If your summer reading tastes run to science fiction, you might consider Iain M. Banks’ space opera, MATTER. Much of the action takes place on Sursamen, a Shellworld which is an alien artifact as large as a planet. Level Eight is warring with Level Nine. The two groups have roughly 19th Century technology. Monitoring the action are a series of super alien races: the Oct, the Nariscene, and the Morthanveld who have been around for millions of years and have godlike powers.

Against this backdrop of Galactic power politics, Djan Seriy Anaplian, a secret agent for the human Culture’s Special Circumstances section, discovers her father, the King, has been murdered during the war on Sursamen. Djan decides she needs to go back to her home and investigate.

Banks takes about 200 pages to get all his plotlines up and running. But once they’re in place, the action is swift and deadly. Given that MATTER is 608 pages long, the pages turn with rapidity. The last 100 pages zoom by at warp speed. I hope there’s a sequel.

Leigh Brackett wrote science fiction and fantasy at a time when both fields were dominated by male writers. She developed her own, unique style influenced by the adventure stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. Rider Haggard. Leigh Brackett didn’t stop there: she wrote a hard-boiled crime novel, NO GOOD FROM A CORPSE, that caught the eye of director Howard Hawks. Hawks hired Brackett to work with William Faulkner (yes, THAT William Faulkner, the Nobel Prize winner) on the screenplay of Raymond Chandler’s THE BIG SLEEP. Decades later, Brackett wrote the screenplay to another Chandler masterpiece, THE LONG GOODBYE. Oh, and weeks before her death, Brackett turned in the first draft of the screenplay for THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK. Clearly, Leigh Brackett was a major talent. But her early work has been too long inaccessible and forgotten.

Until now.

The Haffner Press is reprinting Leigh Brackett’s early stories. A couple years ago, they published the first volume of stories, MARTIAN QUEST. Now there’s LORELEI OF THE RED MIST. Hours of magic and thrills await you!