Now available: Leigh Brackett's The Sword of Rhiannon, "a love song and eulogy to a planet...a hymn to the lost past of a Mars that never was." With an intro by yours truly. (Why yes, that quote is mine. It makes the book sound kind of awesome, doesn't it? And it is.)
The Sword of Rhiannon was first published as "The Sea Kings of Mars," in Thrilling Wonder Stories, June 1949: sixty years ago. Leigh Brackett was 33. That year saw the discovery of a moon of Neptune (Nereid), the first flight of a jet-powered airliner, and the debut of the very first local on-air TV station (KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh). The Big Bang theory had been published only the year before--right around the time the United Nations established the World Health Organisation, and the arrival of first shipload of Caribbean immigrants in the UK marked that country's beginnings of multi-culturalism.
Earth was changing, growing smaller and more culturally interknit, while the universe was only just beginning to be known. Our understanding of our own solar system was poised on the cusp between the exuberance of frontier imagination and the discipline of science...
To read more you'll have to buy the book. Buy it from the publisher, or get it from the evil empire, just buy it. You know you want it.
