A CHEGADA DOS TERRENOS

The Coming of the Terrans (1967). Tradução portuguesa de António Porto para a Colecção Argonauta: "um dos mais célebres clássicos da ficção-científica pura, uma obra de Leigh Brackett, a autora de The Sword of Rhiannon, que se tornou numa das mais bem pagas argumentistas de Hollywood. (...) o que acontecerá quando os homens chegarem a Marte? O planeta que Leigh Brackett descreve é diferente do revelado pelas sondas espaciais. É um mundo moribundo, seco e hostil, velho de anos incontáveis e de mistérios infinitos, onde os Terrenos, ao chegarem, terão encontrado um mundo de mares mortos, civilizações perdidas e tribos secretas que ressentiam a intromissão na sua glória desaparecida. Viram as ruínas de uma brilhante cultura e riram-se das histórias de deuses invencíveis e de uma magia perdida, nas cidades proibidas de Jekkara, Barrakesh e Valkis. Mas não se riram por muito tempo".[Leigh Brackett ] 'Para alguns de nós, Marte tem sido sempre a última Thule, as Hespérides douradas, o permanente apelativo do mundo da vinculativa fascinação. Viajantes, electrónicos e humanos, iniciaram a tarefa de reduzir esses sonhos a factos frios, duros e ruinosos. Mas, como é sabido, nos assuntos dos Homens e dos Marcianos, os meros factos demoram um pobre segundo a transformarem-se em Verdade, que é poderosa e há-de prevalecer. Por conseguinte, apresento-vos estas lendas de Marte Antigo como sendo histórias verdadeiras, convidando todas as assustadas realidades a manterem uma distância respeitosa. Posso confirmar cada uma dessas aventuras. Afinal, eu estive lá presente '.'The Coming of the Terrans by Leigh Brackett. A dying planet, dried up and hostile -- a planet of countless years and countless mysteries. When the Terrans came, they found a world of dead sea-bottoms, lost civilizations, and secretive tribes bitterly resenting the intrusion of the Terrans on the fading glory of an ancient planet. The Earthmen looked down upon the crumbling ruins of a brilliant culture, and laughed at the stories of invincible gods and forgotten magic lingering in the forbidden cities of Jekkara, Barrakesh, Valkis ... But the dangers were real--and only a few renegade Earth-born adventurers who had adopted the Martian way of life could understand the planet-wide disaster that was building up![About the Author from Wikipedia] Leigh Douglass Brackett (1915 – 1978) was an American writer, particularly of science fiction. Brackett was first published in her mid-twenties. Her first published science fiction story was "Martian Quest", which appeared in the February 1940 issue of Astounding Science Fiction Magazine -- edited by John W. Campbell. At age 31, she married with Edmond Hamilton in San Gabriel, California, and moved with him to Kinsman, Ohio. She died of cancer in 1978 in Lancaster, California. She was also a screenwriter, known for her work on such films as The Big Sleep (1945), Rio Bravo (1959), The Long Goodbye (1973), Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back ( (with Lawrence Kasdan /1980), etc. Often referred to as the Queen of Space Opera, Brackett also wrote planetary romance. Almost all of her planetary romances take place within a common invented universe, the Leigh Brackett Solar System, which contains richly detailed fictional versions of the consensus Mars and Venus of science fiction in the 1930s–1950s. Mars thus appears as a marginally habitable desert world, populated by ancient, decadent, and mostly humanoid races; Venus as a primitive, wet jungle planet, occupied by vigorous, primitive tribes and reptilian monsters. Brackett's Skaith combines elements of Brackett's other worlds with fantasy elements.Though the influence of Edgar Rice Burroughs is apparent in Brackett's Mars stories, the differences between their versions of Mars are great. Brackett's Mars is set firmly in a world of interplanetary commerce and competition, and one of the most prominent themes of Brackett's stories is the clash of planetary civilizations; the stories both illustrate and criticize the effects of colonialism on civilizations which are either older or younger than those of the colonizers, and thus they have relevance to this day. Burroughs' heroes set out to remake entire worlds according to their own codes; Brackett's heroes (often antiheroes) are at the mercy of trends and movements far bigger than they are...