Tor Doubles #8: Leigh Brackett’s The Nemesis from Terra and Edmond Hamilton’s Battle for the Stars
Cover for Battle for the Stars by Bryn Barnard
This volume includes the story Nemesis from Terra by Leigh Brackett and Battle for the Stars, byt Edmond Hamilton. There are two significant distinctions for this volumes. The two authors represented were married to each other and one of the stories was previously included in the Ace Double series. The Tor Double was originally published in May 1989.
The Nemesis from Terra was originally published as “Shadow Over Mars” in Startling Stories in Fall, 1944. It was previously published as part of an Ace Double (F-123, with Robert Silverberg’s Collision Course) in 1961. The Nemesis from Terra is the first of three Brackett stories to be published in the Tor Doubles series.
Although set on Mars in the far future, as with many of Brackett’s Martian stories, The Nemesis from Terra feels more like a fantasy novel than a science fiction novel. It is a descendant of the Mars of Edgar Rice Burroughs and could easily be classified with the stories of Robert E. Howard, neither of which is a surprise.