The Coming of the Terrans, Leigh Brackett

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language: English
country: USA
year: 1967
form: short fiction
genre(s): science fiction
dates read: 3.9.23-10.9.23

Leigh Brackett’s The Coming of the Terrans is a fascinating, though flawed, collection of planetary romance short fiction originally published between 1948 and 1964, about encounters between Terrans and the inhabitants of Mars, spanning forty years of time in-universe.

its primary flaw, which runs through the collection, to different extents in different stories, is its attachment to the idea that civilizations have lifespans — Mars is a “dying” world whose civilizations are long past their “prime”, complete with a Gibbon-esque obsession with decadence and vice. we can also see the influence of racism on the collection — there’s a certain Orientalism, especially, that runs throughout (sometimes foregrounded, sometimes just in a general sense of exoticism).

having said that, the fact that the stories span some dramatic political and social developments in the United States I think is reflected in the shifts apparent from the earliest story, “The Beast-Jewel of Mars” (1948) to the last two stories, and especially “The Road to Sinharat” (1963). even the two stories from the ’50s offer a more nuanced portrayal of Martian civilization. one particularly striking thing throughout all of the stories but the first is that the word “human” almost always refers to the majority (or plurality) sentient species on Mars and not to Terrans. that was a cool little rhetorical move: while the stories are all narrated from the perspective of Terrans, it is Mars and its humans who are at the center of the collection.

in publication order:

• “The Beat-Jewel of Mars” is about a Terran man who wants to experience the true, impossibly ancient form of a Martian practice called “Shanga”, which induces “de-evolution”, and finds himself caught up in a kind of gladiatorial experiment organized by Martians from which he must rescue the Terran woman he loved, who vanished several years before. this is the most obviously racist of the stories by a wide margin.
• “The Last Days of Shandakor” (1952) already begins to complicate this: a Terran comes to the haunted, dying Martian city of Shandakor and finds its inhabitants, whose aquifer has finally run dry, preparing to be overrun by the “barbarians” (as they see them) gathered outside the city walls. he decides to take matters into his own colonial-chauvinist hands and ends up making things worse.
• “Mars Minus Bisha” (1954) has a similar theme to “The Last Days of Shandakor” — a young virologist doing field work in the Martian desert finds himself saddled with a child exiled from her village as the cause of a mysterious plague, which soon begins affecting him instead. he refuses to euthanize her but eventually discovers (too late) that the Martian claim he regarded as “superstition” has a scientific basis.
• “The Road to Sinharat” is by far the standout story in the collection: a Terran scientist races against his superiors and rising political tensions to find evidence that will help him stop the “Mars Rehabilitation Project”, a massive terraforming project designed to increase Martians’ “standard of living”. I’ll talk more about this in a bit.
• “Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon” (1964) is overall a somewhat underwhelming vaguely cosmic horror story about a Terran “cultural advisor” coming face to face with a religious ritual that “scientists” believe(d) to have been a racist exaggeration of early “explorers”. this was a bit of a step back from “The Road to Sinharat”, but there’s also something, I think, in its affirmation of the Martian Other as truly Other, as resistant to Terrans’ attempts to rationalize away their difference and transform them — or assimilate them — into just another kind of Terran (or another kind of human).

“The Road to Sinharat” is really striking for its insistence that, actually, the Indigenous population of the “Drylands” of Mars might know something about the best way to live in the environment they’ve inhabited for millennia, such that attempts to transform that environment — and to transform its people — into a kind of mirror Earth and mirror Terrans, living in cities and practicing water-intensive agriculture and so on, is just colonialism by another name, rooted in a cultural chauvinism towards people who seem “primitive” by the arbitrary standards of “civilization”. this was a totally unexpected political turn, although there were gestures in this direction in “Mars Minus Bisha”, and it displays a much more nuanced grasp of colonialism (both settler colonialism in the US and “overseas” colonialism around the world) than I had expected. I would absolutely recommend this story, and I’d love to teach it.

moods: adventurous, dark, mysterious

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