The Sword of Aldones Read Free

old Planet Stories. (The magazine included correspondents’ addresses in its readers’ columns, and many such relationships developed through this medium.) The friendship between Bradley and Sneary (although it was years before the postal friendship resulted in a face-to-face meeting) developed such warmth that Bradley dedicated The Sword of Aldones to Sneary.
    As is the case with many science fiction fans, Bradley sought to emulate the writers she admired (in the sense of entering their profession, not imitating their styles or themes). Her favorite authors of the then-burgeoning pulp school included Catherine L. Moore, Henry Kuttner, Theodore Sturgeon, and Jack Vance.
    These authors she read in magazines oriented toward colorful adventure—like Planet Stories and Startling Stories—rather than in the most famous science fiction magazine of that era, Astounding (later renamed Analog). Astounding’s orientation was more heavily technological. In the area of pure fantasy, Bradley remembers that she never liked Astounding’s companion magazine, Unknown (later Unknown Worlds) “because I don’t think the writers ever really liked or believed in fantasy.“2 She preferred the longer-lived Weird Tales.
    Favorite works included the Jirel of Joiry and Northwest Smith stories of Moore, The Ship of Ishtar (1926) by Merritt, and The Dying Earth (1950) by Vance. She states that “Henry Kuttner formed my mind. what I tried to do in The Sword of Aldones [was] to make you feel that these are real people, that this is a world that might actually fee someday. This is what happened when I started reading Henry Kuttner. There was just enough scientific rationalization that I could feel, My God, these people are real. Even if some of them were werewolves and things. It was a real werewolf, a man who had something weird changing his bones so that he could actually change.”
    Other writers whom she admired at the time were H. Rider Haggard, Sax Rohmer, the members of the Order of the Golden Dawn, and Mary Renault, in the earlier years of her output.
    Bradley’s first two sales were to a short-lived magazine titled Vortex Science Fiction. (This magazine had a short career in 1953 and is not to be confused with Vertex Science Fiction, published in Los Angeles in the early 1970s, or with another Vortex Science Fiction published in Great Britain beginning in 1977.) Bradley’s recollection is that the original Vortex operated on so small a budget that no major literary agent would deal with its editor. That editor, ironically, was Chester Whitehorn, who had served as editor of the pulpwood Planet Stories in 1945-46.
    Whitehorn appealed to a number of minor agents, including Bradley’s, to “send us anything you have and we’ll put it all in a pile and read everything we get and keep the least worst.“4 Whitehorn bought Bradley’s story “Keyhole” for $12—her first professional sale. Shortly Whitehorn accepted another story, Bradley’s first expressing any form of feminist concern. This story was written as “For Women Only,” but was published under the shortened title, “Women Only.” Both “Keyhole” and “Women Only” appeared in Vortex’s second (and final) issue, October, 1953. “Women Only” dealt with a female android. Androids, although endowed with sexual capacity, were regarded as universally sterile, yet the one in Bradley’s story was able to bear a child.
    Her first significant sale, in Bradley’s judgement, was the novelette “Centaurus Changeling.“5 This story was also sold in 1953 and appeared in the April, 1954
    issue of TheMagazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which was by that time Bradley’s favorite magazine.
    The history of her first published novel, The Door Through Space (1961), is more complicated. Originally entitled Bird of Prey, it was written at novel-length, revised into a shorter format and then published in Venture Science Fiction in May, 1957. (Venture, now defunct, was a