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language: English
country: USA
year: 1964
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
dates read: 2.3.25-4.3.25
after enjoying The Coming of the Terrans, I have been looking forward to reading more of Leigh Brackett’s planetary romance stories, and I’m pleased to report that The Secret of Sinharat (originally published in an Ace Double 1964 and subsequently reprinted with its companion, People of the Talisman, under the title Eric John Stark: Outlaw of Mars) was a fun, quick read, though not without ideological flaws.
the story follows Eric John Stark, also known as N’Chaka, a Terran outlaw who was raised by “barbarians” on Mercury and has now found himself on Mars, where his adoptive father, a cop, blackmails him into attempting to prevent a war led by the “barbarians” of the Drylands against the larger, more technologically developed (or redeveloped, as explored in The Coming of the Terrans) cities. Stark finds himself caught up in multiple conspiracies: first, his own efforts to prevent the war; second, the warlord Kynon’s efforts to conduct it; third, some machinations of the mysterious barbarian queen Berild that are connected with the Ramas, an ancient civilization notorious for being able to transfer consciousnesses between bodies. the Ramas are believed to have died out thousands of years ago, but Stark grows less sure of this with each day.
let’s start with the bad: ideologically, the biggest failing here is, of course, the focus on “barbarians”. although — as in some of the stories in The Coming of the Terrans — Brackett is clearly sympathetic to the Drylands peoples, unlike in — say — “The Road to Sinharat”, the narrow focus here on a handful of characters (Stark, Kynon, Berild, the pirate city mayor Delgaun, the servant girl Fianna, plus some of Delgaun’s minions) and the fact that the war is a multilayered conspiracy mean that the Drylands peoples appear only as a passive group of superstitious, primitive warriors. they are there to be manipulated by Kynon, Berild, and Delgaun, and ultimately Kynon — the one Drylander with some agency — is revealed to have been manipulated himself.
that Stark’s “barbarian” Mercurian name is “N’Chaka” — clearly derived from Shaka — accentuates the racial politics at work here. notably, Stark is described as dark-skinned (“His skin was almost as dark as his black hair”), but this is immediately qualified by emphasizing that this is because of long exposure to the sun — of course we could not actually have a Black protagonist. we’re in a kind of liberal limbo, where we want to appear sympathetic to “primitive” cultures but we do not actually want to read about characters from them, because we still regard them as “primitive”.
secondarily and not unrelatedly, I didn’t love that of all the world-building elements from her prior stories that Brackett could have picked up on she decided to use “Shanga” — from “The Beast-Jewel of Mars” — a drug-like process (people are described as “addicted” to it) that induces both physical and mental “degeneration”, transforming people temporarily back into earlier stages of evolution. it’s a relatively minor aspect of The Secret of Sinharat, but it emphasizes the ways eugenicist ideas about evolution and “development” are central to the narrative.
I did also have a small structural complaint, namely that the novel is built around Stark receiving a series of cryptic warnings that his life is in danger, someone attempting to kill him, and Stark killing or humiliating them instead. it got a little repetitive.
in spite of these flaws, the mystery element is compelling — I do love archaeology and ancient history that turns out not to be over after all. repetition notwithstanding, Brackett does a great job creating and maintaining tension, and I enjoy her prose style in general. the addition of Fianna — her name notwithstanding — to the conspiratorial mix adds some variety, and the ambivalence of the ending is really tasty.
I’m curious to see what else Brackett will do with Stark, both in People of the Talisman and then perhaps in the Skaith trilogy. I think if you’re curious about Brackett, or about planetary romance / sword and planet generally, my recommendation would still be to start with “The Road to Sinharat” (which I genuinely think is quite good, especially for a story by a white American woman from 1963), see how you feel about it, and proceed cautiously from there.
moods: adventurous, tense