Shambleau

Author: C. L. Moore

Desolation Road is one way of writing about Mars as a frontier; C.L. Moore's startling novella is another. In this instance, Mars most closely resembles a dusty township from the American West, where there aren't too many laws and where adventurers wander the streets with guns strapped to their waists. For a while, this was a common way of describing Mars in the planetary romances of the time, but none of them did it better than "Shambleau". The tall, lean outlaw we first encounter in this, Moore's first published story, is Northwest Smith, an adventurer who made his living among the cheap bars and dangerous alleyways of planets that have been settled but not yet civilised. Here he rescues a young woman from a mob, only to discover that she is more menacing than any mob might ever be. Mars as the Wild West became one of the abiding images of romantic planetary adventures from Edgar Rice Burroughs (see above) to Colin Greenland's Take Back Plenty. But "Shambleau" is the classic of the genre.