Leigh
Brackett’s Future History - Connecting the Stories: An Examination
Blue Tyson
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2010 Blue Tyson
It
is well known that Leigh
Brackett
has a group of stories that share a common setting, and that those
are based on the planets of the Solar
System,
primarily on Venus
and Mars.
However, there is much other SF included in 50+ short
stories and ten novels.
I thought it might be interesting to
see what work might coherently fit in one Future History, even if it
was never explicitly stated. I haven't seen anything written talking
about the interstellar and other stories in general, whereas there
are good articles at Wikipedia about the planetary romance era.
Very few dates are given in Brackett stories, so this is an
attempt at division into rough periods, in order. There is no mention
of medical technology or lifespans given for humans, either, at least
insofar as they may differ from the known range of readers of the
times.
ELIMINATION
OF WORK
Firstly, there are definitely a small number of works that
definitely do not. The novel The Long Tomorrow and its on-Earth
postapocalyptic lost technology religious setting definitely does
not.
Secondly, the short story The Tweener has a soldier
return from a Mars that is empty apart from some small rabbit-like
native animals, that are actually discovered to be sentient. This is
not relevant.
Thirdly, The Citadel of Lost Ages is set on a
future earth that astronomical calamity has caused to have a Darkside
and a Lightside, like Mercury. There is no evidence of such directly
in any work. It is in fact somewhat Planet of the Apes-like, Darkside
notwithstanding, with hybrid beastmen running the planet, and humans
as slaves. An outsider enters with forgotten knowledge, a trove of
past human technology including atomic power. Nothing is mentioned of
spacefaring or starship technology. Therefore it is extremely
unlikely this story is relevant.
Fourthly, her last story,
'Mommies and Daddies' has a near future Earth dystopia ravaged by a
drug destroyed populace and their abandoned children. Or at least the
American part of this world is. This certainly does not fit with the
rest of the Future History. Given these multiple bad times on Earth
stories all do not seem to fit at all, it is presumably deliberate on
her part.
Fifthly, Runaway is obviously out thematically with
its investigation of the psychological destabilisation of an
accountant. Content makes this certain: "He knew that Venus was
important because it produced very large amounts of uranium, thorium,
germanium, and a lot of other things that Earth was using up too
fast. And that was all he knew, except that people had to live there
under domes, and that it never rained."
It appears that
she did indeed intend them to share a common history and setting.
CREATIVE
MYTHOGRAPHY
If you want to believe in this exercise, the greatest problem
is the lack of explicit reference to the interstellar travel at the
same time that there is intense focus on the local Solar System, so
you have to get past that in a handwaving manner. Brackett of course
was American, so you could perhaps assume that the Solar System
chroniclers have the same intense inward looking focus that Americans
do. The colonisation does have an American flavour. That is, making
the happenings around other stars analogous to international affairs
as far as interest goes for the average denizen of either at the
time. There may also be author notes or mostly forgotten
conversations that render this particular exercise moot, but these
are unlikely to ever come to light to trouble us, given the passing
of multiple decades already. Spaceports are mentioned often, without
detailing the types of ships they serve. Certainly starships are
given names like Stellar and Starflight.
ONE
MILLION YEARS BC
Some background is given of Martian ancient history:
There
is a reference to the Quiru living a million years ago or so, which
sounds like an extremely rough ballpark figure. Rhiannon was a Quiru,
see The Sword of Rhiannon. "The Quiru, said the myths, had for
that sin crushed Rhiannon and locked him into a hidden tomb. And for
more than a million years men had hunted the Tomb of Rhiannon because
they believed it held the secrets of Rhiannon's power."
ANCIENT
SEA-KINGS AND OTHER WEIRD TALES
1) Mars
Much later, on a far wetter Mars the Dhuvians
ruled an empire as seen in Sea-Kings of Mars. As told to Matt
Carse:""You know at least that since long ago there have
been human peoples on our world and also the not-quite-human peoples,
the Halflings. Of the humans the great Quiru, who are gone, were the
greatest. They had so much science and wisdom that they're still
revered as superhuman.
"But there were also the
Halflings-the races who are manlike but not descended of the same
blood. The Swimmers, who sprang from the sea-creatures, and the Sky
Folk, who came from the winged things-and the Dhuvians, who are from
the serpent.""
An alien race with advanced
technology was also living in the City of Shandakor, as per The Last
Days of Shandakor. While not a million years in the past, tens of
thousands of years it would have taken Mars to dry out.
Also
The Thinkers, as mentioned in Shadow Over Mars also likely also were
around tens of thousands of years in the past: "But these
Thinkers have done a lot of good from time to time."
Mak
nodded. "Sure. Theoretically at least they guide the viewpoint
of Mars-when they feel like bothering. It has to be some big
important split, like the inter-hemispheric war back in Sixty-two
Thousand and Seven, when the Sea Kings had trouble."
As
did the Prira Cen: "Ancient things. Things deeply buried, nearly
forgotten, clouded by superstition and legend. Forty thousand years—"
from The Sorcer of Rhiannon.
The serially immortal Ramas had
also existed since long in the past as talked about in Queen of the
Martian Catacombs/The Secret of Sinharat. The Rama Berild talks of
just one relationship:"'Delgaun has had me for a thousand years,
and I am weary of him. So very weary!'" Given they are the last
of their people, they must have existed a lot further back in the
past.
2) Earth
Brackett appears to have liked Robert
E. Howard
and Abraham
Merritt.
As far as Howard goes, from The Jewel Of Bas: "He gave them a
lament, one of the wild dark things the Cimmerians sing at the bier
of a chief and very appropriate to the occasion" and "The
priests of Dagon, of all the temples of Atlantis, spoke against me. I
had to run away. I roamed the whole earth before the Flood, carrying
the Stone."
Her husband of course was a writer for Weird
Tales,
so these are likely a small nod towards a favored writer. A further
nod to the Weird Tales boys: "Ciaran, because he was a gypsy and
a thief and had music in him like a drunkard has wine, had heard it,
deep in the black forests of Hyperborea where even gypsies seldom
go." The Jewel Of Bas is itself set on a hidden world in the
Solar System.
Lord of the Earthquake is an Abraham Merritt
style adventure where two men enter a portal that takes them back
twelve thousand years in the past to Ancient Mu. So a tribute by
story type, with Brackett of course injecting one of her favored
hardboiled misfit-types in the character of Coh Langham. There may
even ben a Doyle influence : "I devoured Burroughs,
Haggard,
Balmer and Wylie, Doyle's
unforgettable "Maracot
Deep,"
with this exploration of the deep in a submarine. The same applying
to 'Out Of the Sea', with its attack on the USA by human created sea
monsters.
The horror story The Tapestry Gate also has an
otherworldly portal contained therein, but is utilised in an horrific
vein, as opposed to fantasy adventure.
So Brackett has linked
Mu, Atlantis, Cimmeria, Hyperborea and Lovecraftian Elder Gods in to
the ancient background of her work.
3) Venus
There
were no advanced technological or even literate cultures on Venus, so
any history as yet known is limited to fragmented oral traditions,
divulged grudgingly, if remembered at all, such as those of the Moon
Cult.
4) Mercury
A much harsher place than Venus,
aliens such as Shannach, long-lived, may have been there in the past,
but not literate natives, so nothing is known.
RIO
BRAVOS
There is no reason, in a creative mythography sense, that the
adventures of sheriff John T. Chance in protecting his town along
with his friends cannot be included here, or even James Beckwourth's
frontier work. There is actually no direct mention of the historical
19th century at all that I am aware of in her stories other than
these.
L.A.
CONFIDENTIAL
As goes the Wild West, the same for the mean streets of 1940s
USA and the crooks, cops, dicks, dames and other unfortunates in the
following: No Good from a Corpse, Stranger At Home, Murder Is Bigamy,
Red-Headed Poison, Murder in the Family Design for Dying, I Feel Bad
Killing You, No Star Is Lost and The Misfortune Teller or even the
late fifties in The Tiger Among Us, An Eye For an Eye, and So Pale,
So Cold, So Fair. The sixties are represented by Silent Partner and
The True Death of Juanito Rodriguez.
THEY
WALK AMONG US
The 1950s saw aliens with starfaring capability come into
contact with humans who discovered what they were, but only in
isolated incidents. Wisely, they appeared to have kept away from the
big cities. Possibly due to the prevalence of too many smart
investigators in places like Los Angeles that may have discovered
them eventually and blown the whistle.
In 1950, a local
Newhale reporter discovers the Hrylliannu using the area to bring
people to Earth in The Queer Ones. In fact, there is even a hybrid
child produced, but they cover their tracks well. This year also saw
a Pennsylvania farmer and his children encounter joyriding alien
children in The Truants. Parents from both worlds were happy for
no-one to know about this.
Cornwall in 1952 sees earthman
Michael Trehearne discover he is of Varddan extraction in The Starmen
Of Lyrdis. As such he possesses the mutant gene to allow him to
survive their particularly exacting form of interstellar travel, over
which they have a monopoly. As we see here, and with later human
ingenuity on display, the Varddans are far from the only people with
interstellar travel technology, so they rapidly become of little
interest, barely a curiosity. Those that require genetic quirks to
survive space travel are not going to be able to compete with the
crews of ships that do not, by sheer weight of numbers.
THE
COMING OF THE TERRANS
A detailed examination of the colonisation era of the Inner
Worlds is beyond the scope of this article (see the Wikipedia
articles), but the collection above does give some dates:
There
were conflicts and uprisings on Mars that were pro-native. The
Martians were more technologically advanced and capable than the
native Venusians, so did not suffer the same wars and brutal
colonialist programs of slaughter and military action.
1998
The Beast-Jewel of Mars
2016 Mars Minus Bisha
2024 The Last
Days of Shandakor
2031 Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon
2038
The Road to Sinharat
Queen of the Martian Catacombs would
happen around these times as mention is made of the Shanga trade in
that story: "Stark realized now what secret vice Kala sold here.
Shanga – the going back – the radiation that caused temporary
artificial atavism and let men wallow for a time in beasthood. It was
supposed to have been stamped out when the Lady Fand's dark Shanga
ring had been destroyed. But it still persisted, in places like this
outside the law." So the later Stark stories Black Amazon of
Mars and Enchantress of Venus should all be in this range, them or
their expanded versions.
In Cube From Space, there is an
encounter with representatives of two interstellar capable alien
races:"I am Crom. I was king once, in a land called Yf. And they
are the Rakshi. The time came when we had to fight them, we humans,
because we couldn't take any more."
THE
BIG JUMP OUTWARDS
Things changed considerably when the Cochrane Company make
the breakthrough to discover a method of fast interstellar travel
thanks to their engineer Ballantyne and his drive (The Big Jump). The
failure of Barnard II as a colony and exploitation site because of
the Transurane was never going to deter further exploration. Nor was
the fact that prototypes will have problems. "... whole
robot-shift for the drive had bugs in it. The relays won't take the
load. Rip it out and rebuild it ..." Even though the Cochranes
may lost the taste for it, others would not.
PLANETARY
SURVEY
The Preliminary Planetary Survey revisits Barnard II in How
Bright the Stars: "It was a hellish world to be wandering on,
this second planet of Barnard's Star."... "Man had finally
made the Big Jump outward, with the Wenz-Boroda FTL
(faster-than-light) drive, and the exploration of the galaxy had
begun." The more stable starship propulsion technology had made
this possible. Men could also live on Barnard II if they wanted to,
but as Jerry Baird discovers, it is still pointless. The galaxy is a
hostile environment, in general, but has countless other stars to
explore.
Here man has been concentrating on nearby reachable
neighbourhood stars, such as Altair
in The Woman From Altair. One of the spacemen here actually brings
back a wife from one of the Altairan planets, to tragic consequences.
GALACTIC
SURVEY
So succesful has man been at least with the ability to
explore, if not the usefulness of end targets even getting to stars
and planets without name so many have been visited. The Galactic
Survey era shows the technology has been developed to enable ships to
push past the nearby sites such as Barnard's Star, Proxima and Alpha
Centauri, etc.
During The Shadows tired and disillusioned
Exploration Team leader Barrier finds the remnants of a race
destroyed by astrological catastrophe, and their faithful doglike
servants. "Maybe there enough worth in us that here and there
some little world will give us another chance. Anyway, it's nice to
know there's one place where we have some friends.""
An
explicit reference to a far away settlement is givein in Come Sing
the Moons of Moravenn. The planet in this story has a topaz colored
star in the vicinity of the Vela Spur, which could mean it is up to
thousands of light years away.
However, things do change, as
should have pleased Barrier greatly. There is a Galactic Union out
there, and races involved in this organisation do come into contact
with Earth and the Solar System. In fact, in All the Colors of the
Rainbow Mintakan weather engineers on Earth have a violent encounteer
with nowheresville USA racist rednecks. As the engineer Flin notes:
"It was his first big job on his own responsibility, with no
superior closer than Galactic Center, which was a long way off."
Racism has always been in existence in the Solar System, but such
recidivism again is not going to deter the benefits of expansion and
exploration.
Sometimes though, it takes some special people
becoming involved to sort some planets out. To whit, Simon Ashton and
Eric John Stark in The Ginger Star: " A newly discovered, newly
opened world called Skaith that hardly anyone had ever heard of,
except at Galactic Center. Skaith was not a member of the Union but
there had been a consulate. Someone had called to the Union for help,
and Ashton was the man who went to see about it."
Stark
leaves from Pax to head for Skaith. In Last Call From Sector 9G we
find operatives at Galactic Center: "The city was beautiful. Its
official name was Galactic Center, but it was called The Hub because
that is what it was, the hub and focus of a galaxy. It was the
biggest city in the Milky Way. It covered almost the entire land area
of the third planet of a Type G star that someone with a sense of
humor had christened Pax. The planet was chosen originally because it
was centrally located and had no inhabitants, and because it was
within the limits of tolerance for the humanoid races." ... "He
was remembering how he had seen it when he was fresh from Earth, for
the first time—the supreme capital, beside which the world capitals
were only toy cities, the heart and center of the galaxy where the
decisions were made and the great men came and went."
Note
that in All the Colors of the rainbow there are Mintakan engineers
working on Earth. In Last Call From Sector 9G: "BAYA sat on the
bed and watched him pack. She was from one of the worlds of Mintaka,
and as humanoid as they came".
The Galactic Center and
Pax and the Federation of Worlds would appear to be the same. In fact
this hard to find until New Year's eve gives the greatest detail on
the interstellar setting of any of the work, so is important from
that point of view.
INTERPLANETARY
WARS
Even though expansion can take off some of the population
pressure, resources are still an issue, and wars still happen. Mars
is particularly water-poor when looking to rapidly increase
population by colonisation.
While not a war, Water Pirate is
certainly about resources. "It was early in 2418 that the Solar
System realized that there was a Water Pirate. The great tanker
ships, carrying water to the rich dry-world mines and colonies, began
to vanish from the space-lanes, with their convoys. The
Trans-Galactic Convoy Fleet, which for two hundred years had kept the
space-ways safe, was suddenly helpless."
The Earth-Venus
War saw Mars neutral in No Man's Land In Space, and Mars also fought
against the Jovians with Earth and Venus as seen in Outpost On Io.
Mars fought a World War in 2504, then became embroiled in an
Interplanetary conflict later in the 26th century and tried a
disguised sneak attack on Venus, which was foiled in Interplanetary
Reporter.
In A World Is Born: "who had conceived this
plan of building a new world for the destitute and desperate veterans
of the Second Interplanetary War". It is not clear if this is
meant to refer to one of the past wars, as a well understood by
veterans term, or a completely new conflict. It is possible that the
Second Interplanetary War meant is referenced in Thralls Of the
Endless Night, with a documentary discovery: "Treaty of Alliance
between the Sovereign Earth and the Union of Jovian Moons, providing
for Earthly colonization and development of the said Moons, and
mutual aid against Aggressor Worlds.
A single sheet fell out of
the bundle. "...have taken the precaution of Halm, the treaty
secretly in a ship of colonists, in care of the captain who knows
nothing of its nature. It has been rumored that our mutual enemy, the
Martio-Venusian Alliance, may try to intercept it, possibly with the
aid of hired pirates. This would, as you know, mean war. It is my
prayer that the treaty will safely..."
STABILIZATION
AND DESPERATION
Alpha Centauri or Die shows a Solar System government either
disillusioned with interstellar travel, or perhaps having more
jackboot clad reasons. They do not want the people to have the
freedom to travel and communicate in an uncontrolled fashion. This is
explained by the bitter would be escapees: "But damn them all
eternally, even so. Because of them all the Stabilization Acts had
passed. Trade Stabilization. Population Stabilization. Crop
Stabilization. The busy minds of the experts working. Take the manned
ships out of space and there can't be any trade wars or any other
kinds of wars. The worlds can't get at each other to fight. Stop
expansion outward to the stars and eliminate the risks, the economic
upsets that attend every major change, the unpredictable rise and
shift of power. Stabilize. Regulate. Control. We may lose a few
unimportant liberties but think what well gain. Security for all, and
for all time to come! And the dark ships of the Government will keep
you safe.
...
The populations of the Solar System had been
carefully figured to the last decimal point and portioned out among
the planets according to food- and employment-potential, so that
nowhere was there a scarcity or an overplus, and nobody's individual
whim was allowed to upset the balance. If you wanted to change your
residence from one sector or one world to another, the red tape
involved was so enormous that men had been known to die of old age
while waiting for a permit."
If this sort of control is
extended and expanded, then the consequences could easily appear in
'Retreat To The Stars'. The 40th century shows a more extreme
Soviet-like political structure in the Tri-State, compared to the
more extreme right-wing colonialism or American style capitalistic
expansion of earlier times. In Retreat To the Stars there are a few
rebels on an asteroid base still resisting state control. They are
desperately building a starship to escape. The implication here is
that starfaring technology is government controlled.
With a
Future History of many centuries, cycles of political ideologies and
experiments would not be at all surprising. Few dates are given in
Brackett stories, so the Alpha Centauri or Die/Ark of Mars situations
could have been followed by relaxing restrictions and great
expansionism again, cycling around again until the 40th century.
For example, A Peace and Happiness doctrine backed up by
actual brainwashing technology saw President Hilton rule the
Federation of Worlds in Child Of the Sun. 'There was no way out
ahead, either. Mercury was there, harsh and bitter in the naked blaze
of the sun. The ships of Gantry Hilton, President of the Federation
of Worlds, inventor of the Psycho-Adjuster, and ruler of men's souls,
were herding him down to a landing at the lonely Spaceguard outpost."
The Unregenerate rebels have almost lost completely and are also
looking for a place to flee. "Unregeneracy was almost dead in
the inhabited worlds." Falken and Moore do so, and find an
immensely powerful stellar energy being using a small world as a
plaything, and hope to use him to help them survive Hiltonist
oppression.
Two thousand years between The Coming of the
Terrans and Retreat To the Stars leaves a lot of time for things to
change and plenty of chronological slots for the above to fit in.
On analysing the stories in this way, it does appear there is
good evidence to include most of them in a coherent Future History.
REFERENCES
The Coming of the Terrans - Leigh Brackett
The Halfling and Other Stories - Leigh Brackett
The Eric John Stark Saga - Leigh Brackett
The Solar System - Leigh Brackett
Martian Quest: The Early Brackett - Leigh Brackett
Lorelei Of the Red Mist: Planetary Romances - Leigh Brackett
Leigh Brackett Summary Bibliography
Mars in the Fiction of Leigh Brackett
Venus in the Fiction of Leigh Brackett
Mercury in the Fiction of Leigh Brackett
Jupiter in the Fiction of Leigh Brackett
Blog : http://leighbrackett.blogspot.com
Blog : http://spaceoperareader.blogspot.com
Twitter : http://www.twitter.com/bluetyson
Facebook : http://www.facebook.com/BlueTyson