We watch, helpless, the inevitable fall from grace of Len and his friend Esau, and the beginning of their long journey to self-acceptance and belonging.īrackett, however, was a product of her age. Any proscribed activity requires pariahs, in this case the technological elite of Bartorstown. That culture's faith-based leadership plus its constitutional prohibition against cities makes clear how law can lead to taboo. The first third of the novel is masterful. Into a substrate composed of tropes familiar to any reader of the Great American Novel––the young hero seeking his place in the world, a pastoral America certain in its faith––she poured a healthy dose of sfnal anti-anti-intellectualism and, perhaps inevitably, the refusal of the hero's expected return to his beginnings. So Brackett tried again with The Long Tomorrow and this time she chose a landscape that Huck Finn might recognize (though peopled, it must be noted, almost entirely by white characters). But Rhiannon fails as a novel: the hero doesn't grow and change. The result was The Sword of Rhiannon, an exotic planetary romance cabled with gristle. In 1949 she mixed aspects of these previously immiscible traditions––the grit and noirish interiority of hard-boiled fiction with an elegiac Mars dreaming of long-forgotten technology. In mid-century North America, I doubt there was any writer better equipped for the challenge.īefore Brackett wrote The Long Tomorrow (1955) she was expert in two disparate traditions: swashbuckling planetary romance (for the sf pulps) and hard-boiled crime narrative (a novel, and several screenplays including The Big Sleep). She aimed for no less than the first serious science fiction novel of character.

But because Brackett's ambition was huge, she chose for her setting a post-nuclear Ruined Earth. This is the theme of the Bildungsroman: loss of innocence, change, and the journey from safety into the unknown in pursuit of knowledge. Brackett sets up her major theme in the first sentence: knowledge is sin, and fourteen-year-old Len Colter is about to take the step that will lead to his loss of Eden.

The opening of The Long Tomorrow reads like a King James Bible for the American myth: sure, rhythmic, and implacable. Twenty pages later, I couldn't understand why it wasn't universally acknowledged as a Great American SF Novel. Five pages in, I wondered why I'd never heard of it.

I read The Long Tomorrow for the first time in 2005.

The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett