The Ginger Star

The Ginger Star is, to put it simply, an oh-my-God book. It is the first volume of Leigh Brackett’s Skaith trilogy, following Eric John Stark, raised a savage on Mercury and forged into a warrior on Mars, as he travels beyond the solar system to the dying planet Skaith, under its dull red ginger star, to rescue his foster-father. I have read it well over a dozen times.

It is my favorite book to bring to airports, or to read when I am out somewhere alone and need something to fall into. It has never once let me down. I rate it a ten, and a ten-plus. It is that good.

I had never read anything else by Brackett before this. After the Skaith trilogy I keep meaning to. If the rest is anything like this, I have been missing out for years.

Storytelling and character at the highest level

Brackett’s storytelling is awesome, there is no better word for it. The pacing is perfect. Hard-driving action, then quieter moments that let a reader catch a breath before the next turn. It never exhausts you and it never drags. Her characterization is phenomenal. Eric John Stark is an incredible hero, dangerous and human at once. The people around him feel particular instead of like stock figures. The prose is great, lean and vivid and atmospheric.

I have read a lot of science fiction and fantasy in my life, and very little of it is built this well at every level at once, story, character, and language all firing together.

World-building among the best of the best

The world-building is among the best I have ever encountered, full stop. Skaith is a fully realized dying world, its cultures, its dangers, its strange peoples and creatures all vivid and coherent, and Brackett conveys it with an economy that makes it feel vast without ever bogging down in explanation. There is romance in the story, but not a lot, just enough to matter.

There are monsters, but they are woven into the world instead of played for cheap horror; this is emphatically not a horror story, it is an adventure on a strange and dangerous world. Everything fits. I cannot point to a flaw, not in this book and not across the whole trilogy, and I can say that about almost nothing else.

A book I keep coming back to

What makes it mine is that I return to it again and again. Over a dozen reads, and it is still the book I reach for when I want something I know will hold me, the airport book, the dining-alone book, the comfort read that happens to also be a genuine masterpiece of the form. That kind of rereadability is rare and, to me, the truest mark of a great book: that it rewards me every single time, not just that it impressed me once.

Eric John Stark is one of the great heroes of adventure science fiction, Brackett was a master, and this trilogy is, for my money, as good as the genre gets. I should read more of her. So should you.

Is The Ginger Star worth reading?

It is a ten, and really a ten-plus, one of my very favorite books and one I have read well over a dozen times. The Ginger Star and the Skaith trilogy it opens are, to me, the best of the best: Brackett’s storytelling is awesome, her characterization phenomenal, her world-building among the finest in the genre, and her prose great, with a perfect blend of action and breathing room and not a flaw I can find anywhere across all three books.

Eric John Stark is an incredible hero, there is romance but not too much, monsters but no horror, and adventure all the way through. It is my go-to book for airports and quiet evenings, and it never disappoints. An absolute masterpiece of adventure science fiction. Read it.

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