Recycling was common in the Pulp Era. Writers had their favourite tropes and plot devices. Faced with deadlines and the need for quick money, they would cheerfully reuse tropes and stories which had worked before, or find ways to recycle unsold stories into something saleable and give their work another shot at publication. This is how Robert E. Howard transformed an unsold King Kull story into the first tale of Conan the Cimmerian. It seemed there were always second chances for authors to try again, and in doing so, perhaps improve on their earlier works.

Having recently purchased DMR’s own Heroes of Atlantis and Lemuria, I had the chance to read Leigh Brackett’s “Lord of the Earthquake” and almost immediately was struck by a number of parallels between it and her later The Sword of Rhiannon. “Lord of the Earthquake”, published in June 1941 issue of Science Fiction, concerns godhood, time-travel and the lost continent of Mu.

But before I go further, a few words about Mu.

Not as well-known as Atlantis or Lemuria, Mu was allegedly a continent in the Pacific, home to the usual advanced civilization and ancestor to the Mayans, Egyptians, the Easter Islanders. Mu was first advanced by Augustus and Alice Dixon Le Plongeon in 1896. The Le Plongeons were Theosophists. Theosophy is a blend of Eastern and Western mystical traditions with a heavy emphasis on reincarnation and channeled wisdom from lost civilizations. The influence of Theosophy on early fantasy and science-fiction is worthy of its own post. The Le Plongeons were fascinated by the Mayan civilization and traveled to Central America and were responsible for unearthing one of the statues at Chichen Itza.

The name “Mu” allegedly came from their disputed translations of Mayan glyphs, from the Mayan word for “macaw” and was identified with a mythical “Queen Moo” who traveled to the land of Mu (identified with Plato’s Atlantis and located in its traditional spot in the Atlantic) and later went to Egypt.

After Augustus’s death, his widow gave his papers to a family friend, English occultist James Churchward, who later claimed to have received the knowledge of Mu from a priest in India. Churchward’s 1926 book, The Lost Continent of Mu, The Motherland of Man and four subsequent sequels helped keep Mu in the public eye. One of Churchward’s most important additions to the growing legend of Mu was decoupling it from Atlantis and relocating it to the Pacific where it has remained ever since.

The reason for Mu’s relocation may lie with Abraham Merritt. Merritt’s 1918 novel The Moon Pool features a lost “Murian civilization” now located underground and only accessible through a remote island in the Pacific. While I’m not enough of a Churchward scholar to say with absolute certainty, he certainly could have read The Moon Pool, because Merritt was as widely-read and influential as Edgar Rice Burroughs in his time. Merritt was a big influence on Brackett, as DMR’s own Deuce Richardson examines here: Leigh Brackett and A. Merritt

Nowadays, Mu is best known in Japan, judging from the large number of anime and kaiju films which have used it. But back in its heyday of the ‘30s and ‘40s it was background for such stories as the 1935 serial The Phantom Empire and Owen Rutter’s nearly-forgotten novel The Monster of Mu, and, finally, the story we have come to discuss.

Coh Langham is an archaeologist, who, while pursuing the ancient legend of Mu, is transported backwards in time by a mysterious force, and through a series of events, becomes a god-like figure and helps create the very history he once studied. Langham is a troubled man, an archaeologist with the Feathered Serpent tattooed on his chest, driven by his father’s fanatical desire to discover the secrets of Mu. Investigating an underwater pyramid in a submarine, he falls through a hole in time.

Langham threw himself bodily at the controls, then he was drowned, blinded, deafened, in roaring darkness that was like no darkness he had ever known.

He felt the submarine shudder, a strange, silent quiver as though its very atoms were shifting; he felt his own body twisted by great impalpable forces, heard himself cry out in wild terror. Then there was only darkness and a horrible rushing as though the little ship was hurtling to the outer ends of space. 

Mu, in the earthquake-plagued days before its destruction, is a highly advanced civilization with flying machines. I couldn’t find any references to these from the Le Plongeons or Churchward, but the Theosophists wrote about the vimanas of Hindu mythology, so she probably got them from there. Soon, Langham’s mythological tattoo gets him mistaken for a god.

“Who are you, in such strange clothing, with the Creator’s symbol on your body?”

“Coh Langham,” he said, “from  . . .”

“From Mayax?” interrupted the girl, and something of the awe left her. “A prince of the house of Coh?”

Well, Langham thought, that’s who I was named for, and he said, “Yes.” Mayax meant Central America, and the Feathered Serpent was the Mayan version of Naga the Creator. Langham wondered whether that whim of decoration was going to do him good or evil. It had saved his life once, but might it yet kill him through giving religious offence? 

The “Prince Coh” for whom he is named comes from the Le Plongeons, as does the name “Mayax”. The whole idea of some pre-Columbian outsider becoming identified with Kukulcan was once an extremely common pulp trope. Soon Langham is thrown into conflict with Xacul, another man who would be God. Using his knowledge of Mu’s impending doom, Langham fights to survive the coming destruction of the continent.

“Lord of the Earthquake” is minor Brackett with moments of interest. The pacing is fast, even by pulp standards, and despite Brackett’s undeniable narrative drive, there’s a sense the story is hurrying past some potentially fascinating ideas. I suspect Brackett thought so herself, because just eight years later, she decided to take another swing at the themes behind that story. Originally published as “Sea-Kings of Mars” in the pages of Thrilling Wonder Stories, The Sword of Rhiannon (as it was retitled in paperback, paired with the reprint of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Conqueror) is a classic.

Matthew Carse is an archaeologist, who, while pursuing the ancient legend of Rhiannon, is transported backwards in time by a mysterious force, becomes a god-like figure and helps create the very history he once studied. When a thief named Penkawr finds the legendary Sword of Rhiannon, he looks for Carse, seeking a partnership with the man from Earth.

He turned and fixed Carse with a sulky yellow stare. “I found it,” he repeated. “I still don’t see why I should give you the lion’s share.”

“Because I’m the lion,” said Carse cheerfully. 

As a side note, the use of Celtic names like “Penkawr,” “Rhiannon,” and “Ywain” for Martians makes me wonder if Leigh Brackett might have been inspired by the opening line of C. L. Moore’s “Shambleau”: “Man has conquered Space before.” By the way, the opening paragraph of that story? It mentions Mu.

But Carse underestimates Penkawr and gets himself shoved into a space-time rift found inside of the Tomb of Rhiannon.

Penkawr’s thrusting hands jabbed his back before he could complete the movement. Carse felt himself pitched into the brooding blackness.

He felt a terrible rending shock through each atom of his body, and then the world seemed to fall away from him.

“Go share Rhiannon’s doom, Earthman! I told you I could get another partner!”

Penkawr’s snarling shout came to him from a great distance as he tumbled into a black, bottomless infinity.

Carse seemed to plunge through a nighted abyss, buffeted by all the shrieking winds of space. An endless, endless fall with the timeless and the choking horror of a nightmare.

He finds himself on a different Mars, the thriving Mars of the distant past which Burroughs hinted at but never depicted.

And there were rolling green hills and dark forest down there below him, where before there had only been desert. Green hills, green wood and a bright river that ran down to a gorge to what had been dead sea-bottom but was now—sea.

Carse’s numbed gaze swept along the great coast of the distant shoreline. And down on that far sunlight coast he saw the glitter of a white city and knew it was Jekkara.

Jekkara, bright and strong between the verdant hills and the mighty ocean, that ocean that had not been seen upon Mars for nearly a million years.

Carse also realizes that his plunge through time has resulted in him gaining an unwelcome guest: the consciousness of Rhiannon. Rhiannon the Cursed One (Curse/Carse?) is regarded as the Martian equivalent of the Devil, having betrayed the god-like Quiru by giving their super-science to a race of Howardian serpent-men, the Dhuvians (and what could be a more appropriate symbol for a Luciferian betrayal than the Serpent?). But unlike Lucifer, Rhiannon is penitent and seeks redemption.

Carse’s man-with-two-souls plight parallels Leif Langdon’s (note the similar surname to Coh Langham) in Merritt’s Dwellers in the Mirage. The protagonist-is-taken-for-a-god trope was not that fresh even back in 1941 and perhaps Brackett realized it, which is why she opts for him to be associated with the Devil instead. A new dynamic is created. Instead of people in awe of his alleged godhood, the protagonost finds every hand raised against him.

I don’t want to spoil The Sword of Rhiannon too much. Suffice it to say, it’s one of the best novels of science-fantasy ever written and you should definitely seek it out.

The first time I tried to read The Sword of Rhiannon was when it was reprinted in Tor’s late-’80s/early ‘90s Ace-homaging Tor Double series, paired up with L. Sprague De Camp’s Divide and Rule. I, young, fresh off reading Burroughs, was eager to read another vintage Martian epic…

…and I bounced off it. Was I expecting something more Burroughs-lite and got disappointed? I really don’t remember. Fortunately, good taste eventually prevailed, I reread it years later, fell in love with it, and now Brackett is one of my top ten authors.

Second chances are wonderful, aren’t they?