FORGOTTEN BOOK : ALPHA CENTAURI OR DIE!

 Alpha Centauri or Die! by Leigh Bracket (fix-up novel of "The Ark of Mars C [Planet Stories, September 1953] and "Teleportress of Alph C" [Planter Stories, winter 1953-54], with the second story substantially edited, 1963; also included in Brackett's 2008 collection The Solar System)

"There were no more men in space.  The dark ships strode the ways between the worlds, lightless, silent, needing no human mind to guide them.  The R-ships, carrying the ffreight and the passengers, keeping order, keeping the law, taking the Pax Terrae to the limits of the solar system, and guardinbg there the boundary which was not now ever to be crossed.

"No mopre men in space,  No strong hands bridling the rockets, no eyes looking outward to the stars.  but still upon the wide-flkung worlds of Sol were old men who remembered, and young men who could dream."

It's a future where mankind can no longer dream, where the human spirit is bound by the reaches of the solar system.

From the blurb from the first edition Ace paperback:

"MANHUNT BEYOND PLUTO

"Alpha Centauri -- nearest star in the Solar System -- a matter of 4.3 light-years away.  to Kiorby and the others it meant freedom -- a word so powerful that they had gathered uop their protesting families and their few possessions and left the safe, easy, automated life of Mars to risk the wrath of the gevernment and the terror of flight into the void between the stars.

"But Alpha Centauri meant something else too:  five years crammed in the belly of a nearly obsolete spaceship, five years of praying that the old ship wouldn't fall apart, tht the food supply wouldn't run out, that the dark shape of a Government-controlled R-ship wouldn't suffenly loom ahead, blocking the path to freedom.

"And should they ever reach the unknown planets of alpha Centauri, what then?  Might there not be a force there, waiting for them, more menacing, more terrifying in its power thn anything man had encountered before?"

Pure space opera and planetary romance adventure of the type typical of Planet Stories, perhaps the best pulp magazine of its kind in the history of the genre.  Leigh Brackett was a mainstay of that revered pulp, and her writing managed to combine fantastic speculation, poetic imagery, sensitivity, and breakneck pacing.  Because of the disparate themes of the two stories that make up this novel, the book is not her very best, but it is a worthwhile example of why people hungered for this type of story.

Leigh Brackett (1915-1978), while known as the "Queen of Space Opera" in the science fiction field, was a multitalented writer who also had great success in other fields. With her 1956 novel The Long Tomorrow, she became the first woman ever nominated for a Hugo Award; she won a Retro-Hugo posthumously in 202 for her novel The Nemesis from Terra.   Other outstanding science fiction novels include The Sword of Rhiannon,The Big Jump, and (notably) The Long Tomorrow, as well as the sword and sorcery inspired Eric John Stark saga.  In the myatery field, she ghosted Stranger at Home for actor George Sanders, the hard-boiled No Good from a Corpse, An Eye for an Eye (adapted as an episode of Suspicion in 1958, the teen-age gang suspense novel The Tiger Among Us (filmed as 13 West Street in 1962), and crime novel Partner.  In the Western field, she wote the novelization of her film Rio Bravo, and the Spur-winning novel Follow the Free Wind.  She began her screenwriting career with Repubic Pictures' The Vampire's Ghost (not the grratest film ever made," according to Brackett).  This led to Columbia Pictures' Crime Doctors Man Hunt.  Director Howard Hawkes was so impressed with her novel No Good from a Corpse that he told his people to get "this guy Brackett" to help William Faulkner wit the script for Ratmond Chandler's The Big Sleep.  Brackett would go oon to work with Hawkes, scripting Rio Grande.Hatari!, El Dorado, and Rio Lobo.  She also wrote the screenplay for Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye, and at the tiome of her death, had just completed the first draft of The Empire Strikes Back.  Brackett was married to legendaryscience fiction writer Edmund Hamilton and collaborated with him (uncredited) on some of his works.

For a rip-snortin' read, it's hard to gop wrong woth Leigh Brackett.