A beautiful alien woman tells him he’s dying but that she is going to transfer his mind to another body and not to worry because she will mentally accompany him. Starke regains consciousness in a bed in a palace. In order to escape pursuit, he flies over a mountain range where magnetic effects cause his craft to crash in a region where the air is filled with red mists that rise from a red sea.

Hugh Starke is a small time criminal who has just made a big time score, a payroll job worth a million credits. It’s a top-notch adventure story that starts out sounding like a hard-boiled crime story. In her introduction to The Best of Planet Stories #1, Brackett says that she was writing without an outline and “had no idea where the story was going.” Bradbury took up writing where she left off and finished the story. She couldn’t finish the novellette and work on the screenplay, and since the movies paid much better than the pulps, she asked her friend Ray to take over for her. Which is how Brackett launched her screenwriting career by coauthoring with William Faulkner the script for Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. She was approximately halfway through a novellette she was writing for Planet Stories that was set on Venus (More about Brackett’s Venus in a bit.) when she got a call from Hawks, or more probably his secretary. The novel caught the attention of movie producer Howard Hawks, who decided he wanted Brackett to work on the screenplay for his next project. They used to meet once a week to read and critique each other’s work.īrackett had sold some detective short stories as well as one novel, No Good From a Corpse. They were friends who had both been mentored by Henry Kuttner. Both were regulars in Planet Stories at the time. Here’s how it came about:īoth authors were living in the Los Angeles area in the 1940s, and both had been working hard to develop their craft as writers. The only collaboration between two great science fiction authors, Leigh Brackett and Ray Bradbury.

Mist by kathryn james