Lorelei of the Red Mist: Planetary Romances

by Leigh Brackett, Ray Bradbury (Foreword), Frank Kelly Freas (Illustrator)

Picking up where Martian The Early Brackett left off, this volume collects 12 more tales of strange adventures on other worlds from the undisputed "Queen of Space Opera." Drawn from Planet Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories pulp magazines, this tome revels in the 1946 titular collaboration with Ray Bradbury--who also contributes an original poem about Leigh Brackett as well as an essay about meeting & working with Brackett. Harry Turtledove, the modern master of "alternate history" provides the introduction and the book is adorned with Frank Kelly Freas' vintage illustrations from the 1953 reprint of "Lorelei of the Red Mist." In a review of Martian The Early Brackett, Paul di Filippo says "Plainly, Brackett was growing with every story she wrote, not yet 30 years old by the volume's end, with the best yet to come." Lorelei of the Red Planetary Romances is where some of that "best" can found.

Genres: Science Fiction, Short Stories

496 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1991

About the author

Leigh Brackett was born on December 7, 1915 in Los Angeles, and raised near Santa Monica. Having spent her youth as an athletic tom-boy - playing volleyball and reading stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs and H Rider Haggard - she began writing fantastic adventures of her own. Several of these early efforts were read by Henry Kuttner, who critiqued her stories and introduced her to the SF personalities then living in California, including Robert Heinlein, Julius Schwartz, Jack Williamson, Edmond Hamilton - and another aspiring writer, Ray Bradbury.

In 1944, based on the hard-boiled dialogue in her first novel, No Good From a Corpse, producer/director Howard Hawks hired Brackett to collaborate with William Faulkner on the screenplay of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep.

Brackett maintained an on-again/off-again relationship with Hollywood for the remainder of her life. Between writing screenplays for such films as Rio Bravo, El Dorado, Hatari!, and The Long Goodbye, she produced novels such as the classic The Long Tomorrow (1955) and the Spur Award-winning Western, Follow the Free Wind (1963).

Brackett married Edmond Hamilton on New Year's Eve in 1946, and the couple maintained homes in the high-desert of California and the rural farmland of Kinsman, Ohio.

Just weeks before her death on March 17, 1978, she turned in the first draft screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back and the film was posthumously dedicated to her.

Reviews

[Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you draw a Venn diagram, and one circle is Burroughs' Barsoom with its canals and dead sea bottoms and ancient, crumbling palaces, another circle is Howard's Conan stories with their thieves' quarters and smoky taverns, the third circle is the 1940s consensus future solar system with dying, dusty Mars, jungle-clad Venus, most planets and moons perfectly habitable if not exactly safe and landing fields with interplanetary runabouts, and the fourth circle is noir detective stories with their hard men and troublesome dames, in the exact center, where all of those circles overlap, you'll find Leigh Brackett's planetary romances.

[Mack · Rating 1 out of 5]

I guess if Ray Bradbury can have a clinker, anybody can. Well, Leigh Bracket may be the author. There you go. Readers of sword and sorcery might give this a five.

[Rhonda Wise · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novela, like several others by Leigh Brackett, deals extensively with the impact and horrors of mind control. It has some of the things I dislike about other pieces written at this time (the implicit biases that I seem to trip over regularly), but it is still so well written that I remained more focused on the plot and the characters than the not so subtle 'isms'. I think anyone who is writing about the horror of having their mind controlled by another being really should read Leigh Brackett. The way she describes the takeover, the calm while being controlled, the subtle lack of acceptance and then the cold, stark reflection on what happened and what the character did while under that control is startling. It is also effective in making the reader think. At least it was for me. I did really like this read.

[Mark Rabideau · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nothing much... mediocre and dull