Leigh Brackett 52 min read

On a Mars where the Low-Canal towns never close, Carey finds Jekkara shut tight and silent, an unnatural, chilling wrongness that draws him toward the ancient, forbidden city of Sinharat.

Leigh Brackett's 1963 story is an atmospheric, muscular planetary-adventure tale. Vivid, lyrical, superbly styled. Read it for classic Brackett Mars, a hard-bitten adventurer, the decadent canal towns, and the deadly secret of a dead city, told with the tough romantic poetry that made her the queen of planetary adventure and shaped a whole tradition.

In its time

Published in 1963, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

52 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).

Illustrated by

Virgil Finlay