"Earth's Renaissance" an essay by Leigh Brackett (Stfette, #2, July '41)
Unseen.
Showing posts with label essay. Show all posts
Showing posts with label essay. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Saturday, May 1, 2010
Myth-Adventures in Leigh Brackett's Enchantress of Venus - Terry Hansen
Apparently in Extrapolation 23, Spring 1982, pp77-82. Seriously doubt I am ever likely to find this, so if anyone who has read it has anything to say?
Unseen.
http://books.google.com/books?id=3JXnz9x9sO4C&pg=PA861&lpg=PA861&dq=enchantress+of+venus&source=bl&ots=trKo-1XK6R&sig=6vhABzPl80zHOAyDPyNzRfvi54g&hl=en&ei=ocPeSdD3DY3gtAOXrpy6CQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=14#v=onepage&q=enchantress%20of%20venus&f=false
Unseen.
http://books.google.com/books?id=3JXnz9x9sO4C&pg=PA861&lpg=PA861&dq=enchantress+of+venus&source=bl&ots=trKo-1XK6R&sig=6vhABzPl80zHOAyDPyNzRfvi54g&hl=en&ei=ocPeSdD3DY3gtAOXrpy6CQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=14#v=onepage&q=enchantress%20of%20venus&f=false
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Monstrous Theologies The Theme of Anti-Sacrifice in the Sci-Fi Pulps - Thomas F. Bertonneau
An academic article that also talks about C. L. Moore and Northwest Smith along the same lines.
"Leigh Brackett belonged to the same story-telling generation as Moore and Kuttner; she was married, in fact, to another science fiction writer, Edmond Hamilton, just as Moore was married to Kuttner.(14) The four lived in and around Santa Monica in the 1930s through the 1950s and knew each other well. Responding, as Moore did, to Lovecraft's opening of antique vistas and to Stanley G. Weinbaum's opening of the solar system, Brackett wrote a series of tales involving the antiquated cultures of Mercury, Venus, Mars, and the Asteroids under the ecumenical dominion of a Terran Empire in its brash ascendancy. Brackett's Martian stories parallel Bradbury's, but are more brutal than his, granting a greater degree of robustness to the colonized Martians. Brackett nevertheless, like Moore and Kuttner, ever apologizes for the normative, and this means that she defines the difference between the ethically acceptable and the ethically unacceptable according to the absence or presence of sacrifice. It is significant that, in one of the few explanations that she offered of her interest in the popular forms, she said the following: "The so-called space opera is the folk-tale, the hero-tale, of our particular niche in history" (Preface to The Best of Planet Stories 2-3). "The Beast-Jewel of Mars" (1948) is explicitly devoted to an examination of sacrifice and provocatively links sacrifice to the politics of resentment.
"The Beast-Jewel of Mars" revolves around Shanga, translatable as "the return" or "the going-back" (The Coming of the Terrans 8), a cult "forbidden centuries ago by the city-states of Mars" (9), which has reappeared with the arrival of the earthmen. The cult thus corresponds to a Lucretian lapsus in antiquas religiones. The sacred objects of the cult, the Jewels of Shanga, date back reputedly to "a half a million years ago" (14) when the priests of Caer Dhu carved them by a science now lost. The scheme resembles that in "The Dust of the Gods" by Moore, where a fragment of demonic Pharol's vanished world turns up in the deep rubble of the polar mountains of Mars. Certain plotters, as we have seen, want artifacts from the anomaly, the ones that Smith and Yarol refuse to export but, rather, destroy in situ. In Brackett's story, a Martian named Kor Hal tells protagonist Burk Winters that, despite having inaugurated Shanga as an escape from war and violence, the people of Caer Dhu quickly "perished" and "in one generation . . . vanished from the face of Mars." Brackett gives us a sketch of the Lucretian notion of how the ennui of long-standing security makes the beneficiaries of earlier demonic banishments vulnerable to cultic revival. Only a continuously upheld psychic vigilance can keep such atavistic deformations at bay."
4 out of 5
http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0601/monstrous.htm
"Leigh Brackett belonged to the same story-telling generation as Moore and Kuttner; she was married, in fact, to another science fiction writer, Edmond Hamilton, just as Moore was married to Kuttner.(14) The four lived in and around Santa Monica in the 1930s through the 1950s and knew each other well. Responding, as Moore did, to Lovecraft's opening of antique vistas and to Stanley G. Weinbaum's opening of the solar system, Brackett wrote a series of tales involving the antiquated cultures of Mercury, Venus, Mars, and the Asteroids under the ecumenical dominion of a Terran Empire in its brash ascendancy. Brackett's Martian stories parallel Bradbury's, but are more brutal than his, granting a greater degree of robustness to the colonized Martians. Brackett nevertheless, like Moore and Kuttner, ever apologizes for the normative, and this means that she defines the difference between the ethically acceptable and the ethically unacceptable according to the absence or presence of sacrifice. It is significant that, in one of the few explanations that she offered of her interest in the popular forms, she said the following: "The so-called space opera is the folk-tale, the hero-tale, of our particular niche in history" (Preface to The Best of Planet Stories 2-3). "The Beast-Jewel of Mars" (1948) is explicitly devoted to an examination of sacrifice and provocatively links sacrifice to the politics of resentment.
"The Beast-Jewel of Mars" revolves around Shanga, translatable as "the return" or "the going-back" (The Coming of the Terrans 8), a cult "forbidden centuries ago by the city-states of Mars" (9), which has reappeared with the arrival of the earthmen. The cult thus corresponds to a Lucretian lapsus in antiquas religiones. The sacred objects of the cult, the Jewels of Shanga, date back reputedly to "a half a million years ago" (14) when the priests of Caer Dhu carved them by a science now lost. The scheme resembles that in "The Dust of the Gods" by Moore, where a fragment of demonic Pharol's vanished world turns up in the deep rubble of the polar mountains of Mars. Certain plotters, as we have seen, want artifacts from the anomaly, the ones that Smith and Yarol refuse to export but, rather, destroy in situ. In Brackett's story, a Martian named Kor Hal tells protagonist Burk Winters that, despite having inaugurated Shanga as an escape from war and violence, the people of Caer Dhu quickly "perished" and "in one generation . . . vanished from the face of Mars." Brackett gives us a sketch of the Lucretian notion of how the ennui of long-standing security makes the beneficiaries of earlier demonic banishments vulnerable to cultic revival. Only a continuously upheld psychic vigilance can keep such atavistic deformations at bay."
4 out of 5
http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0601/monstrous.htm
Red Mist and Ruins: The Symbolist Prose of Leigh Brackett - Thomas F. Bertonneau
Red Mist and Ruins: The Symbolist Prose of Leigh Brackett
Bertonneau, Thomas F.
New York Review of Science Fiction 19(3): 18-21. November 2006. (No. 219)
Unseen.
http://web08.library.tamu.edu/browse/75926/
Bertonneau, Thomas F.
New York Review of Science Fiction 19(3): 18-21. November 2006. (No. 219)
Unseen.
http://web08.library.tamu.edu/browse/75926/
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Edmond Hamilton and Leigh Brackett an Appreciation - Brian Stableford
An essay I have not read in :
In Masters of science fiction : essays on six science fiction authors : Edmond Hamilton, Leigh Brackett, Barry N. Malzberg, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Silverberg, Mack Reynolds / by Brian M. Stableford. It is 9 pages long, starting on page 6 and
finishing on page 14 (thanks to Mary Gosling at the NLA).
"Her work, which stands at the end of the sf pulp tradition, is orientated backwards in time, constituting in large measure a reflection upon that tradition insofar as it served the escapist needs of it, readers. In her way she was as little committed to the wilder excesses of this escapist need as—on close inspection—Hamilton turns out to have been. Thai is what made both of them science fiction writers rather than fantasists. They both owed allegiance to the weltanschauung of modern rationalism, and were significantly divorced in the spirit of their writing from the fantastic imagination of writers like Burroughs, Merritt and Cummings, whose work resembles theirs in superficial symbology, but which is irredeemably committed to the flight from reason."
3.5 out of 5
In Masters of science fiction : essays on six science fiction authors : Edmond Hamilton, Leigh Brackett, Barry N. Malzberg, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Silverberg, Mack Reynolds / by Brian M. Stableford. It is 9 pages long, starting on page 6 and
finishing on page 14 (thanks to Mary Gosling at the NLA).
"Her work, which stands at the end of the sf pulp tradition, is orientated backwards in time, constituting in large measure a reflection upon that tradition insofar as it served the escapist needs of it, readers. In her way she was as little committed to the wilder excesses of this escapist need as—on close inspection—Hamilton turns out to have been. Thai is what made both of them science fiction writers rather than fantasists. They both owed allegiance to the weltanschauung of modern rationalism, and were significantly divorced in the spirit of their writing from the fantastic imagination of writers like Burroughs, Merritt and Cummings, whose work resembles theirs in superficial symbology, but which is irredeemably committed to the flight from reason."
3.5 out of 5
Leigh Brackett : no long goodbye is good enough - Rosemarie Arbur
In :
The Feminine eye : science fiction and the women who write it / edited by Tom Staicar
New York : F. Ungar Pub. Co., c1982.
viii, 148 p. ; 22 cm.
ISBN 0804428387 0804468788 (pbk.)
spans from p 1 - 13. (thanks to Elizabeth Caplice at the NLA)
"With few exceptions, Brackett's works have not been presented seriously to those too young ever to have read the pulps, to those too old to consider science fiction equal in value to the other, more traditional forms of literature, and to those who regard science fiction as the chief literary movement of this century. Brackett's achievements only rarely find themselves in the company of those that deserve (if not demand) respectful critical scrutiny as well as hours of enjoyable reading.
But they do belong in that company. Because they do, I take my title from a major screenplay she wrote and turn its emphasis around: the objective of this essay is not to look back at Leigh Brackett's science fiction accomplishments as if they were receding toward a region inaccessible to us because it no longer exists; the objective is to look at them straight on, as they (still) really are. If readers of this essay are somehow influenced to look into what they have not already read or to reread a favorite Brackett tale, or to examine and adjust the list of authors in their secret, personal SF hall of fame, then this essay—the French word is "attempt"—will have succeeded. In the excitement of (re)discovering the fine things Brackett did with language, readers may forget the need to say their goodbyes, for they will have immersed themselves in prose that is strong, timeless, and alive."
4.5 out of 5
The Feminine eye : science fiction and the women who write it / edited by Tom Staicar
New York : F. Ungar Pub. Co., c1982.
viii, 148 p. ; 22 cm.
ISBN 0804428387 0804468788 (pbk.)
spans from p 1 - 13. (thanks to Elizabeth Caplice at the NLA)
"With few exceptions, Brackett's works have not been presented seriously to those too young ever to have read the pulps, to those too old to consider science fiction equal in value to the other, more traditional forms of literature, and to those who regard science fiction as the chief literary movement of this century. Brackett's achievements only rarely find themselves in the company of those that deserve (if not demand) respectful critical scrutiny as well as hours of enjoyable reading.
But they do belong in that company. Because they do, I take my title from a major screenplay she wrote and turn its emphasis around: the objective of this essay is not to look back at Leigh Brackett's science fiction accomplishments as if they were receding toward a region inaccessible to us because it no longer exists; the objective is to look at them straight on, as they (still) really are. If readers of this essay are somehow influenced to look into what they have not already read or to reread a favorite Brackett tale, or to examine and adjust the list of authors in their secret, personal SF hall of fame, then this essay—the French word is "attempt"—will have succeeded. In the excitement of (re)discovering the fine things Brackett did with language, readers may forget the need to say their goodbyes, for they will have immersed themselves in prose that is strong, timeless, and alive."
4.5 out of 5
Monday, December 14, 2009
Meet the Author Leigh Brackett - Oscar J. Friend
Startling Stories, Fall 1944, (Sep 1944, Oscar J. Friend, Better Publications, Inc., $0.15, 116pp, Pulp, magazine) Cover: Earle K. Bergey
Unseen.
Unseen.
And As For the Admixture of Cultures on Imaginary Worlds - Leigh Brackett
The Conan Swordbook: 27 Examinations of Heroic Fantasy, (1969, L. Sprague de Camp, George H. Scithers, Mirage Press, #V-104, $5.95, xiii+255pp, hc)
The Blade of Conan, (May 1979, L. Sprague de Camp, Ace, 0-441-11670-1, $1.95, ix+310pp, pb)
I have not seen this.
The Blade of Conan, (May 1979, L. Sprague de Camp, Ace, 0-441-11670-1, $1.95, ix+310pp, pb)
I have not seen this.
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Leigh Brackett's The Long Tomorrow: A Quest for the Future America - Diane Parkin-Speer
Extrapolation 26 (1985):190-200.
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