--- In
rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Moore"
<moorich@...> wrote:
> One other suggestion, perhaps out of left field, are
some of the
> stories by Leigh Brackett from the pulps of the
1940s. Brackett
was
> a great admirer of Chandler and herself wrote a
hardboiled
detective
> novel so good that Howard Hawks hired her to work
with Faulkner on
> the adaptation of THE BIG SLEEP. Something of
Chandler's stayed
> with her in her science fantasy stories. Chandler
and Brackett
were
> both romantics and favored the lone hero on a
difficult quest.
>
> As I was thinking about this I pulled down a
Brackett collection to
> read the introduction by Michael Moorcock and found
it very
> insightful. "She took as much from the likes of
James M. Cain, who
> came from Maryland to use the sharp street language
of Southern
> California as his inspiration, as she did from
(Edgar Rice)
> Burroughs. She antedated cyberpunk by some fifty
years, by
bringing
> the spare, laconic prose and psychically wounded
heros of
Hemingway,
> Hammett and Chandler into the sf pulp...It was why
she could move
so
> easily between private eyes with a nasty past,
star-weary spacers
> and moody cactus-cussers. And, of course, her lone
outlaws, living
> on the edge of the civilised world, frequently
commissioned to dare
> the unknown, are not a million miles from Fenimore
Cooper's Natty
> Bumppo..."
>
> Brackett's brooding loner hero is exemplified in her
stories of
Eric
> John Stark. She wrote in a sub-form sometimes called
science
> fantasy as it has elements of both SF and fantasy.
In clumsy hands
> this can turn into a silly, juvenile mess but
Brackett was a master
> and her best stories are transporting.
Except that Brackett could write and Fenimore Cooper
couldn't. Her space opera was as sophisticated as the form
has been, hugely influential on Poul Anderson, Charles
Harness and the other important "next-gen" writers in that
form...if I'd read enough of the latter day literary New
space opera folk to say, I'd be surprised not to see her
influence there, as well. She really was as good as Richard
suggests (and I hadn't read this yet when noting the use of
the term "science fantasy"--she really does need to be
mentioned when discussing that form, as do C. L. Moore and
Fritz Leiber...both of whom also wrote noirish or hardboiled
CF work from time to time).
Todd Mason
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 26 Oct 2007 EDT