Book Review: The Ginger Star

The Ginger Star
Cover by Andrew Hou, for once showing Eric John Stark with his correct skin tone.

Book Review: The Ginger Star by Leigh Brackett

Skaith is a dying world. Its sun, once a vibrant red, has faded to a brownish ginger and the warmth reaching the surface has ebbed over the centuries. Slowly, the civilizations that once fared over the globe have moved away from the increasingly frozen poles towards the still livable tropics. But it’s obvious to anyone with a brain that within a millennium or two, even the equator will be frozen over and then the story of Skaith’s humans will be over.

The Ginger Star
Cover by Andrew Hou, for once showing Eric John Stark with his correct skin tone.

But then the starmen came, visitors from outer space. They spoke of the Galactic Union, a coalition of many worlds that lived in cooperation with one another. The Union would be willing to relocate the people of Skaith, taking those who were brave or desperate enough to a more livable planet. The Wandsmen, the closest thing to a planetary government as the enforcement arm of the Lords Protector, realized that this escape hatch threatened their power.

When Simon Ashton, a representative of the GU came to Skaith to negotiate with the city-state of Irnan, which was favorable to evacuation, the Wandsmen captured him, and it’s not known what his current status is.

The Union decided Ashton knew the risks when he went in, and they weren’t going to launch a rescue mission or punitive strike for just one man. But that didn’t stop John Eric Stark, also named N’Chaka, the Man Without a Tribe, the mercenary who owed his life and sanity to Ashton, from acting on his own.

Now Stark has landed at the port city of Skeg to begin his search for Ashton, to rescue him or revenge him as the case might be. But here he is met with a prophecy, about a Dark Man who will come from the stars to destroy the Lords Protector. This prophecy may or may not be genuine, but the Wandsmen are taking no chances!

Eric John Stark was created by Leigh Brackett, with his first published story being “Queen of the Martian Catacombs” in the Summer 1949 issue of Planet Stories. She wrote a few more in the early 1950s, then returned to the character in the 1970s, starting with this novel.

To recap, after the death of his parents as a small child, Stark was raised by natives of the planet Mercury, developing a permanent nearly black skin tone from constant exposure to the burning sun. When he was in his mid-teens, claim jumpers killed his adopted family and imprisoned him. Lawman Ashton Smith rescued him and taught Eric the ways of civilization, though Stark has never lost the keen animalistic survival skills and senses of his youth.

By the time these books were written, scientific knowledge of the solar system had advanced, and it was no longer feasible to write planetary romance set on Mars or Venus. So the larger universe only hinted at in the earlier stories is used to move the action to a faraway star system where there can be ancient worlds with lost technology where swordplay is the standard fight mode.

The primary antagonist of this story is Gelmar the Wandsman. He appears to be high in their ranks, being personally responsible for convincing the people of Skaith that the Dark Man prophecy is false. The easiest way to do that is to publicly kill Stark, but our protagonist isn’t going to make it easy for him. In the civilized areas, the Wandsmen’s greatest asset is being able to direct mobs of Farers, itinerant folk who started as refugees, but have become an idle lot guaranteed food and shelter as long as they obey the Wandsmen. (I get a strong whiff of the Seventies Establishment view of hippies off these folks.)

Stark is almost immediately in lethal danger, escaping from one peril to another, and gaining a precious few allies along the way. Most prominent among these are the cynical warrior Halk, and the prophetess Gerrith, daughter of the woman who made the Dark Man prophecy. Plus a surprise alliance towards the end.

Eric John Stark spends a lot of time in captivity, being moved from one place to another in a way that seems to be bringing him closer to fulfilling the prophecy. Along the way, we meet various groups of Skaith citizens who have adapted to the slow death of their planet in different ways, from the “children of the sea” who’ve been genetically engineered to live in the ocean, to the Thyranese who strip mine ancient ruins for precious metal.

While Stark is still very much the same kind of person he was in the original stories, and the genre is still very much the same, I can really see the increased maturity and skill that Ms. Brackett brings to the table after another twenty years’ experience. Skaith really feels like an alien and aging planet.

The ending does a good job of setting up the sequels while being satisfying enough to make reading this first book worthwhile.

Content note: Lots of violence, much of it lethal. Death of animals. Implied cannibalism. Nudity, described but not overly dwelt on. Fantastic racism as the different peoples of Skaith often have poor opinions of each other. Slavery is referred to, but never actually on screen. Late teenagers on up should be fine. Extramarital sex, no details.

This is a very good entry in the planetary romance category, and recommended for fans of that subgenre and pulp SF in general.

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