Thinking about Leigh Brackett's heroes, I might say that however disillusioned they often find themselves at the end of their adventures, their heroism resides in their capacity to remake the world in which they find themselves for the better. Or perhaps that's putting it too strong. Saving a world doesn't automatically improve it, which is why many adventure stories can be read as in some ways fundamentally reactionary. Sometimes Brackett depicts failure, and whatever her heroes' success, their achievements are always within worlds which are subject to history. It's explicitly stated in at least one story that the romantic world of Mars in which their adventures take place is slowly dying. Over a period of centuries, even millenia, this landscape will disapear. Innocence is already lost.
But think about this more generally. All the various permutations of adventure stories that I've read by this point. Success or failure, it's always an isolated individual who is at the centre of the narrative. Part of the promise of an adventure story is that individuals can save their worlds, even improve them, making their worlds more just. Thinking about heroism in the real world, it's easier to see how seductive such a vision is. Not to take anything away from the heroism that exists, but most heroism occurs within social structures. The heroism of soldiers or firemen for example, is intensely social. Their professions place them in situations where heroism is possible, which is obviously less open to those of us who spend most of our days in an office. Which is not to say that heroism isn't found in other places. For some of us, ordinary life can require quite astonishing acts of bravery, and that's not to be slighted. Still, the kind of heroism that's celebrated in adventure narratives is rarely performed by romantic individuals here in the real world, where it is more likely to be the work of capable professionals who are trained to perform such acts.
If our sensibility is essentially romantic however, then living in a modern world which is currently largely run for the convenience of an essentially sociopathic elite, and in which heroic action can feel severely limited, the appeal becomes obvious. Think about the words which are used to justify the way the world is at present. So often we seem to be told we must be 'realistic', of the need for 'efficiency'. It's also a concious disavowel of romanticism and fantasy. At several points in reading Leigh Brackett's stories, I was reminded of the work of Graham Greene. Greene's characters are found in a world which is closer to the real (which is no doubt why some would argue his work is more mature), but I don't see how his dissillusioned characters are any less romantic. It's just that they exist in a world in which the kind of heroism available to those in a story by Leigh Brackett is no longer possible. That's what happens to heroic action in a world which is realistic.
In all likeliehood, individual heroism of the kind celebrated by adventure fiction has always been a romantic fiction, which might explain why the best of these kind of stories seem to belong to the past, either through their setting, or because that's when they were written. By their very nature perhaps, many adventure stories are looking backwards to a remembered past. As I noted in my previous post about adventure stories, adventure stories promise is a vision of freedom, a freedom from modernity. Which is not to say that the form is automatically reactionary. My admittedly limited awareness is that these days we don't seem to be able to do adventure stories, at least in the more high profile examples of the form where they're hedged about with irony in one way or another. A proper adventure can contain irony, but it still needs to be told straight.
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