Fantastic Metropolis

Few people of later generations than mine know how influential Leigh Brackett has been on the field of science fiction and fantasy. If you’ve read the odd piece by me or by Ray Bradbury, for instance, you’ll know that we admired her, loved her, learned from her and were encouraged by her, but you might not know that E.C. Tubb’s excellent long-running Dumarest of Terra series, which has been appearing for almost half-a-century, was originally written in conscious and acknowledged imitation of Brackett’s much-admired Eric John Stark stories. I heard her Stark stories quoted long before I actually read them, just as, while hitch-hiking through Germany a few years later, I had Borges retailed to me by a Spanish-reading Swede before Borges ever appeared in English. Ted Tubb could quote chunks of Brackett from memory and invent a fair version of his own on the spot! He wasn’t the only one. I remember sessions with him and some of the other UK sf writers of the 50s, including Ken Bulmer and John Brunner, in which her work was the sole subject of enthusiastic conversation and where we vied with one another to capture that typical, intoxicating style in extemporary round-robins, which is what writers used to do at sf conventions before they started becoming stars. Someone always had a typewriter and you took turns on it. Tubb was brilliant at this. 17-year-old John Brunner’s second novel The Wanton of Argus didn’t come out of nowhere and a strong streak of Brackett ran through all his best early space operas and science fantasies which, with books like Stand on Zanzibar and Shockwave Rider, are now regarded as his best, most vital work.

But, of course, Leigh was also influential in Hollywood. Her contribution to Star Wars wasn’t limited to the script she did for The Empire Strikes Back. When I saw the first Star Wars movie I was disappointed. I had expected something as good as Brackett. What I got was a dilute of Brackett and the Brackett style. Han Solo’s origins lie, it seems to me, in those tough, semi-piratical spacers who took the interplanetary work nobody else would do. I suspect they all looked a bit like Bogart in Leigh’s mind! Which says something for Bogart, I’d say, since Leigh got to know him when she was working with Faulkner on the The Big Sleep. She and Bogie enjoyed each other’s company. They were the same kind of tough-talking romantics. Her spacegoing heroes were not a million miles away from the seagoing Bogart of Key Largo.

I don’t remember her talking about John Wayne much, though she shared his politics more than she did mine. I’d imagine his off-screen antics and language didn’t make him an ideal model, especially when she had known Douglas Fairbanks, for whom she and I shared an undying admiration, though Fairbanks’s wonderful on-screen joie-de-vivre wasn’t something many of our own characters displayed. She tended to prefer people who ran gin joints in Moroccan ports and sacrificed their own happiness for the woman they loved. It was definitely part of her appeal to me when I discovered that there was a kind of sf I did like and it was only rarely found in Astounding—while you found a lot of it in Planet Stories and Startling Stories. Not, as this collection of her earliest work shows so well, that she couldn’t deliver a nifty scientific idea or two when she wanted to. What I found interesting about these stories, many of which I first read in the pulps, was how many of them were actually science fiction rather than the science fantasy with which I mostly identify her. She came up with curious, engaging scientific notions, along with some very sexy warrior queens, hard-bitten interstellar dames, and quite a few attractive, god-like or boy-like super-villains.

It’s readily arguable that without her you would not have got anything like the same New Wave, which changed generic sf so radically from a fundamentally mechanistic realism to a fundamentally humanist romanticism in the 60s and 70s. In a sense 2001 was the magnificent epitaph for that kind of sf. J.G.Ballard, our master of laconic, poetic imagery, much admired in the literary world and almost as influential upon it as Philip K. Dick, came to the field out of an enthusiasm for Ray Bradbury, as did many British imaginative writers. It’s commonly known, because Ray has said so, that Ray Bradbury’s Mars, like Ballard’s Vermillion Sands, is not a million miles from Brackett’s Mars. And before the whole world realised how good he was, Bradbury regularly appeared in the same pulps. Leigh would have credited Edgar Rice Burroughs for everything, but Burroughs lacked her poetic vision, her specific, characteristic talent and in my view her finest Martian adventure stories remain superior to all others.

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.

Most of Leigh’s characters definitely had complex skeletons in their closets. Sometimes you even found out a bit about them. Sometimes you didn’t. I think it depended how the story went, for she wrote with few notes, flying by the seat of her pants but usually bringing the ship in to some kind of reasonable landing. She had great instincts and she learned to trust them. Like Howard’s, Leigh’s characters didn’t vary much. Usually the central character was a star-weary spacer down on his luck, good-looking in a battered kind of way, something eating his heart or conscience he’d rather forget, a past he’s not proud of, ready to take the jobs and the women nobody else would or could handle. In her hands the form grew more sophisticated, but the Leigh Brackett of The Big Sleep was pretty much the same as the Leigh Brackett who wrote The Long Goodbye many years later (including one of my favourite lines from the villain, after bottling his girl-friend’s face, to Marlowe “Her, I love. You—I don’t even like.”). It was the same Brackett who wrote Martian Quest and her last story, a collaboration with Ed Hamilton, Stark and the Star Kings, which has yet to appear. Her characters were complex by suggestion only, yet they are almost always believable. Because what she could do was create an ambience. She might have raised a suspicious eyebrow at my French, but it produced a bloody good frisson, that ambience. And it was that atmosphere you inhaled as hard as you could, just as you would with Bradbury and Ballard. Who cared about the plot mechanics? Brackett’s atmosphere made you high and wanting more of it. You soon discovered indeed that Brackett was extremely addictive. You started searching the second hand bookstores for those old pulps containing unreprinted work (much now at last reprinted here). You developed a Stark habit. You didn’t care that you had a fair guess the hero would get neither the girl nor the gold but redeem his honour instead. Her plots improved in quality but most of the time remained variations on her favourite theme—the man with only his life to lose is offered a dangerous job he can’t refuse. It’s there in Martian Quest. In her most famous collaboration with Ray Bradbury, Lorelei of the Red Mist. She had almost a mother’s pride in Ray and was tickled when that story, which had appeared in the magazine with her byline as the most prominent, was reprinted in book form with Ray’s name in the largest type. She had a generous affection for Ray. She celebrated his success. I feel that I, too, in some ways, was one of Leigh’s boys. She had a way of making you feel very proud of yourself. She had a kind of integrity you don’t seem to run across as much as you did. And she had a strong sympathy for the underdog. Especially the one who makes it back from the bottom. She showed that sympathy in Rio Bravo. It was in her wonderful historical novel Follow The Free Wind and, of course, when Eric John Stark returned in The Ginger Star and its sequels, he was still, in her words, a wolf’s head, an outlaw.

Donald A. Wollheim, who was another great admirer and opposed to most of what she stood for politically, said she was the best possible combination of Burroughs and Merritt. He was proud to publish much of her early work in book form. She learned most of what she knew about structure after 1940 from Ed Hamilton, whom she married January 1st, 1947, with Ray Bradbury as their best man. Ed really helped her discipline her talent. He wrote complicated plot-outlines and detailed chapter by chapter plans, whereas she just sat down at the typewriter and started. She always said that she owed most of what she learned about structure to Ed, while he was always quick to say that her influence had improved his style.

She’d start with a mood, a bit of landscape, an image, a feeling. The plots of those early stories weren’t what caught you. It was that atmosphere, the glamour, the sense of romantic desolation which harks back to science fiction’s Gothic roots and which can be found, for instance, in Mary Shelley, Ann Radcliffe and the Brontes. Rapidly written, for the most part, these stories have the feel of raw visionary poetry. They appeared in what I believe were the superior pulps, containing more vivid and often more lasting fiction than the admired Astounding and F&SF, which were considered more prestigious in their day. I preferred the pictures in Fantastic, particularly when they were by Finlay. With Weird Tales and Campbell’s excellent Unknown, for me Planet Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories and Startling Science Fiction—all contained more idiosyncratic writing, more stylish innovation, than an entire run of the more respectable sf magazines. It’s where I first read Charles Harness, author of The Paradox Men, a romantic classic to rival Captain Blood, Alfred Bester, Theodore Sturgeon, L. Sprague de Camp, Jack Vance, Philip Jose Farmer, Fritz Leiber and many others. By the late 50s only Galaxy ran the best examples of that kind of fiction, serialising, for instance Bester’s Tiger! Tiger!, which for me is a truly American novel, reflecting the spirit of Tom Paine in a way I have never seen bettered. Bester also enjoyed Leigh’s stories.

There was a time when the kind of science fantasy Brackett made her own was looked down upon as a kind of bastard progeny of science fiction (which was about scientific speculation) and fantasy (which was about magic). Critics of the 50s hated it because it was very uncool to be as blatantly, gorgeously romantic as Brackett, to combine the natural and the supernatural so effortlessly. Maybe that was why, too, she deliberately obscured her gender in the early days. It was a pretty unladylike form. Her friend Catherine Moore had to appear as C.L.Moore, just so that the reader shouldn’t be any further upset. Unless it came in the debased form of a bodice-ripper or wore a stetson, romanticism in the 40s and 50s had to chainsmoke and wear a fedora and a trenchcoat or it had better not come at all. An unsuitable job for a woman. It was a tribute to Howard Hawks that he wasn’t phased by the famous revelation that the guy he had hired for The Big Sleep was actually a gal in a gingham dress. Hawks was as famous for his regard for strong women as he was for his exploitation of weaker ones. And Leigh’s steady integrity impressed him. She stayed on the picture. There are many who believe she materially helped make it the classic it became. She worked with Hawks and Wayne on movies like Hatari! (about which she had some hilarious stories) and Rio Lobo, as well as the classic Rio Bravo and she also wrote for television. The western, like her Martian stories, depends chiefly on reflective landscape for its constant appeal and she was a great painter of reflective landscapes.

To some extent the post-war rejection of gorgeous fantasy, of full-blooded romanticism was the result of our sudden growing up as cultures, recognising the results of Hitler’s over-the-top use of romantic propaganda. Even Errol Flynn had to get out of his tights and into that trenchcoat. Tony Curtis in The Black Shield of Falworth became the benchmark for ludicrously miscast low budget historicals. Robert Taylor was a severely miscast Ivanhoe, though Elizabeth Taylor remains the best Rebecca ever. Nobody with any serious ambition wanted to work on such travesties. There were only a few restricted areas where a certain kind of romanticism was acceptable. The ruling literary caste was prepared to take The Third Man, and Philip Marlowe but not Gormenghast and Titus Groan or Queen of the Martian Catacombs and Eric John Stark. Yet Brackett has less in common with Mervyn Peake than she has with Graham Greene, Raymond Chandler and other superior writers of popular fiction. Yet common to all these writers is the sense of yearning loss, as of innocence, a nobler, irredeemable past and an uncertain future. Her heroes are often deeply aware of some moral transgression which everyone forgives them for except themselves. At the time these stories were written we had seen our sense of our history, of our progress towards real civilisation, blasted to bits before our eyes. By the time these stories were appearing in the pulps, Germany’s Nazi armies seemed unchallenged in their conquest of Europe. All those idealistic aspirations for world peace and the rule of civil law had collapsed before the cheap rhetoric of a bad journalist like Mussolini or a mediocre painter of postcards like Hitler. Bogart made more than one speech about how we felt, most famously in Casablanca. Yet the dominant sf of the day did not reflect the mood of the times, unless it was the militaristic, xenophobic elements. John W. Campbell was so busy being upbeat and celebrating crackpots who created perpetual motion machines and cults like early scientology which offered personal empowerment and an alternative to atomic war, he didn’t notice that the world had changed profoundly. We were beginning to realise that controlling it might not produce the effects we desired. I was never entirely sure whether he was disappointed by the failure of the Hitler experiment. Campbell marched on to his own simple, stirring tunes, convinced he had a handle on the future. Ironically, it was the humanistic writers, like Sheckley, Bester and Dick, who most closely predicted our present. As a result, much of what Campbell published dated badly and became quickly unreadable. But Leigh, like so many of her peers, captured the mood of her time which translates so easily to the mood of our present and appears in writers like William Gibson or the graphic novel work of Moore and Gaiman. Martian Quest, good as it was, wasn’t the work of a typical Astounding contributor.

Like so many of her heroes, Leigh preferred the outlaw life. She always said her first love was science fantasy. She said it defiantly, when it generally paid less than other pulp fiction. When it paid less, indeed, than other kinds of science fiction. If she had chosen, in her fiction, to hang out more with the scum of the LA streets rather than the dregs of the spacelanes she could have made a lot more money. Here’s one of her heroes, Mike Vickers, more used to steering a 1940 Ford than an interplanetary tramp:

There was a street. It was narrow and crooked. It had no lights and no paving. There were little mud-walled houses. There was garbage and the odor of it, heavy and rank, and filth, and a dead rat lying in the dust, and a subtle breath of heat. Vickers drew back. He was afraid. He willed his feet to move, to go away, but the floor slid under them like a running stream. He cried out, loud enough for God to hear, and all that came from his mouth was a whisper: Angie! Angie.

There was someone behind him, and he knew that there was no escape.

Find a copy of Stranger at Home, as by George Sanders, which is where that appeared, and you’ll see what I mean. Her name is actually in the book. Published in 1946, it’s dedicated ‘To Leigh Brackett, Whom I Have Never Met.’ I like to think this was George Sanders’s way of giving her a credit. I’d love to see that one back in print. We probably have various Hollywood strikes to thank for a lot of the stories she wrote around that time, because when she couldn’t work for the movies, she wrote fiction. Later, she would come to write science fiction in favour of writing for the movies. Only once, with The Empire Strikes Back, did she ever script a science fantasy tale. In a sense she had the privilege of self-imitation, just as she had when doing Eldorado, which she knew was a rehash of Rio Bravo. At one point she had suggested to Hawks that he simply change the names of her previous script and save himself some money.

Leigh was never very easy with journeyman work, no matter how good she was when she did it. Her keen sense of freedom made her, like many other fine writers of her generation, choose the more precarious living of writing science fantasy. It was a form which appealed to the romantic visionary in her, to her love of the exotic, the ancient and the long-civilised, as well as an enduring belief in the rights of the individual. She loved England and was proud of her English and Scots ancestry, but she was American to the core. And pretty much the best that an American can be.

It was their work that attracted my admiration, but it was their old-fashioned integrity, their generosity and their honest common sense that attracted me to both Leigh and her husband as people. We met at a science fiction convention. I was in my early twenties. I heard they had been seeking me out to congratulate me. For what? I wondered. I was almost speechless, not knowing what I could have done to impress such influential giants. Perhaps they’d congratulate me on my expertise as a literary thief? Perhaps they had recognised some obvious, if unconscious, plagiarism? We were introduced and Ed immediately began pumping my hand. “I just wanted to shake your hand,” he said. “They used to call me ‘the Galaxy smasher’ but you, Mike, you destroyed the universe!” He was kind enough not to mention that my ramshackle book could scarcely have been written at all without the voice of Leigh Brackett echoing in my soul. If I were to quote the opening, you would think it was Leigh on a bad day. It turned out that I didn’t quite have her penchant for interplanetary romance, but her example and her influence runs clearly through every Earth- or Mars-bound fantasy adventure story I have ever told and through virtually every other fantasy adventure story that has been told since!

When Ed died, Leigh wrote to let me know. A sad, matter of fact note in her usual laconic style, born of an age when to be self-referential was considered a bit indecent. Nobody wrote to me when Leigh died the next year. I heard the news from Harlan Ellison, who had also enjoyed her friendship. It broke my heart to lose her company but I couldn’t imagine her wanting to go on living without her companion of some thirty-five years. And, of course, she does live on, as every influential writer does, through her readers and all the romantic young people, like me, whom she encouraged to dream and be proud of it.

Michael Moorcock
Circle Squared Ranch,
Lost Pines, Texas
October 2000