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Eric John Stark is a character created by the
science fiction
Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel uni ...
author
Leigh Brackett
Leigh Douglass Brackett (December 7, 1915 – March 18, 1978) was an American science fiction writer known as "the Queen of Space Opera." She was also a screenwriter, known for '' The Big Sleep'' (1946), '' Rio Bravo'' (1959), and '' The Long Go ...
. Stark is the hero of a series of
pulp
Pulp may refer to:
* Pulp (fruit), the inner flesh of fruit
Engineering
* Dissolving pulp, highly purified cellulose used in fibre and film manufacture
* Pulp (paper), the fibrous material used to make paper
* Molded pulp, a packaging material
...
adventures set in a time when the Solar System has been colonized. His origin-story shares some characteristics with feral characters such as
Mowgli and
Tarzan
Tarzan (John Clayton II, Viscount Greystoke) is a fictional character, an archetypal feral child raised in the African jungle by the Mangani great apes; he later experiences civilization, only to reject it and return to the wild as a heroic adv ...
; his adventures take place in the shared
space opera planets of 1940s and 1950s science fiction.
Back-story
Stark was born on
Mercury. His parents were employees of the mineral extraction company Mercury Metals and Mining. After his parents died in a cave-in caused by a quake, Stark was adopted by a tribe of Mercurian aborigines who are described as hairy and possessing snouts. They gave him the name N'Chaka, meaning "the man without a tribe". He believed himself to be one of them, rather than a human, and endured their rigorous way of life in the Mercurian Twilight Belt, surviving by hunting rock-lizards.
Before Stark was fully grown, another group of human miners exterminated his tribe, captured Stark and imprisoned him in a cage. They would ultimately have killed him if he had not been rescued by the police official Simon Ashton, who raised Stark to adulthood.
The stories of the adult Stark are fast-paced adventures, but Brackett manages to insert more pathos than most authors. Because of his background, Stark is keenly aware of the injustices visited on the planetary "primitives" by the
colonialist
Colonialism is a practice or policy of control by one people or power over other people or areas, often by establishing colonies and generally with the aim of economic dominance. In the process of colonisation, colonisers may impose their relig ...
Earth, and tends to side with them against official bodies. At the opening of the story in which he first appears, Stark is evading a twenty-year sentence placed on him for running guns to a Venusian native group that has been resisting Terran colonizers.
Appearance
A point about Stark's physical appearance which has been studiously ignored by every one of his illustrators until the
James Ryman's covers from the
Paizo Publishing
Paizo Inc. (originally Paizo Publishing.) is an American role-playing game publishing company based in Redmond, Washington, best known for the tabletop role-playing game '' Pathfinder''. The company's name is derived from the Greek word ''paiz ...
''Planet Stories'' line:
[http://paizo.com/image/product/catalog/PZO/PZO8010_500.jpeg ] years of exposure to heightened sunlight on the planet Mercury has permanently given Stark very dark, almost black skin. His skin is "almost as dark as his black hair" and an antagonist refers to him scornfully as a "great black ape". The darkness of Stark's skin is reiterated in ''Enchantress of Venus''. Brackett's other Mercurian characters also have black skin (e.g. Jaffa Storm in ''The Nemesis from Terra'').
Brackett's professional illustrators have universally drawn Stark as light-skinned, even sometimes blond. Brackett's use of a strong, independent, and attractive black-skinned character as hero for several of her stories was very unusual for the 1940s and 1950s. The artists' choice to ignore Brackett's written description and substitute a generic light-skinned blond pulp hero, even as late as 1982, may reflect prejudice against dark-skinned people. The effect of these misleading illustrations has been such that Stark is never remembered or referred to by critics as a black-skinned character, though he is clearly described as such in the stories.
While Stark is described many times as having very dark skin, he appears to be of white European rather than African descent; Brackett repeatedly tells her readers that Stark's unusual coloring is due to prolonged exposure to extreme sunlight while growing up on the planet Mercury. Brackett openly created Stark as a pastiche of
Edgar Rice Burroughs' popular
John Carter of Mars
John Carter of Mars is a fictional Virginian soldier who acts as the initial protagonist of the Barsoom stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs. A veteran of the American Civil War, he is transported to the planet Mars, called Barsoom by its inhabita ...
and
Tarzan
Tarzan (John Clayton II, Viscount Greystoke) is a fictional character, an archetypal feral child raised in the African jungle by the Mangani great apes; he later experiences civilization, only to reject it and return to the wild as a heroic adv ...
characters, and Stark's sun-blackened skin is the Mercurian version of Tarzan's sun-bronzed skin.
Stories
Solar System
Stark first appeared in a group of novellas published in the
pulp magazine ''
Planet Stories
''Planet Stories'' was an American pulp science fiction magazine, published by Fiction House between 1939 and 1955. It featured interplanetary adventures, both in space and on some other planets, and was initially focused on a young readershi ...
''. These were: "Queen of the Martian Catacombs" (Summer 1949); "
Enchantress of Venus" (Fall 1949), once published as "City of the Lost Ones"; and "Black Amazon of Mars" (March 1951). The first and last stories were expanded into short novels: "Queen of the Martian Catacombs" as ''
The Secret of Sinharat
''The Secret of Sinharat'' is a science fantasy novel by American writer Leigh Brackett, set on the planet Mars_in_fiction#Mars_in_fiction_before_Mariner, Mars, whose protagonist is Eric John Stark. The novel is expanded from the novella "Queen o ...
'' and "Black Amazon of Mars" as ''
People of the Talisman''. The expanded versions were first published in 1964 as an
Ace
An ace is a playing card, die or domino with a single pip. In the standard French deck, an ace has a single suit symbol (a heart, diamond, spade, or club) located in the middle of the card, sometimes large and decorated, especially in the c ...
Double
A double is a look-alike or doppelgänger; one person or being that resembles another.
Double, The Double or Dubble may also refer to:
Film and television
* Double (filmmaking), someone who substitutes for the credited actor of a character
* ...
paperback, and again in 1982 under the title ''Eric John Stark: Outlaw of Mars''. The internal chronology of the stories is different from the publishing order; in "Queen of the Martian Catacombs" Stark is on Mars, having fled capture on Venus; "Black Amazon of Mars" takes place soon after, but in an unexplored and barbaric area close to the north pole of Mars; and in "Enchantress of Venus", Stark has returned from Mars to Venus to look for a missing friend.
The two expanded novels have inconsistencies with their novella originals. ''The Secret of Sinharat'' is almost identical with "Queen of the Martian Catacombs" up to the point at which Stark arrives at Sinharat, but a crucial plot point is revealed earlier in the novella, and further developments diverge from (while occasionally overlapping) the storyline of "Catacombs". "Black Amazon of Mars" is largely different from ''People of the Talisman'', though founded on a similar premise.
Skaith
Many years later, Brackett returned to the character in a trilogy of books titled ''The Ginger Star'' (1974), ''The Hounds of Skaith'' (1974) and ''The Reavers of Skaith'' (1976). These stories are
science fantasies set on a distant but primitive
extrasolar planet
An exoplanet or extrasolar planet is a planet outside the Solar System. The first possible evidence of an exoplanet was noted in 1917 but was not recognized as such. The first confirmation of detection occurred in 1992. A different planet, init ...
, since Stark's original
Solar System
The Solar System Capitalization of the name varies. The International Astronomical Union, the authoritative body regarding astronomical nomenclature, specifies capitalizing the names of all individual astronomical objects but uses mixed "Solar ...
venue had become unacceptable to publishers. As a result, although the character's personality and origins are retained, there are few other links between the Skaith novels and the earlier Stark novellas.
Other
A final story, ''Stark and the Star Kings'' (2005), places Stark into the world of her husband
Edmond Hamilton
Edmond Moore Hamilton (October 21, 1904 – February 1, 1977) was an American writer of science fiction during the mid-twentieth century.
Early life
Born in Youngstown, Ohio, he was raised there and in nearby New Castle, Pennsylvania. So ...
's ''Star Kings'' series, making it a rare collaboration between the two.
References
External links
* {{isfdb series, id=2456
Characters in written science fiction
Planetary romances