Quest of the Starstone eBook CL Moore Henry Kuttner
Download As PDF : Quest of the Starstone eBook CL Moore Henry Kuttner 
A mysterious warrior woman approaches Northwest Smith, with a tantalizing proposition, "Come with me to the green hills of earth in the distant past of 1500."
Excerpt
The rivet-studded oaken door crashed open, splintering from the assault of pikebutts whose thunderous echoes still rolled around the walls of the tiny stone room revealed beyond the wreck of the shattered door. Jirel, the warrior-maid of Joiry, leaped in through the splintered ruins, dashing the red hair from her eyes, grinning with exertion, gripping her two-edged sword. But in the ruin of the door she paused. The mail-clad men at her heels surged around her in the doorway like a wave of blue-bright steel, and then paused too, staring.
For Franga the warlock was kneeling in his chapel, and to see Franga on his knees was like watching the devil recite a paternoster. But it was no holy altar before which the wizard bent. The black stone of it bulked huge in this tiny, bare room echoing still with the thunder of battle, and in the split second between the door's fall and Jirel's crashing entry through its ruins Franga had crouched in a last desperate effort at—at what?
His bony shoulders beneath their rich black robe heaved with frantic motion as he fingered the small jet bosses that girdled the altar's block. A slab in the side of it fell open abruptly as the wizard, realizing that his enemy was almost within sword's reach, whirled and crouched like a feral thing. Blazing light, cold and unearthly, streamed out from the gap in the altar.
"So that's where you've hidden it!" said Jirel with a savage softness.
Quest of the Starstone eBook CL Moore Henry Kuttner
Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry in a single story, what more do you need to say? The story has all the action, adventure and danger you would expect, and a haunting, bittersweet conclusion as characters separated by different eras glimpse what might have been.Product details
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Quest of the Starstone eBook CL Moore Henry Kuttner Reviews
In my recent reviews for C. L. Moore's "Northwest Smith" and "Jirel of Joiry," I mentioned that there was one story missing from both of those collections, and that it just happened to be the same story. And since the Smith tales had dealt with the exploits of a futuristic, space-age smuggler/rogue, and the Jirel tales with a medieval swordswoman, it might understandably be wondered how any author could possibly unite them, for the first and final time, in any one story. Well, that was the challenge that Moore and her future husband, Henry Kuttner, rose to successfully, in their very first collaboration of many. The story, "Quest of the Starstone," initially appeared in the November '37 issue of "Weird Tales" magazine, the publication in which all the previous Smith and Jirel tales had appeared. "Quest," for the longest time after its initial publication, was almost impossible to find. Indeed, it never saw a reprint in any anthology until almost 40 years later, when editor Lin Carter selected it for inclusion in his 1976 collection "Realms of Wizardry" ("It was obviously an impossible feat for any author to bring together in one story a Sword and Sorcery heroine from the Middle Ages and a science fiction hero from the distant future; therefore, it was only natural for Kuttner to suggest the notion to Moore," Carter tells us in his intro). This indeed was the book that I was fortunate enough to lay my hands on, many years back, more than willing to pay the purchase price for this hardcover volume for the one story alone. But somehow, the story remained unread; I kept putting it off, telling myself that I really should reread all those Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry stories again before diving into this prize. But as I have finally taken in both series for the first time in 35 years, and renewed my love affair with both, I was also finally, at long last, able to take in this hard-to-find wonder.
The only thing is, the story is not exactly hard to find anymore. Today, anyone can go on the Internet Archive and read it for free. The story also appears in Karl Edward Wagner's 1989 collection "Echoes of Valor II," and in Planet Stories' Jirel collection "Black God's Kiss" (2007), as well as in its "Northwest of Earth" anthology (2008). And it can also be downloaded today on to your for just 99 cents. Thus, what was once a story that was virtually impossible to find is now readily available for all fans of Golden Age sci-fi and fantasy to enjoy.
So, how did Moore and Kuttner unite Catherine Lucille's two most famous characters in one story, despite Smith and Jirel's extreme distance from one another, both spatially and temporally? As the story opens, Jirel and her men are seen sacking the castle of the evil wizard Franga, from which the warrior lady of Joiry successfully steals the mysterious gem known as the Starstone, which reputedly confers both luck and wealth on its possessor. Enraged at his defeat, Franga opens a shadowy portal that he creates out of thin air, materializing on the planet Mars in the far future, where he tempts a certain spaceman (can you guess which one?) with pearls to do a job for him. Thus, Northwest Smith and Yarol the Venusian (his companion of old) are catapulted through both time and space to Jirel's castle, tasked with getting the Starstone back from her. Smith is even taught a certain incantation by Franga that will sweep him, Yarol and Jirel to an otherdimensional nowheresville, so that the recovery might be more easily carried out. And so, in a momentous meeting of legends, Smith and Jirel do indeed converse, in the guarded seclusion of the warrior lady's castle. But once Smith has snatched her into Franga's magical realm (Jirel, incidentally, gets involved in some kind of otherdimensional mishegas in every single story that she appears in; Smith, not nearly as often), our stalwart spaceman is prey to misgivings, as he begins to wonder if he and Yarol are indeed contending with the right foe...leading, as might be expected, to an uneasy alliance between Moore's two greatest creations....
For a story clocking in at a mere 26 pages and, by my rough count, 13,000 words, "Quest of the Starstone" packs an awful lot of color and action into its short compass. Highlights of this tale include our indomitable trio facing off against a horde of the reanimated undead in that otherdimensional realm; the torture that Smith is forced to undergo at Franga's hands; and the final revelation as to the Starstone's nature. But the smaller moments here are the ones that resonate most, such as Jirel's comment after hearing Yarol speak in High Venusian ("What is he saying--he gurgles like a brook...."); Jirel's grudging admiration for Smith's brawny physique, and her awe at his heat gun and valiant spirit; and the touching suggestion that some kind of a romance might have perhaps been possible between Smith and Jirel, had circumstances been otherwise.
For the rest of it, the story is not quite as epochal as this reader had been hoping for--bringing to mind, somehow, the slight disappointment I felt when Captains Kirk and Picard met for the first time in "Star Trek Generations"--and almost crying out for a longer, more in-depth treatment (as H. Rider Haggard had done in his 1921 novel "She and Allan," in which he united his two greatest characters, Ayesha and Allan Quatermain). The tone of the story is different from all the others, somehow, and Franga's statement to Smith that the year he has been brought back to is 1500 also strikes a wrong note; somehow, I had sensed that Jirel's time period was at least several hundred years earlier, and indeed, in one of the earlier Joiry stories, Moore had mentioned that the Roman empire had recently fallen. But if 1500 is indeed the accurate date, then we have also finally been vouchsafed a rough date for the Smith stories, as well, since Northwest reflects, upon his return to the Mars of the future, that Jirel had been dead now for 2,000 years, making his own time period...A. D. 3500? Again, that also does not strike the reader as being correct.
But these are quibbles. The bottom line is that all fans of Moore's two greatest characters will love seeing these two interact, despite the improbabilities and despite the unsettling discrepancy of tone. It is more than a matter of being a completist, as far as these two landmark series is concerned. The story is fun as can be, and a must for fans of Golden Age sci-fi and pulp fiction in general. Only...I wish we could have been told more about that Martian tavern owner who lost his legs "during an illicit amorous visit to the forbidden dens of the spider women"! Sounds like the basis for a novel in its own right, doesn't it?
(By the way, this review originally appeared on the Fantasy Literature website ... a most ideal destination for all fans of C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner....)
Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry in a single story, what more do you need to say? The story has all the action, adventure and danger you would expect, and a haunting, bittersweet conclusion as characters separated by different eras glimpse what might have been.
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