Space Opera Noir from the Master!
Half Tarzan. Half Bogie from The Big Sleep (for which Leigh Brackett wrote the screenplay, along with that guy William Faulkner). After his parents died when he was an infant, Eric John Stark was raised by savage aliens on the Mercurian terminator. Whatever veneer of civilization Stark possesses is thin indeed.
But that's a good thing. For the universe Stark inhabits is a tough place all around—a cosmos where Mars and the planet Skaith make late-'30s Casablanca look like a gated retirement community! Stark is a hard man for hard-boiled times. He's literally noir, too—burned a permanent-midnight-black during his youth under Mercury's harsh sky.
This is wonder-filled, wonderful stuff. It's ERB meets Raymond Chandler—although Brackett truly is in a class by herself . Cynical motives. Politically seething, highly-complex worlds. Clandestine, desperate plots to throw off foreign masters—or just to make a buck off the general suffering of others.
And one man who survives everything bad life can throw at him—and emerges a hero.
Eric John Stark.
You won't regret this journey into Leigh Brackett's master-work. By the way, not only did Brackett co-write the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back, did you notice that the film was dedicated to her when it came out shortly after her death Clearly this is a story-teller who has had a world-shaping influence on modern times. Tap it at the source.
With a new introduction by Algis Budrys, a legend himself, and exciting new art by Doug Chaffee, the first of our two Leigh Brackett mega-volumes will feature the Stark novels set on the planet Skaith, starting with The Ginger Star, followed by The Hounds of Skaith and concluding with Reavers of Skaith. The entire "Eric John Stark" saga—including Edmond Hamilton's stories, and the one true collaboration between Edmond Hamilton and Leigh Brackett!
The Ginger Star: Volume I of The Book of Skaith
WHERE WAS SIMON ASHTON
Ashton had disappeared somewhere—somehow—on Skaith, the dying planet of
the Ginger Star, and Stark was determined to find him no matter what the cost.
Everyone on this exotic planet had heard of the strange Dark Man from another world, bur no one was talking. Not the Farers. Not the Wandsmen. Not even the Irnanese.
All clues led to the mysterious North-stronghold of the tyrannical Lords Protector whose impregnable castle fortress was guarded by the infamous telepathic North-hounds. And Stark was on his way, despite the price on his head and the fatal prophecy of a beautiful priestess . . .
"THERE'S ONLY ONE LEIGH BRACKET! AND THERE'S ONLY ONE ERIC JOHN STARK"BOTH STAND ALONE IN THEIR FIELD!""
RAY BRADBURY
The Hounds of Skaith: Volume II of The Book of Skaith
MORE BEAST THAN MAN
Stark has killed the king-dog Flay on the plains of Worldheart. Now he was the leader of the ferocious Northhounds—nine great white beasts that responded to his every command. But should they ever turn on him, the hounds could prove more deadly than any enemy on that hostile planet . . .
The Reavers of Skaith: Volume III of The Book of Skaith
A FUGITIVE ON SKAITH
Safe at last, or so Stark thought.
But before he could escape from the dying planet of the ginger star, he was betrayed by that treacherous Antarean Penkawr-Che. That villain amoung men intended to kill Stark, and this time there would be no escape. Or so Penkawr-Che thought.
Abandonded by friends and besieged by enemies, Stark was a fugitive once more. Running from all those who hunted him, he embarked on a nightmare journey through deadly jungles and across predator-infested seas to risk his life for those who hungered for his death!
The Secret of Sinharat
A BLOOD PRICE FOR IMMORTALITY
Eric John Stark was a hunted outlaw, a hard, merciless renegade with a twenty-year Moonprison sentence hanging over him. Men called him barbarian, wild man. Women called him beast.
But the Earth Police Control had a use for him, for they knew why he was on Mars. The Martian desert-tribesmen of Kesh and Shun had made alliance with the men of the Low Canals, and following the,banner of the enigmatic chieftain Kynon, who promised them eternal life, they would sweep out of the deserts and cast a storm of blood across the planet. Stark was one of the outlaw mercenaries who'd been asked to help lead them.
But if he could lead those men, perhaps he could also stop them. And if the rumors which filtered into Mars' civilized border towns had truth, this uprising had to be stopped—for those behind it were more powerful, and 'infinitely older, than the barbarian armies they would unleash.
People of the Talisman
LEIGH BRACKETT has always said that her stories about Mars had their inspiration in Edgar Rice Burroughs' Martian novels. I have no doubt that this is true, for nearly all of us can remember the first impact of those wonderful romances. However, from the haunting concept of a dying world of silent cities, she took off on her own, and her obsession with Celtic mythology and legend shows very clearly in her interplanetary tales.
She has been writing science-fiction for a long time now, since 1939, and also since 1944 she has been in and out of the Hollywood scene writing for moving pictures, chiefly for veteran producer Howard Hawks. Her first major screen assignment was to collaborate with William Faulkner on the script of the Humphry Bogart film, "The Big Sleep." For the last seven or eight years she has been leading a sort of double life. Two-fifths of the time has been spent in Hollywood, writing script on such films as "Rio Bravo" and "Hatari" for John Wayne. The other three-fifths of the time has been spent at a typewriter under the eaves of our old Ohio farmhouse, writing science-fiction and mysteries, with frequent interruptions to run a tractor, clear paths in the woods, and spray the orchard.
In science-fiction, she owed most to the late Henry Kuttner, who was a friend and advisor when she was trying to get started. He once spoke of her incurable romanticism. It still persists, and she maintains that when the first astronauts land on Mars they will find dead cities, fierce riders and wicked, beautiful queens . . . just as in this book.
—Edmond Hamilton
Stark and the Star Kings
THE LOST ONES
Laughing, she cast him down into the hideous depths, beneath the seas of flaming gas, to where dead blossoms swayed, whispering, over strangely jumbled ruins . . . .
But there he found the secret of her power, and came surging back—up from the depths, from the slime, the tortured swamps—to storm her forbidden temple and seek her within, death like a gift in his hand!
The Star Kings
"A STIRRING NOVEL OF THE FUTURE."
—Western Morning News
Flung across space and time by the sorcery of super-science, John Gordon exchanges bodies with Zarth Arn, Prince of the Mid-Galactic Empire 2000 centuries in the future!
Suddenly John is thrust into a last-ditch battle between the democratic Empire World and the tyranny of the Black Cloud regime. Only one weapon—the terrifying Disruptor—can win the struggle for the Empire Forces. But it is so powerful that unless John uses it correctly it could destroy not only the enemy but the cosmos.
Could his 20th Century mind cope with the technology of 200,000 years from now
Return to the Stars
KINGDOM OF THE STARS
John Gordon, twentieth century Earthman, is torn from his own time to a far distant future—a time when the entire galaxy is inhabited. But men do not rule the future; our race is only one among thousands, and many of those thousands are sworn enemies of humanity! Gordon , man of the past, is forced to form alliances with the men of the future in a desperate battle to save the human race from final annihilation . . .
Space Opera Noir from the Master!
Half Tarzan. Half Bogie from The Big Sleep (for which Leigh Brackett wrote the screenplay, along with that guy William Faulkner). After his parents died when he was an infant, Eric John Stark was raised by savage aliens on the Mercurian terminator. Whatever veneer of civilization Stark possesses is thin indeed.
But that's a good thing. For the universe Stark inhabits is a tough place all around—a cosmos where Mars and the planet Skaith make late-'30s Casablanca look like a gated retirement community! Stark is a hard man for hard-boiled times. He's literally noir, too—burned a permanent-midnight-black during his youth under Mercury's harsh sky.
This is wonder-filled, wonderful stuff. It's ERB meets Raymond Chandler—although Brackett truly is in a class by herself . Cynical motives. Politically seething, highly-complex worlds. Clandestine, desperate plots to throw off foreign masters—or just to make a buck off the general suffering of others.
And one man who survives everything bad life can throw at him—and emerges a hero.
Eric John Stark.
You won't regret this journey into Leigh Brackett's master-work. By the way, not only did Brackett co-write the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back, did you notice that the film was dedicated to her when it came out shortly after her death Clearly this is a story-teller who has had a world-shaping influence on modern times. Tap it at the source.
With a new introduction by Algis Budrys, a legend himself, and exciting new art by Doug Chaffee, the first of our two Leigh Brackett mega-volumes will feature the Stark novels set on the planet Skaith, starting with The Ginger Star, followed by The Hounds of Skaith and concluding with Reavers of Skaith. The entire "Eric John Stark" saga—including Edmond Hamilton's stories, and the one true collaboration between Edmond Hamilton and Leigh Brackett!
