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 leas the American part 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."
Lastly, I have not seen the story 'Last Call From Sector 9-G', and no-one seems to know what it is about that I have asked. My guess is this might be an inclusion in the Future History, from the title.
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."
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.
REFERENCES
Leigh Brackett (ology)
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
Sea-Kings of Mars
Martian Quest: The Early Brackett - Leigh Brackett
Lorelei Of the Red Mist: Planetary Romances - Leigh Brackett
The Big Jump
The Starmen Of Lyrids
Leigh Brackett Summary Bibliography
Leigh Brackett Solar System
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
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