The Secret of Sinharat: And the People of the Talisman

by Mary Rosenthal and Leigh Brackett

Enter Eric John Stark, adventurer, rebel, wildman. Raised on the sun-soaked, savage world of Mercury, Stark lives among the people of the civilized solar system, but his veneer of calm masks a warrior's spirit. In the murderous Martian Drylands the greatest criminals in the galaxy hatch a conspiracy of red revolution. Stark's involvement leads to the forgotten ruins of the Martian Low Canals, an unlikely romance and a secret so potent it could shake...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1601250479
• ISBN13: 9781601250476
• Release Date: January 2008
• Publisher: Paizo Inc.
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.0" x 8.0"
• Age Range: 16 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 11 and higher

Customer Reviews

Eric John Stark of Mercury

This book contains a brace of novellas, The Secret of Sinharat and People of the Talisman, each running just over 100 pages. Both are of Eric John Stark, Earthman by way of Mercury, in the barren deserts and wildlands of Mars. Brackett's stories are "old fashioned" tales of Mars as it was envisaged years ago, although in today's world its not hard to imagine unsaid terraforming having occurred. This is primarily an adventure tale, not bounded by categories of "science fiction" on one hand and "fantasy" on the other. There are ray guns and swords, aliens and axes, and it is never clear whether some things are based in technology or magic (or even if there is any difference between the two). The Secret of Sinharat Stark is an outlaw and mercenary, forced to work for the authorities by infiltrating a violent warlord's plans of conquest. In doing so he runs across old enemies and makes new ones, which he must deal with carefully due to the demands of his mission. Throw in some deadly storms, a narcotic radiation that causes regression to beasthood, and finally a showdown with immortal soul-vampires, and there is plenty to entertain. Oh, and there are pretty girls. Of sorts. Two of them. People of the Talisman This is a direct sequel to Sinharat - but that's not really important, and only told in a throwaway line - where Stark is journeying to a forsaken city to fulfil a promise made to a friend. Along the way he is captured by a warband of savages lead by a masked leader (whose helmet reminded of Darth Vader's in description, although Talisman was written in the mid-60's, well before Brackett was involved with George Lucas). Stark escapes, in a scene reminiscent of Conan, and travels on to help defend the city against the marauders. Shockingly, the city falls and the defenders must rely on the Talisman of the title, an ancient artifact believed to always protect the city. And that is when the fun really starts, and the plot twists like a whirlpool. Once again there are two pretty girls, and once again they are a lot more than pretty girls. This book is a great read.

Awesome sword-swingin' and super-sneakin' adventure on a mad, mad Mars that could never be

Leigh Brackett was an extremely influential American author who wrote and won major awards in a number of genres, including western and noir. She is best remembered, however, for her TOWERING contribution to fantastic fiction (a term I prefer to use because it's often very difficult to draw a hard line between sci-fi and fantasy), particularly during the 1940s and '50s. Most of her fan-fi can be classified as planetary romance: a sub-genre pioneered in the early 20th century by Edgar Rice Burroughs and which characteristically involves travel to, and adventure on, fanciful planets where savagery and sword-play carry the day rather than radium and ray guns. Though countless planetary romances ranging from dreckish to dazzling have fluttered off the printing presses since Burroughs' classic Barsoom series, Brackett's are some of the absolute TOPS, and the milieu in which they take place is unforgettable: Earthlings have long possessed the secret of interplanetary space travel and have been very, very busy lording it over the rest of the solar system, almost every planet of which is home to its own human race(s) (generally the dominant inhabitants prior to the advent of spacefaring Earth) and most planets of which have one or more unique "halfling" races: half-animal or half-insect-seeming humanoids who are typically equal to homo sapiens in intelligence. Whether directly concerned or looming in the background, colonial Earth's rocky (and often exploitive) relationship with its extra-terrestrial subjects almost always plays some part in these stories, which are typically fast, wild and tinged with a tingly touch of shady-alley noir. This slick and affordable edition, courtesy of Paizo Publishing's "Planet Stories" line, contains two wonderful Brackettales: THE SECRET OF SINHARAT and THE PEOPLE OF THE TALISMAN. They both take place on Mars: a dying world where savage tribes vie with sword and axe for what few resources remain, and in which a few relatively civilized settlements, fearful of the wild hordes, huddle behind either the colonial government or the chance protections of geography. They both also star Eric John Stark the mercenary, Brackett's most famous hero. Stark, raised by Mercurian halflings and colored black by the sun and atmosphere of that world, is sort of an amalgam of James Bond (the itchy, watchful, but occasionally careless Bond of the original Fleming novels, not the unflappably icy fellow in the boring movies) and Conan the Barbarian. Though Stark's services are often purchased by the indigenous tribes of Mars (he would never fight for the colonial government), he often undertakes deadly missions simply to honor those to whom he is bound by friendship, and that is how both of these terrific stories -- one taking place on the floor of an aeons-dead sea and the other on Mars' snow and ice-choked northern cap -- begin. Oh, but don't be expecting any Martian halflings; they're all dead by this time! To see what Brac

Wow, I was amazingly surprised!!!!

I had never read anything by the author before and did not know what to expect. The two stories included in this volume are excellent! I enjoyed "The People of the Talisman" a little better than "The Secret of Sinharat" although both are awesome stories. Of the Planet Stories releases this has been the best I have read so far. I am looking forward to more stories of Eric John Stark.......

Barsoom gone bad or Mars from the gutter up.

Let me start off by saying that this is the first book review that i have ever written.. so cut me some slack! :-) Paizo has taken a big chance here by attempting to introduce classic works of Adventure SF and Fantasy to a new/younger audience. And so far it seems to be paying off if the activity on the message boards is any indication. I have a new subscription to the series and my first volume arrived today. "The Secret of Sinharrat ( with "The People of the Talisman") is probably Leigh Brackett's most famous work or at least it features her most famous character "Eric John Stark". This is the 3rd edition I own of the book. I first discovered LB waaaaay back in the early 70's when an older cousin of mine gave me a pile of the old "Ace Double" paperbacks. For those of you who don't remember them these were a very long running series of 241 Science Fiction/Fantasy paperback series from Ace Books from the 1950's up to the early 1970's. The contents were usually one short novel from a famous writer and one short novel from a newer writer. The novelty was that the 2 novels were not printed one after the other. You would read one novel and then flip the book over (which made the back cover the front cover) and read the next novel. So these were paperbacks that 2 different "Front covers". Anyways one of these caught my eye right off. On one side it showed a man dressed somewhat in barbarian fashion riding some sort of large reptile beast across a night time desert landscape while being pursued by other figures who were similarly mounted . My 11 year old brain thought "Cool!". As I started to read it I became very excited when I realized that this was two novels set on a Mars that was very similar to the Mars/Barsoom of Edgar Rice Burroughs. But after reading a few pages of the first novel I became kind of confused. The good guy was actually sort of a bad guy who is forced / black mailed into helping the law stop a planned uprising of the locals. Eric John Stark was the first Anti-hero I ever came into contact with. He lives in a universe where it seems that at least all of the inner planets of the Solar System are habitable. You have to understand that even into the 1950's no one was 100% sure of the conditions that existed on the other planets. So the popular conceptions in the minds of many folks were Mars is a dying desert world that is much older than ours. Venus is a young dynamic tropical hothouse of a world that is younger than ours. Mercury is hot as hell, doesn't rotate on its axis and is probably only liveable at the terminator existing between the day and night sides. This is the universe that Eric John Stark was born into. He is a mixture between Tarzan and Clint Eastwood's "Man with no name". Stark was born on mercury in a mining colony where his parents worked as geologists. They were killed in a landslide and he was adopted as a baby and raised by the mercurian aborigines who are/were more or less an art of Neanderthal and given the n

hard-boiled planetary adventure

Paizo's Planet Stories line is bringing back into print some classics of the pulp medium/genre. These two stories from Leigh Brackett are perfect exemplars of why this is a great idea. Brackett is little known today (except perhaps for her scriptwriting credit on The Empire Strikes Back) but this volume displays her talents--hard-boiled diction and style combined with Burroughs-derived planetary romance. The setting is the unscientific classic pulp solar system--essentially the exotic ports of call of the early twentieh century writ large. Mars is decadent and subversive--like a colonial powers' view of China or the Middle East; Venus is primitve and restless--again echoing views of Africa, South America, or Oceania. Brackett's hero is Eric John Stark--earthman raised by savages on Mercury--who is half Tarzan and half Sam Spade. The novellas here are two of her three Stark pulp stories (he later graduated into some interplanetary novels) and are fast-paced, tough-minded adventure at its best.