Eric John Stark is a character created by the science fiction author Leigh Brackett. Stark is the hero of a series of pulp adventures set in a time when the Solar System has been colonized. His origin-story shares some characteristics with feral characters such as Mowgli and Tarzan; his adventures take place in the shared space opera planets of 1940s and 1950s science fiction.
Stark was born on Mercury. His parents were employees of the mineral extraction company Mercury Metals and Mining. After his parents died in a cave-in caused by a quake, Stark was adopted by a tribe of Mercurian aborigines who are described as hairy and possessing snouts. [1] They gave him the name N'Chaka, meaning "the man without a tribe". He believed himself to be one of them, rather than a human, and endured their rigorous way of life in the Mercurian Twilight Belt, surviving by hunting rock-lizards.
Before Stark was fully grown, another group of human miners exterminated his tribe, captured Stark and imprisoned him in a cage. They would ultimately have killed him if he had not been rescued by the police official Simon Ashton, who raised Stark to adulthood.
The stories of the adult Stark are fast-paced adventures, but Brackett manages to insert more pathos than most authors. Because of his background, Stark is keenly aware of the injustices visited on the planetary "primitives" by the colonialist Earth, and tends to side with them against official bodies. At the opening of the story in which he first appears, Stark is evading a twenty-year sentence placed on him for running guns to a Venusian native group that has been resisting Terran colonizers.
Years of exposure to heightened sunlight on the planet Mercury has permanently given Stark very dark, almost black skin. His skin is "almost as dark as his black hair" and an antagonist refers to him scornfully as a "great black ape". The darkness of Stark's skin is reiterated in Enchantress of Venus. Brackett's other Mercurian characters also have black skin (e.g. Jaffa Storm in The Nemesis from Terra).
Brackett's professional illustrators have universally drawn Stark as light-skinned, even sometimes blond.[ citation needed ] Brackett's use of a strong, independent, and attractive black-skinned character as hero for several of her stories was very unusual for the 1940s and 1950s. The effect of these misleading illustrations has been such that Stark is never remembered or referred to by critics as a black-skinned character, though he is clearly described as such in the stories.
While Stark is described many times as having very dark skin, he appears to be of white European rather than African descent; Brackett repeatedly tells her readers that Stark's unusual coloring is due to prolonged exposure to extreme sunlight while growing up on the planet Mercury. Brackett openly created Stark as a pastiche of Edgar Rice Burroughs' popular John Carter of Mars and Tarzan characters, and Stark's sun-blackened skin is the Mercurian version of Tarzan's sun-bronzed skin.
Stark first appeared in a group of novellas published in the pulp magazine Planet Stories . These were: "Queen of the Martian Catacombs" (Summer 1949); "Enchantress of Venus" (Fall 1949), once published as "City of the Lost Ones"; and "Black Amazon of Mars" (March 1951). The first and last stories were expanded into short novels: "Queen of the Martian Catacombs" as The Secret of Sinharat and "Black Amazon of Mars" as People of the Talisman . The expanded versions were first published in 1964 as an Ace Double paperback, and again in 1982 under the title Eric John Stark: Outlaw of Mars. The internal chronology of the stories is different from the publishing order; in "Queen of the Martian Catacombs" Stark is on Mars, having fled capture on Venus; "Black Amazon of Mars" takes place soon after, but in an unexplored and barbaric area close to the north pole of Mars; and in "Enchantress of Venus", Stark has returned from Mars to Venus to look for a missing friend.
The two expanded novels have inconsistencies with their novella originals. The Secret of Sinharat is almost identical with "Queen of the Martian Catacombs" up to the point at which Stark arrives at Sinharat, but a crucial plot point is revealed earlier in the novella, and further developments diverge from (while occasionally overlapping) the storyline of "Catacombs". "Black Amazon of Mars" is largely different from People of the Talisman, though founded on a similar premise.
Many years later, Brackett returned to the character in a trilogy of books titled The Ginger Star (1974), The Hounds of Skaith (1974) and The Reavers of Skaith (1976). These stories are science fantasies set on a distant but primitive extrasolar planet, since Stark's original Solar System venue had become unacceptable to publishers. As a result, although the character's personality and origins are retained, there are few other links between the Skaith novels and the earlier Stark novellas.
A final story, Stark and the Star Kings (2005), places Stark into the world of her husband Edmond Hamilton's Star Kings series, making it a rare collaboration between the two.
Edgar Rice Burroughs was an American writer, best known for his prolific output in the adventure, science fiction, and fantasy genres. Best known for creating the characters Tarzan and John Carter, he also wrote the Pellucidar series, the Amtor series, and the Caspak trilogy.
Mars, the fourth planet from the Sun, has appeared as a setting in works of fiction since at least the mid-1600s. Trends in the planet's portrayal have largely been influenced by advances in planetary science. It became the most popular celestial object in fiction in the late 1800s, when it became clear that there was no life on the Moon. The predominant genre depicting Mars at the time was utopian fiction. Around the same time, the mistaken belief that there are canals on Mars emerged and made its way into fiction, popularized by Percival Lowell's speculations of an ancient civilization having constructed them. The War of the Worlds, H. G. Wells's novel about an alien invasion of Earth by sinister Martians, was published in 1897 and went on to have a major influence on the science fiction genre.
Leigh Douglass Brackett was an American science fiction writer known as "the Queen of Space Opera." She wrote the screenplays for The Big Sleep (1946), Rio Bravo (1959), and The Long Goodbye (1973). She worked on an early draft of The Empire Strikes Back (1980), elements of which remained in the film; she died before it went into production. In 1956, her book The Long Tomorrow made her the first woman ever shortlisted for the Hugo Award for Best Novel, and, along with C. L. Moore, one of the first two women ever nominated for a Hugo Award.
Edmond Moore Hamilton was an American writer of science fiction during the mid-twentieth century. He is known for writing most of the Captain Future stories.
John Carter of Mars is a fictional Virginian soldier who acts as the initial protagonist of the Barsoom stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs. A veteran of the American Civil War, he is transported to the planet Mars, called Barsoom by its inhabitants, where he becomes a warrior battling various mythological beasts, alien armies and malevolent foes. Created in 1911, the character has appeared in novels and short stories, comic books, television shows and films, including the 2012 feature film John Carter, which marked the 100th anniversary of the character's first appearance.
The Eternal Champion is a fictional character created by British author Michael Moorcock and is a recurrent feature in many of his speculative fiction works.
The planet Venus has been used as a setting in fiction since before the 19th century. Its opaque cloud cover gave science fiction writers free rein to speculate on conditions at its surface—a "cosmic Rorschach test", in the words of science fiction author Stephen L. Gillett. The planet was often depicted as warmer than Earth but still habitable by humans. Depictions of Venus as a lush, verdant paradise, an oceanic planet, or fetid swampland, often inhabited by dinosaur-like beasts or other monsters, became common in early pulp science fiction, particularly between the 1930s and 1950s. Some other stories portrayed it as a desert, or invented more exotic settings. The absence of a common vision resulted in Venus not developing a coherent fictional mythology, in contrast to the image of Mars in fiction.
Northwest Smith is a fictional character, and the hero of a series of stories by science fiction writer C. L. Moore.
Rocketmen was a constructible strategy game produced by WizKids and released in 2005 and discontinued in 2006. Part of its marketing included animated adventures based on the character of Nick Sion, a rebel and adventurer facing the evil alliance of Terra and Mars.
Fictional depictions of Mercury, the innermost planet of the Solar System, have gone through three distinct phases. Before much was known about the planet, it received scant attention. Later, when it was incorrectly believed that it was tidally locked with the Sun creating a permanent dayside and nightside, stories mainly focused on the conditions of the two sides and the narrow region of permanent twilight between. Since that misconception was dispelled in the 1960s, the planet has again received less attention from fiction writers, and stories have largely concentrated on the harsh environmental conditions that come from the planet's proximity to the Sun.
The Amtor or Venus series is a science fantasy series consisting of four novels and one novelette written by American author Edgar Rice Burroughs. Most of the stories were first serialized in Argosy, an American pulp magazine. It is sometimes known as the Carson Napier of Venus series, after its main character, Carson Napier. Napier attempted a solo voyage to Mars, but, because of mistaken navigational calculations, he finds himself heading toward the planet Venus instead. The novels, part of the sword and planet subgenre of science fiction, follow earthman Napier's fantastic adventures after he crash-lands on Venus, called Amtor by its human-like inhabitants. Unlike Barsoom, the desert planet of Mars, these stories are set upon a waterworld like Earth. Most of the events of the series take place on the island of Vepaja, the kingdom of Korva on the island of Anlap, and the city-states of Havatoo and Kormor on the tropical continent north of Vepaja.
The Secret of Sinharat is a science fantasy novel by American writer Leigh Brackett, set on the planet Mars, whose protagonist is Eric John Stark. The novel is expanded from the novella "Queen of the Martian Catacombs", published in the pulp magazine Planet Stories in the Summer 1949 issue.
People of the Talisman is a science fantasy novel by American writer Leigh Brackett, set on the planet Mars, whose protagonist is Eric John Stark.
Scarlet Traces is a Steampunk comic series written by Ian Edginton and illustrated by D'Israeli. It was originally published online before being serialised in 2002, in the British anthology Judge Dredd Megazine. A sequel, Scarlet Traces: The Great Game, followed in 2006.
Barsoom is a fictional representation of the planet Mars created by American pulp fiction author Edgar Rice Burroughs. The first Barsoom tale was serialized as Under the Moons of Mars in pulp magazine The All-Story from February to July 1912 and published compiled as a novel as A Princess of Mars in 1917. It features John Carter, a late-19th-century American Confederate veteran who is mysteriously transported from Earth to the dying world of Mars where he meets and romances the beautiful Martian princess Dejah Thoris. Ten sequels followed over the next three decades, further extending his vision of Barsoom and adding other characters.
"Enchantress of Venus" is a science fiction short story by American writer Leigh Brackett. It was originally published in the magazine Planet Stories in 1949. It is part of the Eric John Stark series of books and stories. The story has been reprinted numerous times since its first publication, and has been the subject of critical commentary in the Science Fiction community.
Tarzan is a series of 24 adventure novels written by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950) and published between 1912 and 1966, followed by several novels either co-written by Burroughs, or officially authorized by his estate. There are also two works written by Burroughs especially for children that are not considered part of the main series.
In a writing career spanning more than 60 years (1946–2008), American science fiction and fantasy author Philip José Farmer published almost 60 novels, over 100 short stories and novellas, two "fictional biographies", and numerous essays, articles and ephemera in fan publications.
The Flame of Iridar is a science fantasy novella by American writer Lin Carter set on an ancient, inhabited Mars. It was first published in paperback by Belmont Books in May 1967 together with the unrelated Kris Neville novella Peril of the Starmen as the "Belmont Double" anthology, The Flame of Iridar/Peril of the Starmen. The anthology was reissued in trade paperback by Wildside Press in August 2018. A chapbook of the Carter work alone, constituting its first stand-alone edition, was published by Sabre Press in 2019. The first British edition was issued in ebook by Gateway/Orion in January 2020.
