Other than a brief foray into the Kugel book and a bit more with Passionate Marriage, I've been plugging steadily through The Sand Kings of Mars. I'm reading the third Eric John Stark story right now--I hadn't realized that she'd only written three (other than the Skaith books, much later). In some ways he's a Tarzan-like character, but I love how economically she skips over his early childhood in about 4 sentences of dialogue. It gives us the essentials (raised by aboriginals on Mercury who were killed off by miners, Stark was caged by those miners, then freed by Earthman Ashton and brought into civilization).
We skip a lot of the tedious details that, not only don't we care about (how did Stark end up with aboriginals? How did Ashton educate him?), but would at best weaken the story. The story of how Tarzan learned to read is pretty silly, and his learning to talk is even worse, and, in any case, we just want to jump to the scenes where he does things like lay a bet with the Englishmen that he can walk into the jungle and bring out a dead lion. This isn't deep literature, and Brackett knows how to focus on what's important for her story.
Brackett, of course, is constantly lumped in with C. L. Moore, since they were the 2 major women sf writers in the pulps, and they both did the space opera thing, as well as having a strain of feminism in their work. I probably need to read Moore again, but I think I like her stories better. Moore tends to be a bit more surprising about who's good and evil, and her stories have a more melancholy touch to them, where the hero may well be worse off at the end than at the beginning. (I'm thinking specifically of "Shambleau" and "Black God's Kiss," here, which I think are fantastic stories).
Maybe a trip down memory lane by re-reading the Northwest Smith stories is called for...
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