Novel Review: The Ginger Star by Leigh Brackett

Apocryphal

The Ginger Star by Leigh Brackett, 1974, 186pp

I wasn't planning to write a review of this book, but my friend Ray noticed I was reading it and asked me to report, so here we are. Frankly, it was much better than I expected it do be. The Ginger Star was published in novel form in 1974, and based on a shorter version of the text that was serialized in Worlds of If.

This is a sword and planet tale set on the planet Skaith - an old, dying world under an old, dying, ginger-coloured star. The hero of our story is Eric John Stark, ostensibly an earth man, but raised by wolves and a loner. He's as much animal as man, by his own description. He arrives on Skaith from Pax, the administrative centre of the Galactic Union, in the first chapter because he's looking for a friend of his - a sort of father figure - named Simon Ashton. Ashton, a diplomat, has gone missing. This is an official mission for Stark, but also a personal one.

On Skaith, he finds a secretive body called The Lords Protector, some kind of immortals who rule the place from a distance. Their captains and soldiers are The Wandsmen and The Farers, basically your everyman tyrants on the ground. When Stark arrives on Skaith, his questions about Ashton immediately attract the wrong kind of attention, and in good old S&S fashion, he finds himself stumbling from one adventure to the next in his search, all the while trying (and often failing) to avoid 'the law', such as it is. Along the way, he meets various people with curious customs, including refugees, rebels, misanthropic naturists, feral fairies, and more. A theme emerges in the telling about a conflict between people's desire to remain on their endemic but dying planet, or seek a new life in the stars. Stark, being a star-man, becomes a symbol of change.

Although this is a sword-and-planet type story, Stark actually uses multiple means to solve his problems, very few of which involve a sword. There's perhaps a little too much reliance on Stark getting captured and needing to escape, but this is balanced by a pretty nice twist near the end.

The pace is brisk, but the writing is very good for this kind of literature. The setting is pretty well realized, and there are some nice bits of description. Overall, I thought there were quite a few interesting ideas in here, and there's a fair amount of good content for a 186 page pocket book. It's definitely a cut above Burrough's Mars books, in my opinion. I see bits of Vance and T.J. Bass in the world-building and events.

Here are a few of the good bits:

Setting:
"...He did not much like the look of the sea... Skaith had no moon, so there were no tides to stir it, and there was a milky, greasy sheen to the surface. Skaith's old ginger-colored sun was going down in a senile fury of crimson and molten brass, laying streaks of unhealthy brilliance across the water. The sea seemed a perfect habitat for the creatures who were said to live in it."

Quirky Culture:
"There was a fire burning inside, and the half-dozen men and women Stark had seen before with Yarrod sat by it in a close group, heads together, arms intertwined. They neither moved nor looked up as Stark and Yarrod entered."
"Pretty good, aren't they?" said Yarrod. "Or do you know?"
Stark clawed back through his mental file on Skaith. "They're pretending to be a pod. And you're supposed to be a pod-master."
A pod, according to the file, was a collection of people so thoroughly sensitized by a species of group therapy that they no longer existed as individuals but only as independent parts of a single organism. The pod-master trained them, then kept them fed and washed and combed until such time as the hour arrived for Total Fulfillment. That was when one of the components died and the whole organism went, finding escape at last.

Little Sisters of the Sun:
"A band of women forced their way to the steps and began to climb. They wore black bags over their heads, covering their faces. Otherwise they were naked, and their skin was like tree-bark from long exposure.
"Give us the Dark Man, Mordach!" they cried. "Let us take him to the mountain top and feed his strength to the Old Sun."
Mordach held up his staff to halt them. He spoke to them gently, and Stark asked, "What are they?"
"They live wild in the mountains. Once in a while, when they get hungry, they come in. They worship the sun, and any man they can manage to capture they sacrifice. They believe they alone keep the Old Sun alive."
Halk laughed. "Look at the greedy beasts! They'd like to have all of us."

A Dying World:
"And old road," said Amnir. "Once, when Old Sun was young, all this land was rich and there were great cities. This road served them. Folk didn't ride on beasts in those days, or drive clumsy wagons. They had machines, bright and shining things as swift as the wind. Or if they wanted to they could take wing and rush through the sky like shooting stars. Now, we plod, as you see, across the cold corpse of our world."
"For what purpose," asked Stark, "do we plod?"
Amnir had refused to tell them what he intended to do with them.

On Belonging to a place, however doomed:
He glared at the stars as though he hated them.
"One is born on a world. It may not be perfect, but it's the world one knows, the only world. One adjusts, one survives. Then suddenly, it appears there is no need to struggle because one has a choice of many worlds. It's confusing. It shakes the whole foundation of life. Why do we need it?"
"It isn't a question of of whether or not you need it," said Stark. "It's there. You can use it or not, as you please."
"But it makes everything so pointless! Take the Thyrans. I've heard all their ballads, The Long Wandering, The Destruction of the Red Hunters, The Coming of Strayer, ...and so on. The long dark years, the courage, the dying, and the pain, and finally the triumph. And now we see that if they had only known it, they could have run away to a better world and avoided all that." Amnir shook his head. "I don't like it. I believe in a man staying by what he knows."

I'm looking forward to the next installment!