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Thralls of the Endless Night: Planet Stories, Fall 1943
Planet Stories - Fall 1943, published by Fiction House included great material by classic science fiction authors.
128 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 2011
About the author
Leigh Brackett
405 books251 followersLeigh 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 28, 2020
Already a more mature short novel. A "tribe" composed of Hans, Officers and a Captain marooned on a strange place, close to a Ship, who have to eke out a living with great difficulties in a difficult and hostile environment. There are also Piruts (all corruptions for more ancient words) who always try to get the supposed benefit of living close to the Ship.
Still very naif, but the story is built slightly better; feels the age, though.
A curiosity, we never get to know the "yellow" girl's name, funny.
Still very naif, but the story is built slightly better; feels the age, though.
A curiosity, we never get to know the "yellow" girl's name, funny.
September 4, 2024
“There was silence in the room again. Kirk felt it, thick and choky. His heart kicked against his ribs. He was scared, suddenly. He’d never talked that much before. It was the baby, crying on the cold, that set him off. Suppose someone had heard him. Suppose he was reported for a mutineer. That meant the sucking-plant …
‘Listen!’ said Ma Kirk.
Nerves crackled icily all over Kirk’s skin. But there wasn’t any need to listen. The noise rolled in over them. It hit rock faces polished by the wind, and the drifts of crystalline pebbles, and it splintered into a tangle of echoes that came from everywhere at once, but there was was no mistaking it. No need even to use sensitive earcups to locate its source.
The great alarm gong by the Captains hut.
Kirk began to move, very swiftly and quietly. Before the third gong stroke hit them he had his spear and his sling and was already lifting aside the door curtain.”
“Thralls of the Endless Night” is a story written by Leigh Brackett. As usual, even when not writing her best work, there is a gripping brilliance to her writing that is striking…not that it’s perfect. Some of the sci-fi bits above hit my weird bone hard, while the prose without would have felt far stronger.
But they are necessary. As often is the case for classic sci-fi stories, there’s a lot of world building - here the reader is transported to a world where likely a ship long ago landed or crashed and the survivors have devolved into a nearly cave man like society, with dwindling high tech resources while the young literally fight over meatless bones out of hunger. And it is a society with caste systems, descended from the original escilion of the ship from seemingly generations ago.
The story is pretty griping and heavy with pathos. It should be noted that this story was written long ago, in a very different time. Some parts will probably be a bit jarring to readers in the middling 21st century. Not that we haven’t read or seen much more jarring things, but anyway, if it were written today I’d think it might get some trigger warnings or something. Though Brackett obviously was a woman, it is often commented that she wrote like a male author. This piece, like many of her others, backs that up.
Not that it’s bad, if you can get passed a few things. Overall this is a very imaginative story full of strong feelings and actions with a plot that is just twisty enough exploring an interesting premise. I’d rate it 3.5 yellow captains daughters out of 5, and I muddle between bumping it up to 4 or lowering it to 3, but will raise it to 4 in the end.
‘Listen!’ said Ma Kirk.
Nerves crackled icily all over Kirk’s skin. But there wasn’t any need to listen. The noise rolled in over them. It hit rock faces polished by the wind, and the drifts of crystalline pebbles, and it splintered into a tangle of echoes that came from everywhere at once, but there was was no mistaking it. No need even to use sensitive earcups to locate its source.
The great alarm gong by the Captains hut.
Kirk began to move, very swiftly and quietly. Before the third gong stroke hit them he had his spear and his sling and was already lifting aside the door curtain.”
“Thralls of the Endless Night” is a story written by Leigh Brackett. As usual, even when not writing her best work, there is a gripping brilliance to her writing that is striking…not that it’s perfect. Some of the sci-fi bits above hit my weird bone hard, while the prose without would have felt far stronger.
But they are necessary. As often is the case for classic sci-fi stories, there’s a lot of world building - here the reader is transported to a world where likely a ship long ago landed or crashed and the survivors have devolved into a nearly cave man like society, with dwindling high tech resources while the young literally fight over meatless bones out of hunger. And it is a society with caste systems, descended from the original escilion of the ship from seemingly generations ago.
The story is pretty griping and heavy with pathos. It should be noted that this story was written long ago, in a very different time. Some parts will probably be a bit jarring to readers in the middling 21st century. Not that we haven’t read or seen much more jarring things, but anyway, if it were written today I’d think it might get some trigger warnings or something. Though Brackett obviously was a woman, it is often commented that she wrote like a male author. This piece, like many of her others, backs that up.
Not that it’s bad, if you can get passed a few things. Overall this is a very imaginative story full of strong feelings and actions with a plot that is just twisty enough exploring an interesting premise. I’d rate it 3.5 yellow captains daughters out of 5, and I muddle between bumping it up to 4 or lowering it to 3, but will raise it to 4 in the end.
February 11, 2024
Good Leigh Brackett. It's missing the poetry, the language I associate with her solar system tales. It's still a wonderful read about communities descended from a crash generations ago and struggling on the brink of extinction.
I wonder about the end. History would lead me to believe that having resources won't solve any of humanities problems in the long term. That means, like all LB tales, it ends on a bit of grey note-neither happy or overtly tragic, but somewhere in between.
This was not the best edited edition, the errors are a little distracting.
I wonder about the end. History would lead me to believe that having resources won't solve any of humanities problems in the long term. That means, like all LB tales, it ends on a bit of grey note-neither happy or overtly tragic, but somewhere in between.
This was not the best edited edition, the errors are a little distracting.
March 4, 2022
A short sci-fi piece that's deeper than one would think by the page count and era it was written.
February 25, 2024
My full video review is available to view here: https://youtu.be/AizhXr5nwtw?si=Um8I1...
Nothing deep or difficult with this one. Just a classic space opera from the early days of science fiction pulp magazines. Pretty good story, if too short. I would love to have seen this longer and get into the characters more.
-Gregory Kerkman
Nothing deep or difficult with this one. Just a classic space opera from the early days of science fiction pulp magazines. Pretty good story, if too short. I would love to have seen this longer and get into the characters more.
-Gregory Kerkman
January 13, 2016
Glorious. So glorious.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews