Leigh Brackett 1 hr 3 min read

Burk Winters can't bear to watch another man handle the controls of the ship that was his, and lingers in the passenger section as the Starflight lands at Kahora Port.

Leigh Brackett's 1948 story is a rich, atmospheric planetary-romance space opera. Vivid, moody, superbly told. Read it for classic Brackett Mars, a grounded spaceman drawn into the deadly, decadent lure of an ancient Martian city, where a strange regression called the Shanga offers oblivion dressed as pleasure.

In its time

Published in 1948, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

1 hr 3 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).