The Secret of Sinharat

The Secret of Sinharat

Cover of first edition.
Author Leigh Brackett
Country United States
Language English
Genre Science fiction novel
Publisher Ace Books
Publication date
1964
Media type Print (Paperback)
Pages 95 pp
Followed by People of the Talisman

The Secret of Sinharat is a science fiction novel by Leigh Brackett set on the planet Mars, whose protagonist is Eric John Stark.

Plot summary

Map of Mars in the fiction of Leigh Brackett

For the first seven chapters, Queen of the Martian Catacombs and The Secret of Sinharat are almost word-for-word identical; the differences are inconsequential to the plot. In Chapter 1, a brief paragraph is inserted to situate the reader in the Leigh Brackett Solar System and to excuse the presence of non-Terran humans on planets like Mars through the concept of a prehistoric "seeding" - not mentioned elsewhere in Brackett's novels. In Chapter 5, an explicit reference to the events of Brackett's story The Beast-Jewel of Mars (Planet Stories, Winter 1948) has been cut, perhaps on the assumption that readers of the novel would not know or be interested in the earlier story. The Arabic word khamsin is consistently replaced by "storm wind", perhaps on the grounds that readers might not be familiar with the word (or mistake it for a Martian technical term).

From chapter 8 on the two versions diverge.

Queen of the Martian Catacombs

The Secret of Sinharat

Characters

Publication history

Queen of the Martian Catacombs in Planet Stories, Summer 1949

This story was first published under the title Queen of the Martian Catacombs in the pulp magazine Planet Stories, Summer 1949.

In 1964, after considerable revision and expansion, it was republished as The Secret of Sinharat as one part of an Ace Double novel; its companion was another expanded Eric John Stark story, People of the Talisman. The expansion has sometimes been attributed to Brackett's husband, Edmond Hamilton. For The Secret of Sinharat, there is little internal evidence to support this suggestion.

In 1982, it appeared, again together with People of the Talisman, under the title Eric John Stark, Outlaw of Mars.

In 2005 the original Planet Stories version was republished in Sea-Kings of Mars and Otherworldly Stories, Volume 46 in the Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks series. It appeared the same year in the collection Stark and the Star Kings (Haffner Press).

In 2008, the entire Eric John Stark saga was republished, in E-Book form, by Baen Publishing, and is available thru Webscriptions.net.

Titles

Queen of the Martian Catacombs is typical of the rather wordy and often misleading titles assigned to stories in Planet Stories, to go along with their colorful, action-packed, but equally misleading cover art. The cover of the Summer 1949 issue of Planet Stories gives the title as Queen of the Martian Catacombs: A Desert-worlds Novel by Leigh Brackett, with the explanatory blurb Across the red sands fought the Terran changeling to reach Berild, beautiful and fey - and blast her into eternal dust.... This is not a very accurate synopsis of the story.

The "catacombs" in question are the tunnels under Sinharat, although they do not play a very important part in either version of the story, and the "Queen" is apparently Berild, though her role is not really central enough to name the story after her. Planet, however, liked cover illustrations of beautiful women, and the Allen Anderson cover of the Summer 1949 issue indeed shows a red-haired woman in blue dress and high heels (!) astride a Martian steed resembling a frightened cartoon seahorse. An inappropriately pale-skinned Stark is shown in the foreground attempting to split the skull of a crouching, red-skinned Martian (?) with his sword—both sword and red Martian existing only in the illustrator's imagination. An architecturally banal Martian city languishes in the background, while the vivid yellow sky boasts over a dozen moons.

The later title, The Secret of Sinharat, is less irrelevant; the "secret" is presumably the Rama's secret method of mind-transference, and although it hardly belongs exclusively to the city of Sinharat, that city's prominent place as the setting for the story's climax is sufficiently important to make its use in the title not inappropriate.

Footnotes

    References

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