2015 read #21: The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett.

The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett
214 pages
Published 1955
Read from April 22 to April 24
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

This book follows the likes of C. M. Kornbluth's "The Cosmic Expense Account" (reviewed here) in dumbfounding me by how goddamn good science fiction from the 1950s could be. My first exposure to Brackett (aside from, of course, The Empire Strikes Back, the first draft of which she penned), The Long Tomorrow anticipates the gentle dexterity and surety of character that distinguishes Le Guin at her best. If we put Tomorrow head-to-head with the most obvious parallel in Le Guin's work -- a post-apocalyptic novel grounded in anthropology, in which a young man out of place traces a hazardous journey west from the Ohio Valley to find a rumored remnant of the lost civilization -- Brackett, amazingly, beats Le Guin, and handily. To be fair, even Le Guin admitted that City of Illusions was one of her weaker works; I would never claim that Tomorrow could best "Solitude" (reviewed here). But the anthropological slant of Brackett's world, and the deeply felt humanity of her central characters, make comparisons to Le Guin hard to resist -- even as they elevate Tomorrow (and Brackett) to a level where comparisons are scarcely necessary.

Tomorrow steals up on thorny questions of faith and fundamentalism, the destiny bound up in how we're raised to think and see the world, developing them so expertly within the conflicts and the character arcs that they startle with their elegance and power in the denouement. In many ways the outline of the plot is predictable -- you know going in almost exactly what each turn in Len's journey of dissolution, acceptance, and redemption will be -- yet I can't help but admire Brackett's artistry in how she brings those turns about, always veering from the expected course and (to hopelessly muddle the metaphor) turning the screws on Len just that extra bit more before (again with the metaphor) opening a window once the door has been shut. The result is genuine tension. You know the main character isn't going to die midway through a sci-fi novel from 1955, but there were moments when I wasn't at all sure about that. I genuinely cared about Len, and his evolution from starry-eyed New Mennonite boy to brawling port town tough to embittered and cynical man standing (seemingly) against the world is startlingly believable and true to his character, and gives Tomorrow a sense of scale far more epic than its pagecount -- not to mention how it suggests shades of Blood Meridian.

I'm being conservative on my (arbitrary) rating, held back by that aforementioned sense of predictability as well as the usual social trappings that plague any book from this time (the helplessness of women, the drunken destructive rage of the one character of color). Nonetheless, this is a superb classic that merits a revival.