The Secret of Sinharat

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The Secret of Sinharat
Secret of sinharat.jpg
Cover of first edition.
Author Leigh Brackett
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Genre Science fiction
Publisher Ace Books
Publication date
1964
Media typePrint (Paperback)
Pages95
Followed by People of the Talisman  

The Secret of Sinharat is a science fantasy novel by American writer Leigh Brackett, set on the planet Mars [ broken anchor ], 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. [1]

Contents

Plot summary

Map of Mars in the fiction of Leigh Brackett. Map of Leigh Brackett's Mars.jpg
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 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. Planet Stories Volume 04 Number 03.djvu
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. [2] 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.

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References

  1. Queen of the Martian Catacombs, Internet Speculative Fiction Database.
  2. Ace Doubles Reviews

Sources