pitch-dark tunnels.

He's exhausted and dehydrated by the time he does find an exit into another valley, but there's no chance to rest. Because this second valley is inhabited and many of the inhabitants are rather nasty.

The situation is thus: three centuries earlier, a ship crashed in the valley. Most of the surviving passengers were colonists. But a number of them were convicts--at the time, convicts were sent to Mercury to help work the mines. Soon, the convicts (now known as Korins) were enslaving the colonists. The Korins used flying creatures to help track and attack escaped slaves. Both the Korins and the flyers (called "hawks" though they are more reptile than bird) wear sun-stones on their foreheads, which apparently allow the humans to stay in telepathic contact with the hawks.

Trevor falls in with an escaping woman slave and they join a larger band of escapees. But though Trevor sympathizes with the slaves, he simply wants to get his hands on a priceless sun-stone and get away. But his attempt to do this leads to the discovery of an alien creature named Shannach.

And that's all I'm going to tell you--because this is the sort of story that needs to unfold for you while you are reading it, without any spoilers getting in the way. It's available online HERE.

All I can say without ruining it is that Shannach is an imaginative and unique creation--a creature with perhaps a hint of Lovecraftian horror to him that makes him an effective villain and and throws Trevor into very intense battle of wits, willpower and courage. It is, I think, my favorite of the four Mercury stories and one of my favorite Leigh Brackett stories of all.

That finishes up our tour of Mercury as told by Leigh Brackett. Of course, she took us to Venus, Mars and a few of the outer planets as well, so though this is the end of this particular series of posts, there's every chance we'll return to the Brackett Solar System in the future.

"He hated meeting something he couldn't beat."

"Cube from Space" was first published in the August 1942 issue of Super Science Stories. I've read a lot of Leigh Brackett's stories in the past, but this is the first time I've happened to read this particular one.

It has instantly become one of my favorites. The main character is Red--that's the only name he's ever had. Red has had a miserable life. He was born aboard a tramp interplanetary freighter and apparently abandoned immediately. His childhood was spent in what was essentially slavery as he was sold from to different freighters. ("I never set foot on any ground until I was sixteen," he tells us at one point.) He eventually got into smuggling and piracy, working alone because he never met anyone he didn't have good reason to hate.

When the story opens, Red is having a particularly miserable day. He was chased into the Asteroid Belt by patrol ships, crashed, ejected into space and was now drifting towards Jupiter, with his suit running out of air.

But then a very odd-looking space ship drifts by and he enters an airlock. Inside, he discovers the remnants of a race that comes from outside the Solar System.

What follows is a situation that drips with Nightmare Fuel. The aliens--called the Rakshi--number just three hundred. They once enslaved a human race on an alien planet. A human hero--using a sword forged from a unique metal--had destroyed the power source of this ship and sent the surviving aliens drifting aimlessly across light years.

All but ten of the Rakshi were kept alive as disembodied brains. Human slaves provided the biological material needed to constantly replace the bodies of the remaining ten, who operated the ship as best they could. This all happened many thousands of years ago.

Oh, and that human hero that defeated them? He's still aboard the ship as well, kept alive while being chained down for centuries with his sword hanging over him--allowed to live so that he could eternally "meditate on my sins."

The Rakshi pump Red for information and decide that Mercury is the best place to set up shop and get some more human slaves for labor and culture vat materials. They also introduce the possibility of Red working for them--power and money in exchange for being their human agent.

The cube--already in poor shape--crashes upon landing near a human colony in the Twilight era. In the ensuing confusion, Red manages to meet up with some of the colonists. Here's where things become confusing for the criminal. The colonists treat him with compassion, which is something he's never encountered before. Now he's not sure what to do--help the colonists when there's nothing in it for him or go for the power and money.

And is there's anything he can do? The Rakshi move very fast and have these nasty hand weapons that can kill, burn or blind depending on the sadistic whims of the aliens. They soon have most of the humans rounded up. Is there anything the colonists can do to stop them?

It's a well-constructed and truly exciting story, with a creepy and original premise that makes this as much a horror story as a science fiction adventure. It really is one of my favorite in Brackett's canon.

That leaves us with just one Brackett story set on the planet Mercury. I'll get to that one soon.

"You've lost the truth--and you aren't even true to your lie."

Last time we visited Leigh Brackett's Solar System, we landed on the dark side of Mercury. But the talented author returned to Mercury a few more times and, in the story "A World is Born," (Comet magazine, July

1941) she takes us to the Twilight area sandwiched in between the sunlight half of the planet and the dark half.

It's not a pleasant place--the effects blistering heat on one side and absolute cold on the other disrupts the atmosphere, charging it with electricity and causing frequent violent lightning storms.

But all the same, men are on Mercury trying to carve out a colony--working radium mines and growing crops with huge copper cables mounted around them to act as lightning rods.

Most of the men are volunteers, but one of them--Mel Gray--doesn't want to be here. A cynical veteran of the Second Interplanetary War, he's now a prisoner assigned to work on Mercury whether he wants to or not.

Soon, he's planning an escape. But that turns out to be a set-up. Gray was actually sent to Mars by a prison official in hopes that he'd escape. The official will then use that as a scandal to close down the nascent colony and grab the mineral rights for himself.

Gray soon realizes this, but he doesn't care. He long ago realized that he had all he could handle in looking out for himself. He doesn't care for anyone else.


Or so he tells himself. He grabs the lovely Jill Moulton as a hostage during his escape, but then he discovers the official behind the plot has no intention of letting him live afterwards. He further discovers that he hasn't sunk low enough to risk a woman's life.

His combined effort to get Jill to safety AND still get away results in a great action sequence. He and Jill end up in a series of mine tunnels while a storm rages outside. They are pursued by a group of assassins on one side and some of the local workers on the other. And--though they don't know it yet--there are some non-human and

very bizarre life forms down in those tunnels with them...

This is a great story. Brackett had a talent for creating alien environments, then describing them to us succinctly yet vividly. This is combined with some solid characterizations; Mel Gray's discovery that he still has moral standards is part of a very common trope, but it's handled well and generates some honest emotion. Jill acts with intelligence and courage, making her more than just a standard damsel in distress.

This is the second of the four Mercury stories we'll be looking at. So far, our innermost planet sounds like a pretty unpleasant place, does it? Well, if you live in a Solar System full of Adventure Planets, then you need to accept the consequences.

Visit Mercury and Go Insane!

When we visited Leigh Brackett's version of the Solar System a month or so ago, we spent some time in the swamps of Venus and aboard a space ship populated by space gypsies. But just about every planet in Brackett's Solar System is a source of adventure.

"Demons of Darkside," first published in the January 1941 issue of Startling Stories, takes us to Mercury. And Mercury is a planet that is quite likely to kill you--if it doesn't drive you insane first.

But Barry Garth has to go there. He's wanted for murder and the woman he loves is about to be executed for that same murder. There is just one person who has the information that can prove their innocence. But this person is probably the murderer. Also, the guy's space yacht just crashed on the dark side of Mercury.

No one has ever come back alive from Darkside. Or so everyone thinks. When Barry steals a salvage ship in a desperate attempt to find the wrecked yacht, he learns that at least one person has returned from Darkside alive. But that person left his sanity behind and now stays perpetually drunk while screaming sentences such as ""Ye thought ye had me once, ye black demons of hell, but I cheated ye!"

Barry has no choice,though--either he finds the wrecked yacht along with evidence to clear himself and his girl, or the poor girl will be executed.  Besides, all that talk of demons must just be the ravings of a madman.

Barry reaches the Darkside, only to discover that the "demons" are indeed real.

"Demons of Darkside" is a nifty little horror story--steadily building up tension and making Barry's encounter with the "demons" a truly creepy experience. The eventual payoff--involving the identity of the demons and the resolution of Barry's plight--is effective and satisfying.

This is one of four stories set in Brackett's Solar System that take place (in whole or in part) on Mercury. We'll be taking a look at the remaining three over the course of the next few months.

Space Gypsies

Gee whiz, but our real-life solar system is BORING!

 Okay, it's really not--it is, in fact, often quite fascinating and efforts to explore it (the Cassini probe around Saturn; the Mars Rover crawling about the Red Planet, etc) send back a myriad of beautiful images to continually awe us.

Venus in real life. Not a swamp or a dinosaur to be found. Sigh.

But there's a part of me that's always a little disappointed with all that. We recently looked at the Mars and Venus novels of Otis Aldelbert Kline, which presented those planets were inhabitable, full of savage people, strange aliens and hungry monsters.  Edgar Rice Burroughs did the same thing with those two planets and threw in a race of skeleton people from Jupiter as well.

Now THAT'S the Solar System I want. After all, the Solar System is a big place. We can fit in a few alien races and a horde of monsters and still have plenty of room left over for us puny humans, can't we?

The science fiction pulps gave us many different versions of that Solar System. Many of these appeared in Planet Stories, a pulp magazine that holds a very special place in my heart.

Hard science fiction (another genre I love) was also birthed in the pulps. John Campbell, editor of Astounding Science Fiction, demanded scientific verisimilitude from his writers, mentoring guys like Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. To quote a brilliant writer (well, me actually), accurate science in SF:

"...was an important part of the maturation of the genre, and many SF stories require this sort of accuracy to work dramatically. But over in the pages of Planet Stories, readers were being reminded that hard science wasn't as important as good writing and real human emotions... In Planet Stories, it didn't matter if it was possible. It just has to seem real to the reader." (Storytelling in the Pulps, Comics and Radio, pg. 76)

A writer who really understood that--and who gave us perhaps the most extensive and detailed "history" of a life-filled Solar System--was Leigh Brackett (the wife of Edmund Hamilton, another of my favorite pulp SF writers.)

Between 1940 and 1964, Brackett wrote at least 35 stories set within a version of our Solar System in which Mercury, Venus, Mars and several moons orbiting Jupiter or Saturn were all at least partially habitable. Many of these worlds were the homes of several intelligent races--some human and others more alien. It's a dangerous place to live, but in terms of providing a platform for great adventure stories, it scores a 9.8 on the Karloff/Bogart Coolness Scale.

The March 1943 issue of Planet Stories gave us "The Citadel of Lost Ships" (available online HERE). The main character is a human hijacker named Roy Campbell, a criminal successful enough to be one of the most wanted men in the system.

When the story opens, he's in the swamps of Venus, hiding out with a race called the Kraylens. These are a people who once befriended him and saved his life. But now its the Kraylens who are in trouble. Valuable minerals have been discovered on their land and they are going to be forcibly displaced by the industrialized forces of the Terra-Venusian Coalition Government.

Well, Campbell might be able to help them. He knows there's a rather odd ship near Venus at the moment--a large ship that's actually made up of scrap and the hulks of older ships. These are the Romany--the various alien races who have also been displaced by the advance of civilization. Now they wander about the system, trading for the materials they need to survive.

Maybe the Romany can also take in the Kraylens. But when Campbell tries to arrange this, he walks right into the middle of a civil war aboard the Romany ship. Determined to still help the only people who ever helped him, Campbell takes on the responsibility of helping one side win the war so that the Romany ship can retain its freedom. He also needs to spring the Kraylens from a detention camp while he's at it. Helping him out are a female human rebel, a Martian with a hook-hand, and two Outer Planet natives with unusual psionic abilities.

He might be able to pull this off, but how much of his own freedom is he willing to lose in order to succeed?

It's a great story, full of action, plot twists and strong characterizations.

And, darn it, why ISN'T the real solar system more like that? Space gypsies, man--SPACE GYPSIES. There's really no excuse for us not having a band of space gypsies plying the vacuum between our planets, is there?

Well, obviously between Kline's novels and this, I'm geeking out on Sword-and-Planet stories right now--which means I must force the rest of you to suffer for it.

The stories Brackett wrote set in her Solar System were not written with any particular chronological order in mind and there's no established time line for them. So I'm going to pick out a few stories based on location rather than time frames. We will be taking a look at the four stories Brackett wrote set on Mercury--picking these particular tales pretty much because I recently bought an ebook which collects them. Because of the lack of an internal chronology, I won't make it part of the "In Order" series. Instead, it'll be a occasional series also appearing on Thursdays, much like the series on certain Robert E. Howard stories I did over the last year. So keep your sword and your ray gun handy. You'll be needing them.