Leigh Brackett 1 hr 44 min read

Laughing, she casts him into the hideous depths beneath the seas of flaming gas, where dead blossoms sway over jumbled ruins, but there Eric John Stark finds the secret of her power.

Leigh Brackett's 1949 novella is a jewel of planetary romance, sending her iconic hero Stark across the misty Red Sea of Venus to storm an enchantress's shrine. Lush, muscular, gorgeously atmospheric. Read it for sword-and-planet adventure at its finest, from the queen of the form.

In its time

Published in 1949, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

1 hr 44 min read (a novella, a full arc in one sitting or two).