![]() It’s a bit… uncomfortable… shall we say, but unfortunately these sort of assumptions are build into the kind of planetary romances Leigh Brackett wrote.Īs a genre planetary romance has always been a bit dodgy, an evolutionary offshoot of the Africa adventure story, with a lot of the same racist and colonial assumptions built in. ![]() Worse, in both stories this girl is shown to be representative of her race, their evil part of their biology. ![]() In both there’s the hard-bitten protagonist falling for a mysterious beautiful alien girl who he knows is trouble yet can’t help himself but get involved with, who then turns out to be evil. It doesn’t help that the first two stories are basically the same. The stories don’t fit well together, there’s no real theme to the collection and some are decidedly on the weak side. Unfortunately it turned out this was one of her lesser collections. I had chosen this because it was something I hadn’t read before and I always liked Brackett. The Halfling and Other Stories is the sixth book I’ve read in the Year of Reading Women challenge I set myself after I’d noticed last year how few female written science fiction books I read. The Halfling and Other Stories, Leigh Brackett (1973) ![]()
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