ere is a mess with gems inside somewhere. Forget the gems for now. The mess must be sorted out before we can descry them in the muck. The muck is penetrating. Let us begin with what the book looks like but is not: Stark and the Star Kings looks like an assemblage of collaborations between Edmond Hamilton and Leigh Brackett, but is not. The Star Kings and The Secret of Sinharat (etc.) never ever marched together until now. Only "Stark and the Star Kings," a short, previously unpublished novelette (pp. 587-622 of this large compendium), is collaborative. Everything else was written solo, at different times and for different markets, all the Star Kings tales by Hamilton, all the Eric John Stark tales by Brackett.
The two authors may have been married for 30 years, but they did not write alike and they did not write together, as Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore notoriously did (in a clear reference to the famous anecdote about Kuttner and Moore continuing up each other's stories on the same typewriter, Hamilton says [in the author bio on the dust jacket of the original edition of The Star Kings from 1949] that he and Brackett were recently married and that "our two typewriters now rattle in the same apartment"). Nor is there any evidence that either author ever thought that these two totally unconnected sequences could ever be linked, until the end of their lives, when the desultory "Stark and the Star Kings" was apparently drafted (but probably not put into what they'd have considered to be final form—the inconsistencies between this tale and its disparate predecessors are too glaring to plausibly represent a final take on the text on the part of two extremely professional writers). So Stark and the Star Kings is not a collection of shared work, but an anthology containing separate pieces by two separate writers.
The strange thing is not that this is the case—over and above the fact that Hamilton and Brackett were married, there are emotional and thematic similarities between his Ruritanian space operas and her planetary romances—but that the editor(s) responsible at Haffner Press seemed to think it necessary to disguise the fact. The dust-jacket copy is almost impenetrably vague about the nature of the book it purports to blurb; the contents page (quite incredibly) does not specify the author of any of the stories included; the acknowledgements page (at the very end of the volume) gives nothing but raw copyright data, which again is very much less than helpful, as all three Brackett stories (which are nowhere acknowledged in the volume as by her) are copyrighted solely in the name of Planet Stories; and the "celebrity introduction" by John Jakes—identifiable as one by the presence of the word "I" in its first sentence, and by the fact that it says nothing about the book that the "celebrity" is "introducing"—says only about Stark and the Star Kings that Celebrity Jakes had read "some" of the stories included in the volume even before writing his "celebrity introduction" about John Jakes.
So it might be an idea to say just what we have here, and to say who wrote what. (Apologies in advance for exactitude, but how else can we begin to learn the past?) The first tale assembled in Stark and the Star Kings is The Star Kings (New York: Frederick Fell, 1949) by Edmond Hamilton; it was first published in Amazing Stories in 1947. The second story is "Queen of the Martian Catacombs" (1949 Planet Stories) by Leigh Brackett, which was published in book form as The Secret of Sinharat (New York: Ace Books, 1964). The third is "Enchantress of Venus" (1949 Planet Stories) by Brackett, which later appeared in The Halfling (New York: Ace Books, 1973), a collection of Brackett novellas. The fourth is "Black Amazon of Mars" (1951 Planet Stories) by Brackett, which was published in book form as People of the Talisman (New York: Ace Books, 1964). (The Secret of Sinharat and People of the Talisman were published dos-a-dos, but are bibliographically deemed to be separate titles.) The fifth story is Return to the Stars (New York: Prestige Books, 1970) by Hamilton; it is a remarkably well-integrated fix-up whose original parts appeared 1964-1969 in Amazing Stories and Fantastic Stories. The sixth is the collaborative tale already mentioned, "Stark and the Star Kings," which first appears here. Some of this information is hinted at in the acknowledgements; much is not. The fifth story is a direct sequel to the first, though it is appears over 200 pages further into the anthology. The second, third and fourth stories deal with Eric John Stark; though Haffner (and certainly the lamentable Jakes) have nothing to say about this, the three tales constitute almost everything Brackett wrote about Stark until late in her life, when she published the three Skaith novels between 1974 and 1976. In these novels she moves Stark from a planetary romance version of our solar system into an interstellar venue, the planet called Skaith, which (being pretty complicated) stands in for Mercury and Venus and Mars. Though Haffner (and the author of the "celebrity introduction") have precisely nothing to say about this, it does look as though Brackett/Hamilton ignored the Skaith books when they wrote "Stark and the Star Kings." Who? Where? When? What? Why? Why not? Huh?
An illusory collaboration
The review begins: gems ahead. We can be fairly concise. As the original dust-jacket copy made clear in 1949, The Star Kings is a romance of space, a space opera, "escapist literature in the finest sense." A tad misleadingly, George Barr McCutcheon's Graustark (1901) is mentioned; it would have been better to instance Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda (1894), as The Star Kings very exactly reproduces the theme of substitution, though in this case the process is science-fictionalized by having the crown prince of the Mid-Galactic Empire 200 centuries hence change consciousnesses with John Gordon, a man bored with civilian life after his experiences in World War II. When he wrote the tale in 1945, Hamilton was still attempting to change gears in order to fit himself into the new markets created by the war and by John W. Campbell (in that order); so the writing still gives off the kyphotic prissiness of all but the greatest early space operas: John Gordon is psychotically incapable of self-knowledge; cities are described as though they were unspit catballs in the throats of planets; sex curls the toes (Hamilton's misunderstanding of the meaning of "morganatic marriage" is stiflingly hilarious); other species are referred to as "aboriginals"; but every once in a while a spasm of action straightens the spine of telling, and we feel again the hair rise (maybe only vicariously, now that we are so old as a folk) in wonder. The story is utterly simple: Gordon falls in love with a great princess who falls in love with him while simultaneously saving the galaxy from a remorseless foe. Then, as honor-bound as Gary Cooper in a dentist's chair, he comes back home.
The next three tales in this anthology, being by Leigh Brackett in her 1940s/1950s pomp, seem almost infinitely superior to Hamilton's prentice work (even though he'd begun to publish in 1926, and had written about 250 stories in his first two professional decades, he was a slow learner, though a steady one). Eric John Stark is a sort of Conan without sulks; he traverses planetary-romance versions of Venus and Mars, whups villains till they die, screws badass tall women and acts brotherly to shorter women with bare breasts (it's all right to mention breasts if they belong to your sister) who die for him, walks away. The last of them—oddly entitled "Black Amazon of Mars," though the badass tall woman in the tale is red-haired and she leads an army of Arab-like males disguised as a man—is superb, every sentence drenched in an immanence of action (like the very best of Robert E. Howard), every move of the plot foreordained, cumulative, sad, energizing and extremely sexy. No, not just sexy: sexual. Stark and his woman move in this story like sex moves, which is more than skin-deep, which is grammar and stink and attar. (Unfortunately, Alex Ebel's painted-plaster airbrush illustrations, one to a story, resemble the "old master" illustrations of the classic magazines in the same way that 20th-century Vatican art resembles Titian.)
We come back to Star Kings. Return to the Stars appears here because (it is the only "reason" I can think of) the stories by the two authors, regardless of any thoughts of internal cohesion, are printed here in the order they were published. In any case, a few years have passed for John Gordon, but 20 have passed for Edmond Hamilton, who seems to have reached his writerly pomp only in the early 1960s, when stories like the Ballardian "The Pro" (1964 Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction) appeared, as well as the tales that were welded into Return. Gordon has been living on Earth, less and less happy with his lot as an insurance executive. Finally he visits a psychiatrist, recounts his seemingly delusory memories of being a King defending his galaxy against a backdrop of great stars. The psychiatrist praises Gordon for the elaborateness of his delusion and cures him. It is almost certain that Hamilton was referring here to Robert Lindner's great essay "The Jet-Propelled Couch: the Story of Kirk," which appears in The Fifty-Minute Hour: a Collection of True Psychoanalytic Tales (1955); the essay describes Lindner's successful treatment of a man, rather like Gordon, whose delusional life in the stars had begun to impair his life on Earth (without much more than associational sanction, it has been suggested that Lindner's real-life patient was in fact Paul Linebarger, who wrote as Cordwainer Smith). Gordon as "Kirk Allen" is a funny and knowing conceit, entirely typical of late Hamilton. It is all the funnier, and more knowing (of the nature of story, and of the nature of his readers) when Gordon once again gets the call to the stars, and disappears, for real, and for good.
The galaxy he enters is once again threatened by an inimical foe, this time a race of stupid but immensely powerful telepaths; and this time round, Gordon's main ally turns out to be the amoral but utterly brave black-haired daredevil villain of The Star Kings. (He is an uncomfortably close relative to E.E. Smith's Blackie DuQuesne, who dominates the later Skylark of Space books.) Things look grim for a while, but justice and stuff triumph in the end. And Gordon gets the girl, I mean the princess who rules a thousand worlds. And he stays there. Return to the Stars does not match the inevitability and silken blackness of Brackett's best work, but it rests honorably in the same book.
Hard to say the same for the story which is the ostensible reason for yoking Star Kings and John Eric Stark between covers. "Stark and the Star Kings" is tired, tiresome and sketchy; in the absence of any information about this previously unpublished tale, we must assume that the version here published by Haffner is identical with the version that Harlan Ellison bought for Last Dangerous Visions and that he presumably released for this memorial volume. It would be quite extraordinary if this version differed from the LDV version. In any case, the only real point in bringing the two series together would be to have the two protagonists—Gordon and Stark—confront one another in splinters of light and action at the climax of things. But Gordon doesn't even appear in this final story (Sol, which features largely in The Star Kings, is mysteriously unknown to everyone here), and the entity that must be destroyed this time round to save the galaxy is dealt with, by all concerned, with a distinct absence of finesse.
But of course Finesse is hardly the middle name of Stark and the Star Kings. Its middle name is Morganatic.
