What I learned from the Warrior-Maid of Mars

I recently came across this incredible cover for Planet Stories Summer 1950 issue and the title stories snagged my attention immediately, of course – how can you not be snagged by Margaret St. Claire and Ray Bradbury in their primes? – but I was also curious to see who else was featured, and went off looking for the contents[1].

Holy cow this is an amazing issue! Look at these titles:

Hoshi Shinichi in Short Shorts

This strange bird character was created by Hoshi and is
often used on work relating to him - here I shamelessly
steal a scan of the orignal

Hoshi Shinichi [1] died just a few months after I arrived in Japan, and was one of the first Japanese authors I ever read (in Japanese) – as a result, his work is the standard against which I have measured Japanese science fiction ever since. 

This has caused me some frustration: Hoshi is regarded in possibly the most influential writer of science fiction in Japanese, with a body of work including more than 1000 stories – so many in fact that it’s essentially impossible to find a complete list of even his collections.  My own first purchase “The Man From Earth” [2] doesn’t appear on any of the lists I’ve seen, for example – including a few Japanese ones!

Hoshi perhaps comes by his talent honestly as the great-grandson of famous Meiji Era writer, Mori Ohgai [3] but his early life leaned more in the direction of his ancestor’s academic achievements: although Hoshi was the right age for military service during the Second World War, his academic potential (and presumably his family’s connections [4]) kept him away from the front as far as I can tell, and he eventually got a degree in agricultural science from Tokyo University (another sign of his family’s elite status at the time) and was working on a PhD in agricultural chemistry in 1951 when his father’s sudden death forced him to drop out to manage the family’s failing pharmaceutical company.

The company collapsed soon afterwards, being in too rough condition to save, and ultimately the company was rescued by its acquisition by Kohkichi Otani [5] which released Hoshi to pursue his own interests.  Hoshi’s own condition was poor at this time, and following the sale of the family business, he spent some time recovering – and it was at this time he encountered Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles which sparked an intense interest in science fiction.

Over the next few years he became involved in a variety of science-fictional societies ranging from technological futurism to flying saucer clubs, culminating in his contribution to the inaugural issue of Japan’s first major science fiction magazine, Uchujin in 1957.  From there, he produced constantly, becoming a fixture in the Japanese science fiction community.

Overall, his influence on Japanese SF – and fiction in general – has been amazing, inspiring dozens of manga, films, TV, and of course other writers’ work.  He specialized particularly in what are sometimes called “short shorts” – short, intense stories less than 5 pages in length, and is considered the master of the form.[6]  There’s little you can really say in such a short space of course, but Hoshi invariably paints a situation in rough, vivid strokes – not so much world-building as tone-building to create the scaffold from which he’ll make his comment on society.

Hoshi not only wrote constantly, but was also responsible for introducing the Japanese SF scene to Western writers such as Frederick Brown and Isaac Asimov – and in fact I have read that he was responsible for some of the translations of his own work into English.

Bizarrely, though, despite the massive volume of his work, the enthusiasm with which he was received in the Japanese market, and the interest he attracted in other markets (translations into English, German, Russian, French, Italian, and Hungarian!) he seems to have received little recognition in the form of awards – at least not directly: many of the efforts to transform his works into films or manga have won awards.

Early in his career, Hoshi’s collection Six Short Shorts was nominated for the Naoki Sanjugo prize in 1961 (beaten, unsurprisingly, by Minakami’s Temple of the Wild Geese).  Another collection of stories was nominated for the Mystery Writers of Japan Award in 1962, and a novel in 1965, but it wasn’t until 1968 that he won the MWJ with his short Delusion Bank – though that award was presented for both the story and “for past achievement”. [7]  Strangely, despite his popularity and reputation, Hoshi was never awarded the coveted Seiun Prize by Japanese SF fandom, and it wasn’t until after his death that he was awarded the Nihon SF Taisho Award [8] for life achievement.

A fair bit of Hoshi’s work has been translated into English, including possibly his best known story Bokko-chan which was printed in the June 1963 issue of SF&F and seems to have been Western fandom’s first encounter with this remarkable author. 

Like a lot of Japanese SF, Hoshi’s writing has a very different flavour from what we’re used to in the type of English SF from the era in which he was writing – but I think its charm is that it retains the style of the older pulps that was lost during the shifts that occurred in American genre publishing in the 50s and early 60s.  

For anyone looking for a “gateway” to Japanese SF, his short, sharp stories are definitely a good place to start.

--30—

1. Hoshi is the family name of course, but it has always felt strange to me to anglicize the order – it just sounds better this way around.

2. 地球から来た男(chikyuu kara kita otoko) – oddly I can’t find any online reference to this collection from before the 2007 Kadokawa Bunko imprint, though I bought mine years before that, in about 1999 or 2000.

3. Author of Wild Geese and other works, also known for his poetry and his translations of contemporary Western authors such as Hans Christian Andersen, Ibsen and others.  In his later career, he produced a number of biographies of Edo Period academics.

4. Hoshi’s great-grandfather was a famous writer and physician to royalty, his grandfather was an anatomist, his father was the founder of both a pharmaceutical university and a pharmaceutical manufacturer.

5. The founder of the luxurious New Otani hotel chain.

6. This is considered something of a new thing in English – think flash fiction – but has been a mainstay of Japanese literature, not only in fiction but for essays and the like, more or less since the beginning of their commercial printing industry.

7. Interestingly, some of the best American SF authors of the 30s and 40s – surely a major influence on Hoshi, given his translation of Frederick Brown and his interest in Ray Bradbury – were also known for their mysteries and crime stories.  I’ve often wondered if working in this genre helps to discipline the fantasies of SF to create superior stories.

8. The Japanese industry’s equivalent of the Nebula, awarded by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of Japan.

Henry Kuttner: Another forgotten master

Kuttner and Moore working on a manuscript

Imagine:

It was April 7^th, 1915.

Near Basra in Mesopotamia: Turkish troops were assembling,preparing to launch an offensive against the British fortifications. 

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, in Los Angeles, California, science fiction writer Henry Kuttner was born.

Coincidence?

OK, probably.  But it’s no coincidence that, from the publication of his first short The Graveyard Rats in 1936, to his untimely death in 1958 at the age of 42, Kuttner was not only incredibly prolific [1] but incredibly well received.

Kuttner was very much a cerebral writer – many of his stories (though still just a fraction of his output!) are well enough crafted that had he not specialized in genre fiction he would surely be studied today alongside O. Henry as a short story craftsman.  Sadly, specializing in genre meant that his income depended on a prolific output in order to make a living at the penny-a-word rates of the pulps, so the range of quality in his work is quite wide.

Truth be told, the biggest challenge in his early work isn’t the ideas – it’s the execution and the styling, which for Kuttner seems to have been something for which time was required.  A master of complex stories, pacing, and surprise endings, his tales early are often interesting and engaging even when they’re (frankly) not all that well written from a stylistic perspective.

As genre grew and pay rates rose, it became possible for Kuttner to make a better living with his typewriter and his quality evened to the point where he became known for the literary quality of his prose.  But frankly this is no mystery: starting with letters to Weird Tales in the 20s and continuing with his engagement with the Lovecraft Circle (a collection of young writers and fans who essentially had an early fanzine kind of correspondence with Lovecraft himself) Kuttner was busy developing his craft, and while his early work may have suffered somewhat from an over-intellectual style, after meeting C. L. Moore in 1936 [2] they began collaborations – most intensely after their marriage in 1940.

This was surely a match made in literary heaven – Moore was herself an incredibly gifted and justifiably admired author in her time, but it seems to me that her skill with style and colour was just the thing Kuttner’s work needed.  Indeed, some of their most popular work was written in intense collaboration – so intense in fact that L. Sprague de Camp, who knew them both well, once said that once completed it was impossible for them to tell which sections of a story had been written by which of them. [3] You can almost watch Kuttner’s writing improve after the match – and Moore herself said that she thought her own writing owed a great deal to what she learned from working with Kuttner. [4]

Now, Moore’s work was excellent [5], her styling and pacing sublime, but the more hard-core of the two when it came to pulp writing was probably Kuttner – thus the more prolific bibliography over a huge variety of publications.  Kuttner’s styling may have suffered from the sheer volume, but he was nothing if not versatile.

This combination of skills is what drove much of the pair’s production in the 40s and early 50s – Moore contributed the style, Kuttner the page-rate and to some degree the cerebration for which he was justly famous.  Sadly, production waned when Kuttner started working on his masters degree [6] and really never recovered – Kuttner died in 1958, and Moore sadly remarried to a physician who for some reason loathed SF and SFian society so much that he induced her to have nothing more to do with it – even to preventing the SFWA from honoring her as a Grand Master.

Still, the mystery here is less why they both stopped writing but why – after so many years – Moore is still (somewhat) known but Kuttner has been all but invisible for ages. 

It’s strange indeed – especially considering that even 20 years after his death, Ray Bradbury (whose first horror story “The Candle” was reputedly finished by Kuttner, and who so desperately wanted Kuttner’s career in the beginning) named him a neglected master in his Introduction to a collection of Kuttner stories in 1975.  In the same volume he acknowledges Kuttner’s amazingly fertile mind by referring to him as “a pomegranate writer: popping with seeds.”

Indeed, Bradbury may be the most literary and respected of the writers who claim Kuttner as an early influence, but he’s not the only one; Roger Zelazny (the Amber stories), Richard Matheson (I Am Legend) and William S. Burroughs all owe this man a debt, among many others I’m sure.

Kuttner does still turn up of course – how could he not?  In particular, over the years his mythos stories have often been included in collections, including occasional collections of only or mainly Kuttner stories.  But somehow he never seems to get the level of recognition that his best work demands – in fact, while his name remains well known among long-term fandom and of course among lovers of Lovecraftian mythos much of his work remains fairly obscure. 

He has begun to regain visibility in recent years, in part because of the film adaptation of The Last Mimzy (2007) and a small number of recent collections [7], but he still remains sadly underappreciated by genre fandom.

Part of this is surely snobbery – you’d think that a fandom that essentially revolves around the nerdiest of pastimes would be willing to take any accomplices it could get, but the truth is that since the late 50s sword & sorcery and Lovecraftian horror have been increasingly sneered at as unworthy – could this be part of the reason why Kuttner’s work doesn’t get the recognition it deserves?

As I said, at his best Kuttner’s tightly plotted, intricate stories are surely at least in the same league as O. Henry – I think any real fan of early genre writing owes it to themselves to explore at least a little of his work.  You never know what you might learn.

--30--

1. Seriously: check out his summary bibliography at isfdb.

2. Amusingly, Kuttner’s relationship with Moore begins with a fan letter he wrote to her in 1936, around the time of his own first professional publication, in which he assumed she was a man.

3. Apocryphal, and possibly part of the mystique de Camp was building about them, but the story goes that they would just leave the page in the typewriter – sometimes even mid-sentence – for the other to continue, alternating constantly until the tale was finished.  This sounds wonderful, but it seems unlikely that a story written in this way would ever be fully coherent, and it was surely the following editorial stages (with both their skillful input) that led to such tightly written stories.

4. Hmm.  While I don’t typically enjoy full collaborations, perhaps there’s an idea here?  I can think of a few authors who have great ideas but less great writing – or amazing writing but not to amazing ideas. Could we force them to marry?  You know, for the good of the genre?

5. And in terms of averages at the very least, probably also superior to Kuttner’s.

6. With the intention of becoming a psychologist of the head-shrinking rather than rat-mazing variety.

7. Yay for e-books and the publication of out-of-copyright anthologies I guess.

Asimov's Three

The March 1939 issue in which Asimov's first published
story, Marooned Off Vesta appeared, 77 years ago!

April 6, 2016 marks the twenty-fourth anniversary of the Good Doctor, who sadly died in 1992 of heart and kidney failure.

Having been writing science fiction for 15 years, and having cemented his reputation with an impressive bibliography that included what is sometimes considered science fiction’s most famous story, Nightfall [1] Isaac Asimov was tapped to provide an essay for Reginald Bretnor’s [2] volume Modern Science Fiction: It’s Meaning and It’s Future (1953) where he was published alongside other big names of the era such as John W. Campbell, Rosalie Moore, L. Sprague de Camp, and Arthur C. Clarke.

The whole volume was of course mainly dedicated to the ways in which the authors imagined science fiction would impact society [3], including such titles as Science Fiction: Preparation for the Age of Science (Clarke), Science Fiction and Sanity in an Age of Crisis (Philip Wylie), and Science Fiction, Morals, and Religion (Gerald Heard).  Asimov’s own contribution, Social Science Fiction, is perhaps most notable for its effort at a taxonomy of science fiction stories – which results in his assertion that there are ultimately three categories of science fiction story: Gadget, Adventure, and Social.  To illustrate, he imagines three 19th century authors writing about an “imaginary” device they tentatively call an “automobile”:

“Writer X spends most of his time describing how the machine would run, explaining the workings of an internal-combustion engine, painting a word-picture of the struggles of the inventor, who after numerous failures, comes up with a successful model. The climax of the yarn is the drama of the machine, chugging its way along at the gigantic speed of twenty miles an hour, possibly beating a horse and carriage which have been challenged to a race. This is gadget science fiction. […] 

 “Writer Y invents the automobile in a hurry, but now there is a gang of ruthless crooks intent on stealing this valuable invention. First they steal the inventor's beautiful daughter, whom they threaten with every dire eventuality but rape (in these adventure stories, girls exist to be rescued and have no other uses). The inventor's young assistant goes to the rescue. He can accomplish his purpose only by the use of the newly perfected automobile. He dashes into the desert at an unheard-of speed of twenty miles an hour to pick up the girl who otherwise would have died of thirst if he had relied on a horse, however rapid and sustained the horse's gallop. This is adventure science fiction. […] 

 “Writer Z has the automobile already perfected. A society exists in which it is already a problem. Because of the automobile, a gigantic oil industry has grown up, highways have been paved across the nation, America has become a land of travelers, cities have spread into the suburbs—and what do we do about automobile accidents? Men, women, and children are being killed by automobiles faster than by artillery shells or airplane bombs. What can be done? What is the solution? This is social science fiction.” (Asimov, "Social Science Fiction")

This can all of course be neatly summarized:

• Gadget story: describes how some hypothetical thing might work.
• Adventure story: describes how some hypothetical thing might be used to solve a problem.
• Social story: describes what society might look like when some hypothetical thing exists.

As anyone familiar with Asimov's work and his advocacy for SF to aim for literary achievement might predict, his essay largely advocates for the social story as being the pinnacle.

There are a couple of curious things about this position though, even ignoring the quibble (which I'm sure the Good Doctor would actually have agreed with) that it's a rare story indeed that neatly falls into just one of these categories.

One of the first thing that springs to mind is that, while Asimov doesn't obviously dismiss other kinds of fiction as unworthy, it's clear that in his opinion "social SF" is best placed to reach the "heights" of literary fiction.

While I'm right alongside Dr. Asimov in agreeing that social SF can be much harder to write, and certainly requires more writing skill than simply sketching out a neat idea in a flashy fiction wrapper, even in the era he was writing in and before it should have been obvious: the basic fact that writing a saleable story of the first two species doesn't require the type of literary skills Asimov advocated for in SF doesn't actually preclude their application.

I'm not of course suggesting that Isaac Asimov was ignorant of what came before him - on the contrary, looking at his early work in particular you can almost see the impact of previous writers in its inverse: Asimov's prose is consciously direct and unornamented, and while he develops over the course of his remarkably prolific career [4] even to the end his stories lack so much in the way of literary flourish that he has proven a slippery target for the ordinary literary critic. [5] For many, this is a huge plus: in fact, the ruthlessly plot-and-idea oriented writing that is Asimov’s hallmark is one of the things that made him so popular. [6] I’m not even suggesting that Asimov was himself without literary skill – in fact, despite constantly breaking cardinal rules of fiction (minimize exposition, show don’t tell, write natural, believable dialogue, and others) he demonstrates that he’s capable of some amazing characterization at important points in his plots (look at Liar! for example, or Second Foundation), not to mention the skillful way in which he contrived the narrative of (especially) longer tales, nesting plots and snapping together timelines in fascinating non-linear ways. [7]

No, Asimov certainly knew what he was about in developing his personal style, and I feel sure he had a good grasp of what had come before (indeed, what was still being produced by his peers when he started and into the 50s).  Where I disagree with him is really in his own words, which he gives us in his 3 paragraph author’s note at the beginning of Nemesis (1989) [8]:

“I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing – to be ‘clear’. I have given up all thought of writing poetically or symbolically or experimentally [9], or in any of the other modes that might (if I were good enough) get me a Pulitzer prize.  I would write merely clearly and in this way establish a warm relationship between myself and my readers, and the professional critics –Well, they can do whatever they wish.”

You see, he is making a fundamental mistake here, I think – eschewing poetry and symbol and “art” in writing isn’t the only way to achieve clarity.  Certainly, it’s easy to become unclear if you rely too heavily on these things, but the bright imagery of Leigh Brackett’s descriptions, the rich language of Jack Vance’s satirical tweaks are anything but unclear in my mind.  And this mistake is where I think he gets his sense that social SF is where the genre is best placed to achieve literary quality.

He has taken the stance that only through clarity – by which he specifically means “unadorned writing” – can good SF stories be told (at least by him) and a relationship built with the readers.  From the perspective of this stance his idea that social SF has the best potential for literary quality makes perfect sense, I think, but it’s because the “artistic flourishes” he chose to avoid are what give stories of the first two varieties life, and his own style was in fact best adapted for painting the complex future stories he ultimately went on to write in his Robot series and in the Foundation books.

But this brings me to my second point: that I think Asimov’s idea that social SF is the realm in which science fiction was best able to aspire to literary achievement betrays the “class angst” shared by so many genre writers. 

In trying to find ways in which SF might “one day” aspire to literary greatness, Asimov makes himself complicit in placing SF – and other “genre” writing – as somehow automatically unliterary…and by extension unworthy.  In arguing for literary merit in SF he flies the flag high, but in the same motion tears it down again, somehow blind to the fact that SF was already literary: authors like Mary Shelley, Arthur Conan Doyle, Francis Stevens, Abraham Merritt and many others had already proven that, contemporaries of Asimov like Catherine Moore and Leigh Brackett [10] or the better known Ray Bradbury were still proving that, while they might not reach the heights every time (who does!) they were fully capable of it.

So where does this self-consciousness come from in genre?

I think it’s clear:

Somewhere along the line we have been convinced that stories that “merely” paint a picture of a complex object or scenario don’t count as literature.

Somewhere along the line we have been taught that stories that “merely” recounts an adventure don’t count either.

Genre writing – and science fiction in particular – have quite a lot of these kinds of stories, so obviously they don’t count as literature, right?

But of course we accept the military fantasy of the Illiad as literature, we accept the satirical travels of Gulliver as literature, we accept prose poems (which are surely no more than vivid descriptions of a scene, of a feeling), and Shakespeare’s murder mysteries (and what did you think Macbeth and Hamlet were?), we accept Beowulf, and most ironically we accept things like Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and Poe and Welles and Doyle and (ahem) Shelley as literature.

It’s long past time we realised that it isn’t (necessarily) the writing that makes people dismiss SF&F, detective stories, westerns, romance, etc as unworthy – it’s the formats they’ve been traditionally associated with.  Formats that were cheap, mass produced, and hungry for as much content as they could get: pulps.

Yes, this format paid little and produced a lot – not only was it hard for a writer to make a living [11] unless they produced astounding volumes for a multitude of venues, but the publications themselves had a challenge: they had to be cheap enough for nearly anyone to afford, they had to be substantial enough to seem good value for money, and they needed to produce often enough to remain visible in an incredibly competitive market.  These two factors pushed authors and publishers to pump out enormous volumes of text each and every month, so while the best writers could produce truly amazing work the fact was that any random story was probably merely mediocre. [12]

The economics of this era colours our perceptions and and the attitudes of people of the time, though I feel sure that there was an element of elitism involved as well: for the most part the pulps were dismissed as “yellow journals” without interest to authors who could publish in “legitimate” ways – and beneath the notice of the academy.  It wasn’t that there were no literary quality authors writing for the pulps, it was that they were tainted by turning to the pulps to facilitate their desire to write a kind of story that has captivated human beings for as long as there have been stories. [13]

Interestingly, I can see this phenomenon emerging again with the explosion of digital media.  It will be interesting to see if we can overcome the prejudices of our own era to see the gems hidden in the digital pulps.

--30--

1. Amazingly, published a mere 3 years after he had been inspired to try his hand at SF writing Nightfall was already Asimov’s 32nd story, though apparently only his 20th published (admittedly a remarkable acceptance rate).

2. Although little talked about today, Brentnor himself was an interesting character, whose career included writing propaganda to be sent to Japan during WW2 and membership in The Order of the Trapezoid in the 50s.  Yes, that one.  In SF, he’s mainly remembered today for his symposia and essay collections on the craft of writing it.

3. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there seem to be a few Futurians in the credits…

4. Seriously: 500 books in 54 years? Even with story collections included that's remarkable. More astoundingly, he seems to have produced more than 100 of them just in his last 10 years!

5. Though not entirely impossible: Professor Emeritus James Gunn (University of Kansas/English Literature) seems to have done quite well, for one.

6. In an article published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine (July 1980) Gunn noted two very interesting points about Asimov’s style: character is almost never significant, and the plot is driven forward in functional dialogue rather than action.  To quote his summary of the style: “The robot stories, and as a matter of fact almost all Asimov fiction – play themselves on a relatively bare stage.”  When I first read this comment I had an interesting thought: could it be that Asimov’s style reflected the “laboratory aesthetic” of his early era – the 40s and 50s? Anyone who has actually worked in a lab would of course sneer at the ideal as fantasy, but there can be no doubt that the whole minimalist lab filled with expanses of gleaming stainless-steel counters broken only by the occasional sleek machine and lit with the clear white of fluorescent strips was a powerful image.

7. Not that this is universally loved – personally, although I’m not a big Asimov fan (I like rich language and characterization) I think this is the most intriguing aspect of his writing, the way he could fit things together like the parts of some complex machine and make them mesh smoothly.  In light of his incredible output, the skill involved here is amazing.

8. In which, it should be said, he also takes the time to warn the reader that a) the story doesn’t (yet) connect to any of his other universes, and b) that the narrative structure is “odd”

9. And what does he think his non-linear intersecting timelines are if not experimental!?

10. Though their work was losing visibility at the time Asimov wrote his article.

11. We’re so much more fortunate now…

12. Thinking just of the venues that survived – because they realized that no matter how hungry they were to fill their pages, publishing actually bad work would be suicide.

13. Ironically, Ray Bradbury reputedly wanted to be a pulp legend like his mentors Moore, Kuttner, Brackett and Hamilton – and his failure to achieve his goal is a big part of what allowed his writing to be taken as literary rather than dismissed as pulp.  The same might be said of Orwell, whose best known works should surely be filed under SF&F.

Leigh Brackett - Queen of Space Opera

Leigh Brackett
(from Amazing Stories July 1941)

I confess: I am a big fan of old-style space operas, planetary adventure romances, and so-called science fantasy.

While I rarely if ever write that sort of science fiction, I can gobble up some of the old classics in one sitting and it's by no means difficult to understand why: these stories are pure fun.

Still, they're challenging, and it's not hard to understand why some people look down on them.  While the basic rule is "there are no rules" and scientific facts can go out the window when the story demands it, to be truly successful these sorts of stories do have to meet three touchstones:

1. The characters have to draw on key archetypes that resonate with the reader.

2. The settings must be internally consistent.

3. While deus ex machina events and "rule changes" can occur, it can't be haphazard: they must be dramatically consistent.

These kinds of stories were huge in early science fiction, and maintained a strong following even through the "hard" era of the 50s and 60s (when the market for new work in her style seemed to dry up) and as New Wave style came on the scene in the 60s and 70s. And the queen of space opera and planetary romance was Leigh Brackett, who was born 100 years ago today!

Brackett's impact still echoes in science fiction today: she entered the pulp markets near the end of their decades-long ferment of experimentation, took a genre that had been largely dismissed and sneered at, and elevated the space opera and planetary romance subgenres to an artform.  Just as we were learning how little like Burroughs' vision Mars and Venus were, she was building an intricate universe around the touchstones that make this kind of "science fantasy" not just readable but un-put-downable even in the face of obvious scientific impossibilities.

But she was by no means only a science fiction author - in fact although her first sales were SF short fiction (her first story appears to have been "Martian Quest" published in Astounding Science Fiction Feb 1940) she published other pulp genres as well and her first full novel was a hard-boiled crime novel No Good From a Corpse , which led to a series of other hard-boiled and noir works, including a number of screen plays.  Ultimately, though, she was best known for her SF stories and novels, especially those set in her version of our solar system.

Brackett's Mars and Venus started with the image painted by earlier authors like ERB - Mars as a marginal desert world of ancient and decaying civilization, Venus a wet and tropical world peopled by brash hunters - but her solar system was intricately interconnected, and many of her stories dealt with themes like the conquest of the frontier and the interplay of cultures, including the impact of colonization.  Her stories and novels sold well right up into the mid-50s, when the "harder" styles dominated and led to the death of many "sword and planet" and science fantasy venues, but she was still looked to for excellence in her chosen sub-genres.  She mastered the art of internal consistency and resonant archetype characters in a way that draws readers in.  So powerful was her mastery of these epic settings and archetype characters that L. Sprague de Camp famously bemoaned the fact that he had gone to Lin Carter first to co-author new Conan stories, saying that in retrospect Brackett's mastery of gloriously barbaric characters would have been a better fit.

After a decade writing mainly for film and TV, Brackett returned to her planetary romances in the mid-60s, and produced sporadically for the next decade until her death at the age of 62 in 1977 - in the midst of working on the screenplay for the film most often chosen as the best Star Wars episode: The Empire Strikes Back.

The debt modern SFF owes to writers like Brackett is huge, and yet she languishes largely forgotten - sadly, between The Great Culling of backlist titles in the 80s and the dominance of gritty, grimdark sorts of science fiction in the decades since she simply hasn't had the time in the limelight that is her due.

But what about now?  Perhaps the idea of ancient, decadent civilizations on Mars and solar system spanning intrigue and adventure seems a little quaint in a market that swallows up hard science fiction films like Gravity and The Martian, but then look at the resurgence of popularity for television shows like Doctor Who.  Perhaps the time has come to dust off the old space operas, perhaps re-tune them for a more modern sensibility, and let the sheer spectacle wow us again.