The Leigh Brackett Solar System is a fictional analogue to the real-world Solar System in which a majority of the planetary romances of Leigh Brackett take place.
Although Brackett's stories do not form a series with a consistent chronology and causally-connected incidents, more than half of them are recognizably set in the same universe: a Solar System of the near future, with space travel and distinctive alien and human cultures on Mercury, Venus, Mars, the Asteroids, and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. The stories of the Brackett Universe are bound together by shared terminology, place-names, "facts" about biology and culture, and occasionally shared characters. For instance, Brackett's Mercury is a nightmare world of extremes, where powerful storms rack a narrow habitable twilight belt; her Venus is a place where the liha-trees grow in the swamps around embattled outworld cities; and Mars is a place where you can drink thil at Madame Kan's in Jekkara of the Low Canals, or wander among barbarian warriors in the northern Drylands of Kesh and Shun.
Brackett's earlier works set in this universe frequently concern the struggle of settlers, from Earth or elsewhere in the solar system, against the harsh environments of their new worlds and against the hostility of the planets' native peoples. In later works, Brackett shows greater sympathy to the planetary aborigines, and the stories describe their conflict with well-intentioned but destructive individuals and bureaucracies.
Brackett's stories in this universe were written over a period of twenty-four years, from 1940 to 1964 (with, however, only two stories in the last decade of this period). Her first two stories, set on Mars, are only tenuously related to the others; however, her third published story, The Stellar Legion introduces a large number of themes which were afterwards characteristic of Brackett's Solar System stories. Brackett's cessation of writing new stories in this universe coincides with the missions of the Mariner space probes, whose data made her visions of Venus and Mars no longer even remotely plausible.
Read more about Leigh Brackett Solar System: The Worlds of Leigh Brackett, Stories in The Brackett Solar System, Chronology
Famous quotes containing the words solar system, leigh brackett, leigh, brackett, solar and/or system:
“The solar system has no anxiety about its reputation, and the credit of truth and honesty is as safe; nor have I any fear that a skeptical bias can be given by leaning hard on the sides of fate, of practical power, or of trade, which the doctrine of Faith cannot down-weigh.”
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“I’d just as soon kiss a wookie.”
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“Senta: These boats, sir, what are they for?
Hamar: They are solar boats for Pharaoh to use after his death. They’re the means by which Pharaoh will journey across the skies with the sun, with the god Horus. Each day they will sail from east to west, and each night Pharaoh will return to the east by the river which runs underneath the earth.”
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“We recognize caste in dogs because we rank ourselves by the familiar dog system, a ladderlike social arrangement wherein one individual outranks all others, the next outranks all but the first, and so on down the hierarchy. But the cat system is more like a wheel, with a high-ranking cat at the hub and the others arranged around the rim, all reluctantly acknowledging the superiority of the despot but not necessarily measuring themselves against one another.”
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