The legend goes that Hollywood director Howard Hawks read No from a Corpse a hard-boiled crime mystery and said “Get me this Brackett guy.” He was looking for a screenwriter to work on his Humphry Bogart movie The Big Sleep. That Brackett guy as it happens was a woman who was already publishing space operas galore and earned a rep as the Queen of the pulps or Queen of the Space Opera. She was called both for good reason. Her most famous work sadly is the first draft she wrote for The Empire Strikes Back a month before her death. I say sadly because it dwarfs everything else in her long career thanks to the stretch and reach of Star Wars. When I was young, I devoured Erick John Stark novels. They were in my opinion similar to the John Carter books but better. I admit I sought her out because I knew the name from Empire but let’s move on and never speak about it again.
I wanted to review this book for a couple of reasons. First, I respect Brackett and this one was out of her Space Opera wheelhouse. This is a pretty high concept for an SF novel (novella by today’s standard) published first in a magazine in 1953. The second reason is that this novel was bound and first published under Don Wollheim’s Ace Double series with Solar Lottery the debut novel of Philip K. Dick.
So yeah, I wanted to do a bonus episode of the podcast (stay tuned). Keep in mind what PKD told Gregg Rickman about the ACE line at the time. “He was the only market, that was it…It had to be 6,000 lines long I remember that.” Both Ace editions the double and the slim one of the 60s that I read claim to be complete and unabridged. That seems unlikely as most of the writers of the doubles complained about having to make cuts for Wollheim and A.A. Wyn during those early years. This was not Princess of Mars fantasy or space pirates and in that sense, they make for an interesting combo.
LB and PKD would be coming to this with totally different dynamics. Brackett was the marketable name and it is likely that Phil would have been happy with this pairing from a sales point of view. For a long time, this was PKD’s book with the largest sales, and out of the gates, it was the Big Jump that sold it. Still, it was a stranger more psychological deep novel and combined with PKD’s dystopian about random lottery-style elections, violent reality media, and psychic cops made for an interesting combo in the same year Rosa Park refused to go to the back of the bus. PKD has admitted to trying to combine the vibes of Vogt’s World of Null-A and Bester’s Demolished Man, but Brackett’s half is much more original for the time.
The Big Jump is not exactly hard SF but compared to the near fantasy of the majority of her space operas this has realistic of a Brackett book short of her power post Apocalypse novel The Long Tomorrow. The tagline on the ACE Double edition says “One man had come back- but he was neither dead or alive.” The story is one survivor returning from the first interstellar space flight to Bernard’s Star. The survivor Ballantyne returns to earth wrecked from the experience and this sets up the mystery.
Before I get into spoiler territory, I will say I really enjoyed this old-school piece of SF and thought that there were great moments of high concept storytelling. Brackett elevates the material often with moments of powerful prose. The Big Jump is not essential reading for everyone, that said if you are a fan of the era or this author then it totally is. Now let’s go deeper…
Our main point of view character is Arch Comyn who had a friend on the mission. There are some fights, and chases that lead up to Comyn following the mission to Bernard’s Star. While LB hand waves a bit of the science away this is not pure fantasy, she knew the right distance for Bernard’s Star, she invents a ship that travels outside of space-time. I love that she refers to it as “Not-Space”
Early in the novel, Comyn wants to get the mystery that the builder of the ship Cochrane, who oddly has the same name as the person who breaks the warp barrier in Star Trek, and will of course to the modern reader invokes Elon Musk.
“Ballantyne made the Big Jump, he and the men with him. They did the biggest thing men have ever done. They reached out and touched the stars. And you tried to hide it, to cover it up, to rob them even of the glory they had coming.”
This sets up the mystery and it is a good one. Why the cover-up? Why did the mission go bad? More than anything I think these early pages do a good job of making sure the reader understands the stakes and gets on board. It is implied that the ship was saved from crashing into Pluto and that a patrol was looking for it. The first chapter establishes characters and Cochrane’s company. If there is a weakness to the story it is the thin details on Cochrane and his corporate motive. The story works fine but one wonders if LB was limiting these elements for the magazine/Ace Double format.
I really loved the early world-building, The opening paragraph is so cool. It talks of the rumors, that somebody made it. I like the implication that many space jockeys were trying and failing. Spacemen talking in a thousand ports was a great world-building detail. when Comyn returns to New York from Mars.
“The Big Jump had been made. Man had finally reached the stars, and every clerk and shopgirl, every housewife, businessman, and bum felt a personal hysteria of pride and achievement. They swayed in dense masses across Times Square feeling big with a sense of history, sensing the opening drumbeats of an epoch in what they saw and heard from the huge news-service screens.”
Of course, these moments to the modern eye have some cringe-inducing moments but of course, the modern reader has to consider how much progress was yet to be made. I love the idea that she conveys so quickly the pride and happiness that all humanity feels. LB suggests that the celebrations are so wide that Comyn is like everyone else having trouble staying inside. Deft moments of subtle but powerful world-building. Consider that this was first published in a magazine years before the Mercury program had started and four years before Sputnik.
It is telling that she is so good at explaining the wonder and terror of space flight in another moment of excellent world-building prose.
“Comyn thought it was funny. It was very funny, indeed, that men making the second Big Jump in history, that men going faster and farther than any men but five had ever gone before, separated only by metal walls from the awfulness of infinity, should sit and play games with little plastic cards and pretend they were not where they were.”
LB is a great storyteller and those moments of world-building are great examples and that was something I remembered about her. I was surprised by some of the incredibly solid moments of horror that she wrote in this book. The scene where Comyn visits Ballantyne is very disturbing and conveyed by beautiful dark prose.
“The thing that lay in the bed between the barred sides was Ballantyne. It was Ballantyne, it was dead, quite dead. There was no covering on it to hide its deadness; no breathing lifted the flattened ribs; no pulse beat anywhere the pale transparent skin, and the tracery of veins was dark, the face was…Dead. And yet it moved.”
Not only does it bring the horror but it deepens the mystery and makes the build-up of repeating the journey so much darker and richer. There are other moments of Science Fiction and horror blending in excellent prose, the transition from Faster than Light travel from the end of chapter 9 to the opening of chapter 10 was super impressive. That is page 82 and 83 of the second Ace edition.
“…For one timeless ghastly interval he thought he saw the fabric of the ship itself dissolving with him into a mist of discrete particles, he knew that he wasn’t human anymore and nothing was real. And then plunged headlong into nothingness.”
Seriously. Good stuff. Once the mystery is revealed and the crew lands on Bernard II, the truth those on the planet are transformed by the local environment. This is a great answer to the mystery. The reveal has weight and makes the journey worth it. It presents Cromyn with a dilemma that the final act builds too.
The Big Jump is fantastic 50s sci-fi. The weight of the prose, the mechanics of the storytelling, and the details in the world-building are all fantastic. The change highlights flaws in the human character, so in the final moments, the novel even turns a mirror on humanity. This Big Jump is more than just a trip. The transformation offered to these humans has the potential to change their humanity completely and totally. Everything that humanity has done for food, shelter etc. “You have developed beyond civilization.”
What began as a Sci-fi horror adventure ends with a not-so-subtle message that The Big Jump is not just about traveling to another star be evolving past the life we have lived dependent on the one above us. Life on earth is dependent on survival and here four years before Sputnik Leigh Brackett was telling her readers in the stars we can evolve and become something better.
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