Fantastic Metropolis

Burroughs could sometimes rise to her romantic vision but his heroes were fundamentally country (occasionally arboreal) gents, while Leigh’s, wherever their actual adventures took place, were fundamentally urban rough diamonds. The tended to bring metropolitan experience and values to the frontier. It was Ed Hamilton who described the likes of The Continental Op not as detective stories but as urban adventure stories and Leigh approved of that description. She took as much from the likes of James M. Cain, who came from Maryland to use the sharp street language of Southern California as his inspiration, as she took from Burroughs. She antedated cyberpunk by some fifty years, by bringing the spare, laconic prose and psychically wounded heroes of Hemingway, Hammett and Chandler into the sf pulp, rather as Max Brand (especially as Evan Evans) had brought it to the Western. It was why she could move so easily between private eyes with a nasty past, star-weary spacers and moody cactus-cussers. And, of course, her lone outlaws, living on the edge of the civilised world, frequently commissioned to dare the unknown, are not a million miles from Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, whose thin-lipped, steely-eyed and somewhat laconic progeny still turn up regularly in, for instance, the films of Clint Eastwood. Eastwood, in his hey-day, would have made a great Eric John Stark and could probably still pull it off, if The Unforgiven is anything to go by.

Echoes of Leigh can be heard in Delany, Zelazny and that whole school of writers who expanded sf’s limits and left us with some fine visionary extravaganzas. She’s there, for instance, in the influential Jack Vance, whose Dying Earth so inspired M. John Harrison’s Viriconium. There used to be some sort of minor dispute about whether Jack Vance or I first described a culture of humans interacting with dragons. Jack wrote the best one, The Dragon Masters (he’s also a better banjoist than me). But it turns out that neither of us did it first. Check out The Dragon-Queen of Jupiter. There’s no doubt about it. Leigh didn’t just do it earlier, she has a whole bunch of albinoes in there, too. Along with Anthony Skene (whose Zenith the Albino, 1935, is soon to be republished by Savoy, UK) she should really be collecting the Elric royalties…

Others who have acknowledged her influence include Harlan Ellison, Philip Jose Farmer, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Andre Norton, Gene Wolf, Tanith Lee, Karl Edward Wagner… The list goes on and on. Even Edmond Hamilton liked to say how marrying Leigh had definitely improved his work. With Catherine Moore, Judith Merril and Cele Goldsmith, Leigh Brackett is one of the true godmothers of the New Wave. Anyone who thinks they’re pinching one of my ideas is probably pinching one of hers.

Leigh wasn’t much of a plotter in those early days, as you can see here. In fact she seemed happy to produce pretty much the same plot, through her first couple of publishing years. Neither, strangely, did she have much talent for making up alien names, which is why half the Celtic pantheon appear with changed sex, character and physical shape, along with echoes of more current places and names. If Barrakesh (an ancient Martian city) is what it’s called by a Moroccan with a cold, I was also deeply confused by Rhiannon turning out to be a bloke in Leigh’s superb Sword of Rhiannon, which first saw bookform as an Ace Double, backing the first paperback appearance of Conan the Conqueror. What a bargain for twenty five cents! Titles, too, could be a bit confusing. Leigh probably never expected many of these stories to see print in any other form, so she tended to produce similar-sounding titles for totally different stories. Citadel of Lost Ages, The Last Days of Shandakar, The Lake of the Gone Forever, Shannach—The Last. So many hold a note of loss or finality about them, especially when describing the Mars of Eric John Stark, the Mars that has been millions of years in its dying, that Mars to which, on occasion, he can return, to cultures old when Earth was still ruled by the dinosaurs. It’s a mood which goes directly back to the Gothics whose doomed anti-heroes challenged the very nature of existence and were only rarely victorious. But, again, it is distinctly American, echoing the sense of vanishing worlds found in novels like The Last of The Mohicans or The Vanishing American. In her Martian stories, however, she mourned past complexity quite as thoroughly as she mourned passing simplicities. Her nostalgic vision of a redeemed America, in which the Amish are the only society to survive successfully, was published as The Long Tomorrow, one of the best faux-dystopias I’ve read.