2016 read #23: People of the Talisman by Leigh Brackett.

People of the Talisman by Leigh Brackett
126 pages
Published 1964 (wholly revised and expanded version of original novella, Black Amazon of Mars, published 1951)
Read March 24
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

Spoilers for the end, if you can have spoilers for a half-century-old sci-fi novella.

A second Eric John Stark adventure, recycling much the same Old Mars pulp formula of The Secret of Sinharat, with the addition of a ruthless female warlord with world-conquering ambitions, as well as the final remnants of an ancient alien race driven to nihilism and recreational murder through sheer cultural senescence. The latter is a logical enough endpoint of the pervasive soft Objectivism of mid-century sci-fi and sword-and-sorcery, which recurs in the common motif of populations turned weak, soft, or twisted through coddling, centralized authority, and lack of manly challenge. Logical endpoint or not, I must say I did not expect the story to end with an alien carnival of murder and mutilation through a city made of blades -- and anything that jolts one of these stories out of their pulp predictability is fine by me, even if the basis of the twist is something I find utterly ridiculous. The female warlord, furthermore, is an archetype I never would have expected to encounter in a tale of such early vintage. My experience of pulp fantasy has been filtered largely through the "particular enthusiasms" of Lin Carter and his Year's Best Fantasy anthologies of the late '70s, and what few women appeared in those testosterone-addled relics were evil queens, conniving sorceresses, and innocent yet pliable damsels with wardrobe malfunctions. A competent woman warrior who almost gets the better of our hero, and ends the book never defeated or symbolically "put in her place" by him, was a small but unlooked-for pleasure.

Speaking of archaic gender norms: Wikipedia has extensive write-ups of Talisman as well as Sinharat, comprised largely of chapter-by-chapter comparisons between the two 1964 novellas and their earlier pulp-magazine prototypes. Amid all those words devoted to cataloguing textual changes between the two versions, there's exactly one line opining that the "murderously insane aliens" of the final twist might be evidence of an assertion that the 1964 fix-up of Talisman might be the work of Brackett's husband, Edmond Hamilton. Wikipedia goes into no further detail, so my first impression is that the "Hamilton expanded the stories" conspiracy theory is just a bizarre jab at a female author, motivated by garden variety misogyny.