On Leigh Brackett’s birthday (yikes! over a month ago now)  I said I was reading The Starmen of Llyrdis but wasn’t gong to be able to finiish it by her birthday.  I said I would finish it, and I finally did last week. Classes started last week, I had a writing assignment due over the weekend, and I’m just now getting to the review.

That’s the cover of the ebook, which is how I read it this time. The picture is a little misleading. There is a female character who serves as the love interest, but she is absent from much of the book.

This was one of the last stories Brackett wrote for the pulps. It was published in Startling Stories in 1951. Byu this time, she was working as a screenwriter in Hollywood. I’m not sure if she wrote this between assignments or if there was a writer’s strike or what.  Perhaps the death of the pulps and changing tastes in science fictoin had something to do with it.

At any rate, Stamen was considered a novel in those days, and it still fits that definition.

It’s the story of Michael Trehearne, who was born of Earth but is really a member of a race known as the Vardda. They live on the planet Llyrdis and have a special mutation that allows them to survive faster than light travel.

No one else is allowed to have it. This of course causes a great deal of resentment among the races who don’t have it that the Vardda trade with.

The man who developed the process which created the mutation was named Orthis. He wanted to give it to the galaxy. The Vardda were opposed to that. As long as they control the process, they would be masters of the galaxy. Orthis was hunted.

The common belief is that he survived the hunt. His  ship is out there somewhere with the  details of the process stored in it. That was a thousand years ago.

Orthists, those who want to find his ship and give the mutation to the galaxy, have to stay secret. Otherwise, they are arrested and sent into exile.

Of course, you know at some point Trehearne is goiing to go looking for Orthis’s ship.

Starmen isn’t the best known of Brackett’s works, although all the Brackett trademarks are there. An outsider trying to fit in. A romance that is strained and appears to be doomed. Strange planets and exotic aliens.

I read the paperback reprint in high school but that was [redacted] years ago, I remembered almost nothing about the book. Maybe it was the way I wasn’t able to finish it in a couple of sittings and only made a few pages of progress some days, but I thought the book drug in the middle. Once I was able to give it my full attention, it moved more quickly.

Perhaps Starmen isn’t as well-known because this book isn’t part of her solar system that she established in Planet Stories in the forties.

It’s still worth reading, and the ebook is only four bucks as I write this.