Who Goes There?

Leigh Brackett debuted in 1940, with her first couple stories being printed in Astounding, but quickly she found other magazines more enticing despite the smaller paycheck. She stopped submitting to John W. Campbell for the same reason her future husband Edmond Hamilton did: creative differences. Campbell wanted science fiction of a new, more technical, more cerebral sort, while Bracket and Hamilton were devotees of a school of adventure fiction that predates Campbellian SF. Brackett, by her own admission, was also pretty indifferent to keeping up with real-world scientific discoveries. It might be considered strange, then, that nowadays Brackett is most known for her post-nuclear novel The Long Tomorrow and her work as a screenwriter. She also wrote a fair amount of detective fiction, which does show its influence in her SF somewhat. She wrote the first draft of the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back in the last months of her life, which saw her return to her planetary romance roots.

Ray Bradbury is one of the most famous writers in all American literature, especially for his novel Fahrenheit 451 and his fix-up “novel” The Martian Chronicles. Bradbury didn’t think of himself as an SF writer and it’s probably best, if anything, to understand much of his fiction with a horror lends; indeed his first collection, Dark Carnival, was horror-focused. In the ’50s Bradbury would gain mainstream recognition, but in the ’40s he was a fledgling short story writer and fan, with Brackett and Henry Kuttner (who were only five years older than Bradbury) acting as mentors. “Lorelei of the Red Mist” is a Brackett story at heart, but for better or worse Brackett was unable to finish it before trying her luck at screenwriting, leaving Bradbury to write the second half of the novella by himself. For what it’s worth I think Bradbury did a good job paying respect to Brackett’s style, although even without the latter’s word on who did what it’s not hard to figure out where the Bradbury part of the story begins.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the Summer 1946 issue of Planet Stories, which is on the Archive. It’s been reprinted a fair number of times, including in Three Times Infinity (ed. Leo Margulies), The Best of Planet Stories #1 (ed. Leigh Brackett), The Great SF Stories Volume 8 (ed. Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg), Echoes of Valor II (ed. Karl Edward Wagner), and the Brackett collection Lorelei of the Red Mist: Planetary Romances. This is all for collecting’s sake since you can read the story for free on Project Gutenberg. Sadly there was never a sequel to that Planet Stories anthology.

Enhancing Image

Hugh Mongous Starke is a space robber who has made off with the biggest pile of money he’ll probably ever see in his life—only he’s on the run from authorities and it looks like he won’t live much longer. Indeed it doesn’t take long for a mishap with his ship to send his body packing, although his mind proves to be much more resilient. Left dying on Venus, Starke is confronted by a strange woman named Rann, who has the power to spare Starke and give him a new body if only he would hold up his end of a certain deal. Rann is a sorceress, the Lorelei of the title (I thought for a while it was the name of a character, but it’s referring to Rann and her role as a sort of temptress), who has powers beyond Starke’s understanding. Starke gets his new body, but he quickly finds he’s been thrown into a conflict he can scarcely fathom, among people who want him dead.

A while ago I reviewed Brackett’s “Enchantress of Venus,” one in a series starring the futuristic barbarian Eric John Stark (Starke and Stark are very different characters, I might add), and Brackett’s Venus in both stories very much takes after early 20th century depictions of the planet. Even in 1946 the Venus of this story must’ve seemed a little far-fetched. Think Zelazny’s “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth.” It’s not exactly hospitable, but it’s livable for humans who are tough enough; there’s local wildlife, and as expected this Venus is swampy, with the Red Sea (the red mist of the title) being home to a very dense gas as opposed to water. The gas is dense enough to buoy ships but breathable enough that a human could traverse the bottom for several hours without scuba gear. This is all stuff Starke will learn much later but which will be familiar to those of us who have read one or two of Brackett’s Venus stories before.

Starke’s mind has been transplanted to the body of Conan, a warrior who has been kept in chains (“Starke’s new body wore a collar, like a vicious dog.”) and tortured in the dark corridors of Crom Dhu, an island surrounded by the Red Sea and connected to the mainland only with a jetty. Crom Dhu is home to the Rovers, a group of humans (like Starke) who, unlike Our Anti-Hero™, have stuck to a borderline medieval way of living. There’s Romna, the local bard, and Faolan, the leader of the pack who has been rendered blind, both literally and with hatred for Conan. Then there’s Beudag, Faolan’s sister and, as it turns out, Conan’s lover—or rather former lover. Conan, despite being one of the Rovers, has been tortured because he betrayed his own people in a recent battle: he was set to marry Beudag but turned his back on her in favor of Rann. It’s unclear if Conan had planned this from the start or if Rann had put some kind of spell on him. He would’ve run off with the sorceress had he not been captured, and apparently Conan’s mind broke under the torture (possibly also combined with guilt), making his body an ideal vessel for Rann to slip Starke’s mind into it.

To get the obvious out of the way, this is in part a Conan homage. The fact that the Rover hideout is called Crom Dhu doesn’t help. Something clever Brackett does is that she makes the protagonist a typical space opera character (a lovable rogue in the mode of Han Solo, you could say) and puts him in the body of a sword-and-sorcery hero. Eric John Stark takes after Conan (not to mention Tarzan) while Hugh Starke is basically a civilized man (albeit a remorseless criminal), only he’s been thrown into a scenario that would not be unusual for Robert E. Howard to conceive. We also don’t get to know much about the Conan of Brackett’s story, since his consciousness is MIA (although not as absent as was first thought, as we’ll discover later) and he can’t get a word in edgewise. The other characters tell us what sort of man Conan was like and it’s up to Starke to fill in the blanks; he’ll have to do his homework pretty quick, after all, or else he might get killed by one of the Rovers who are out for vengeance. Faolan suspects Starke might be an agent for Rann—a rational concern, considering Rann does want Starke to destroy the Rovers from the inside.

To complicate things further, Beudag clearly misses her former lover, and seeing him returned to a somewhat normal state (or rather seeing his body again inhabited by a working mind) immediately draws her to Starke. Starke is similarly taken with Beudag, who is a warrior lady who could probably crush his head with her thighs. Romance is not exactly Brackett’s strong suit (I remember criticizing the romantic aspect of her Eric John Stark stories that I’ve read), but the off-the-cuff romance in “Lorelei of the Red Mist” feels more justified since Starke is in the body of a man who was in love with Beudag, and he eventually finds that his memories are actually becoming intertwined with Conan’s, on top of Rann’s power over him. This story apparently drew some controversy among the Planet Stories readership for its overt (for 1946 pulp fiction) sexuality, and true enough Brackett and Bradbury are eager to describe human nudity (both male and female) in as much detail as was possible under the circumstances. It’s also unambiguous that both Beudag and Rann find Conan (or rather his body) very attractive. This is not just titilation. There’s some irony in the fact that Starke has a strong mind but originally had a weak body, while Conan has a strong body (even under torture) but a relatively weak mind.

But wait, there’s more! There’s a threeway conflict going on. There’s the humans, the sea-people who dwell in the Red Sea (they’re humanoid but they have gills and thin webbing between their fingers and such), and Rann’s people, who are descended from the sea-people and are apparently racist toward their own ancestors. All three sides hate each other, but right now shit is not looking good for the humans, as Crom Dhu has been under siege and there’s no way of getting off the island. The island is fortified such that Rann’s people will have a hard time getting in, but Faolan’s people can’t get out, and if Faolan dies then the humans will have no choice but to surrender. All Starke would have to do is kill Faolan and Rann will get what she wants and Starke will get his million credits. Rann is held up in the city of Falga, and there was a battle there recently that left the humans retreating and Conan becoming a traitor. There’s a whole backstory that’s partly given to us through exposition but which remains partly up to the reader’s imagination, the result being that Brackett (and I say her specifically since she wrote the first half and thus did most of the legwork with world-building) makes the world of the story feel bigger than it is.

There Be Spoilers Here

Starke, under the influence of Rann, nearly kills Faolan, Romna, and Beudag before being “rescued” by Rann’s people. The deal was that if Starke did what he was supposed to then he would get a million credits, but obviously Rann has no intent of actually following through on this, resulting in Starke narrowly surviving the double-cross and retreating into the Red Sea. It’s at this point that the story takes an unusual turn, and this is because Bradbury is now in control. Brackett said she didn’t know where the story was heading when she passed the torch to Bradbury, and admittedly you can still predict the rest in broad strokes. The details are what matter, though. The story doesn’t descend into horror exactly but it does get noticeably spookier, and the language becomes a bit more poetic as well. (I don’t see Brackett using “ebon” as frequently as Bradbury does here.) Bradbury does his best to mesh with Brackett’s style, but still there’s a switching of gears that you’d probably notice even if you didn’t know the nature of this collaboration. The SFnal part of the story was already tenuous, but by the time Bradbury takes over it has all but evaporated. I do like the idea, however, that within the bast universe of this distant future, with his spaceships and laser beams, that there are pockets of civilization that lag centuries behind that future. The Rovers, for example, have no issue with slavery, nor do they seem to have any weaponry that’s on par with even 20th century American standards. Jack Vance would basically make a whole career on such far-future medievalism.

At the bottom of the Red Sea, Starke comes across a pack of hounds, and a shepherd, one of the sea-people who apparently has the power to bring the dead back to life—not to their full selves, but as zombies. This is something that was not alluded to at all previously. The sea-people wanna use an army of the undead to take both Crom Dhu and Falga, which naturally doesn’t please Starke. Using a nigh invincible army would be nice, but Beudag has been taken hostage by Rann and Starke does feel that he ought to redeem himself in the eyes of the Rovers. It could also be that his personality has meshed with that of Conan’s to the point where he’s seeing himself in Conan’s shoes. “That part of him that was Conan cried out. Conan was so much of him and he so much of Conan it was impossible for a cleavage.” He manages to convince the shepherd to at least have the sea-people strike Falga first, to buy the Rovers time and maybe convince the sea-people that they have a common enemy! Which works! Although the ensuing battle at Falga—really a massacre more than a real battle—is depicted as horribly grotesque. “It was very simple and very unpleasant.” Still, he convinces the sea-people to spare Crom Dhu the same fate. The climax of “Lorelei of the Red Mist” has Starke do the typical heroic things, like rescuing Beudag, saving Crom Dhu, and killing Rann, but it’s also about him coming to terms with the fact that he is no longer entirely Hugh Starke, but “Hugh-Starke-Called-Conan,” host to that second personality and vicariously offering Conan the chance to redeem himself. Starke eventually finds his old body and gives it a proper burial, saying goodbye to his old self literally but metaphorically also saying goodbye to his former life as a rogue. He will work to become an honorable warrior now, with Beudag (who is in love with both Starke and Conan) at his side.

A Step Farther Out

This is a very interesting story, even if it is structurally wonky. It doesn’t help also that I was very tired (from work and a sprained ankle denying me much-wanted sleep) when I was reading it. It does seem a bit long in the tooth, not helped by the obvious divide between the Brackett and Bradbury material. At the same time this is exactly the sort of story that would never see print in Astounding, because it’s a little too fun-loving, a little too horror-inflected, a little too unscientific, and a little too erotically charged. Despite taking place on the same version of Venus as the aforementioned “Enchantress of Venus” this feels less like Edgar Rice Burroughs and more like Robert E. Howard, which of course is not a bad thing! (Makes me wonder what might’ve happened had Howard lived to see the sword-and-planet boom of the ’40s and early ’50s.) If you’re interested in old-school planetary romance, something which predates Dune and which is a lot less sophisticated but also less heady than Herbert’s take, this is a good start.

See you next time.