Alpha Centauri or Die! by Leigh Brackett

Alpha Centauri or Die! by Leigh Brackett
Ace Books, ISBN 0-441-01770-3.
Price paid: 1,00$

There used to be a time where science fiction stories were simple and full of action. They were fairly short and usually fit in weekly serials with names like "Space Adventures!" and "Planet Stories" or "Startling Stories". They never really focused on the scientific aspect of the thing; their goal was to entertain.

Such is Alpha Centauri of Die! by Leigh Brackett. Brackett became popular while writing for such periodicals through the forties and fifties. Focusing on romance and romantic ideals, rather than science, she turned the solar system into a strange fantasy world; so much that she has her own "solar system" entry on Wikipedia.

ACoD! tells the story of Kirby, a man who aches for space travel. In the near future, all the planets of Sol are inhabited and interplanetary conflicts have caused a mutual agreement that manned flights would foerever be prohibited; only the soulless machines would travel between planets. This doesn't sit well with Kirby and many boys and men, who all feel the call for foreign stars.

Smuggling parts for years, they assemble in secret a space shuttle which would send them on their way to Alpha Centauri, a hospitable planet 4.3 light years away. Will they take off? Will they be able to evade the drone ships, armed with nuclear warheads? Will they reach the planet and if so, is it really all that safe?

Clocking in at a 147 pages, you can expect a lot to happen in very few pages. I found it a very easy read and paced well enough that I was surprised when I got to the end an hour or so after starting it.

Is it worth a dollar?

I am not quite sure. It all depends on the type of reader. There will be annoyances. It is not spell checked, for one thing. Mistakes will be seen (which drive me insane all the time). Often, "he" will be written instead of "she"; it always left me wondering whether or not Kirby's girlfriend was a hermaphrodite.

I have to mention the girlfriend briefly. Shari is a Martian. Her customs dictate that she bares her breasts. Human/Martian unions are seen negatively. Had Shari lived on Earth, she would have seen her land savaged by Columbus and would have had to sit at the back of a bus. What I am getting at is that Shari is not only a devoted, boyfriend-worshiping woman; she's a combined Native / African-American stereotype.

However, the most annoying part will come from Brackett's solar system. Though I have no great love for science fiction, I have much interest in science. Reading about Mars having an atmosphere, an ancient civilization and a race of Martians made me cringe. No explanation is ever given as to how all of this is even possible. I realize that this book is dated 1963 but it still is lacking in scientific explanations.

So, I am going to have to go ahead and say no. While it was very entertaining to read, it was filled with spelling errors, stereotypes and factual inconsistencies. Being that it is so short a read, it was not nearly enough.