Leigh Brackett

• 1. Introduction

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  Leigh Brackett was born on the 7th of December 1915 in Los Angeles, California, and by the time she died in March 1978, she had left her mark on science fiction, crime fiction, Hollywood Westerns, and the Star Wars franchise. She earned the nickname "the Queen of Space Opera" during the Golden Age of Science Fiction, a period when very few women were writing in that genre at all. Her first published story appeared in February 1940. Within four years, she had published her first novel, landed a major Hollywood assignment, and created a Mars that readers would return to for decades. Her last professional act was delivering a screenplay to George Lucas, a first draft for the film that would become The Empire Strikes Back. She died before it went into production. That draft sat in a library in Portales, New Mexico, for more than thirty years before anyone outside a small circle could read it. How did a girl from a private school in Santa Monica end up writing for Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne, and Luke Skywalker? And what happened to her vision of a galaxy far, far away?

• 2. The Los Angeles Years

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  Leigh Brackett grew up without a father, who died when she was very young, in a household where her mother did not remarry. She was, by her own description and that of those who knew her, a tomboy, tall and athletic. Her school in Santa Monica introduced her to theater, and she began writing there. Los Angeles was not just her hometown; it became professionally essential to her. She was an active member of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, known as LASFS, which put her in contact with the writers and fans who would shape the field. She contributed to the second issue of Pogo's STF-ETTE, an all-female science fiction fanzine that was probably the first of its kind. Through LASFS she befriended Ray Bradbury, who would serve as best man at her wedding years later and collaborate on one of her stories. Robert Heinlein was another longtime close friend. The community she found in Los Angeles turned a private-school theater kid into one of the central figures of mid-century American science fiction.

• 3. The Queen of Space Opera

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  "Martian Quest", published in the February 1940 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, was Brackett's debut, and she hit a remarkable creative stride in those first two years. Her Mars was not Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars, though his influence was apparent. Where Burroughs' heroes set out to remake worlds, Brackett's heroes, often antiheroes, were swept along by forces much larger than themselves. Her Mars appeared as a marginally habitable desert, home to ancient, decadent, mostly humanoid races. Her Venus was a wet jungle planet full of primitive tribes and reptilian monsters. In 1949, in the story "Queen of the Martian Catacombs", she introduced Eric John Stark, an orphan from Earth raised by the semi-sentient aboriginals of Mercury, who were later killed by Earthmen. Stark reverted, when threatened, to a primitive self he called N'Chaka, the man without a tribe. The character carried a weight that set him apart from genre heroes of the era. A prominent theme throughout her fiction was colonialism: her stories illustrated and criticized the effects of expanding powers on civilizations that were either older or younger than those of the colonizers. The 1943 story "The Citadel of Lost Ships" considered the effects on alien cultures of Earth's expanding trade empire. This was not escapism for its own sake.

• 4. Elegies for Lost Worlds

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  After the Mariner missions returned data indicating there was no life on Mars, Brackett never went back to her Solar System. That decision says something about the seriousness with which she had built those worlds. Even before the Mariner findings, her fiction had taken a melancholy turn. After her high adventure period ended with "Black Amazon of Mars" in March 1951, she adopted what critics have called an elegiac tone: no longer celebrating the conflicts of frontier worlds, but lamenting the passing of civilizations. The titles of her later Solar System stories make the mood plain: "The Last Days of Shandakor", "Shannach-the Last", "Last Call from Sector 9G". That last story was published in the Summer 1955 issue of Planet Stories, which was also the magazine's final issue. Planet Stories had been her most reliable publisher. When it folded, along with Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories, Brackett lost her magazine market almost entirely. The Long Tomorrow, published in 1955, described an agrarian, technophobic society that emerged after nuclear war, and it was among her most critically praised novels. It also made her the first woman ever shortlisted for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1956, and, alongside C. L. Moore, one of the first two women ever nominated for a Hugo.

• 5. Hollywood and Howard Hawks

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  Howard Hawks read No Good from a Corpse, Brackett's 1944 hard-boiled mystery novel, and was impressed enough to have his secretary call in "this guy Brackett" to work on a screenplay. The phrase captures what Hollywood of that era assumed about a writer who produced that kind of prose. Brackett came in and co-wrote The Big Sleep alongside William Faulkner and Jules Furthman; the film starred Humphrey Bogart and was released in 1946. She had been co-writing the novella "Lorelei of the Red Mist" when the assignment came in. She handed the unfinished half to Ray Bradbury so she could leave for the studio. Hawks returned to Brackett repeatedly over the following decades. She wrote or co-wrote several of his John Wayne pictures: Rio Bravo in 1959, Hatari! in 1962, El Dorado in 1966, and Rio Lobo in 1970. Her background with The Big Sleep eventually brought her back to Raymond Chandler; she adapted The Long Goodbye for the screen, released in 1973. She also ghost-wrote a crime novel credited to the actor George Sanders in 1946. The Western novel Follow the Free Wind, published in 1963, earned her the Spur Award from Western Writers of America.

• 6. The Empire Draft

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  George Lucas asked Brackett to write the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back based on his story outline. It was a departure for her; all her science fiction to that point had been in the form of novels and short stories. She delivered a finished first draft, titled "Star Wars sequel", to Lucas shortly before her death from cancer on the 18th of March 1978. Lucas disliked the direction of the draft, discarded it, and wrote two new screenplays before passing the material to Lawrence Kasdan to rework some dialogue. Brackett and Kasdan, but not Lucas, received the final screenplay credit. Brackett's credit was given in tribute, despite her version not being used in the finished film. For more than thirty years, her original draft could only be read at the Jack Williamson Special Collections library at Eastern New Mexico University in Portales, New Mexico, and at Lucasfilm's archives in California. It was officially published in February 2016. In that draft, Yoda is named Minch, Lando Calrissian is called Lando Kaddar, and Luke has a hidden sister named Nellith. Luke's father appears as a Force ghost on Dagobah, distinct from Darth Vader. Han Solo ends the script leaving to search for his uncle Ovan Marek, described as the most powerful man in the universe after Emperor Palpatine. Charlie Jane Anders, co-founder of io9, wrote that despite it being fashionable to dismiss Brackett's contributions, the basic story beats of her draft and the finished film are the same. The film won the Hugo Award in 1981.

• 7. Return and Legacy

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  Edmond Hamilton, the science fiction writer Brackett married on the 31st of December 1946 in San Gabriel, California, died in February 1977 in Lancaster, California, of complications following kidney surgery, at age 72. Brackett died in March 1978 of cancer, at age 62, in Lancaster as well. Hamilton had edited her collection The Best of Leigh Brackett, published in 1977, the year before her death. In 2020, more than four decades after she died, Brackett posthumously won a Retro Hugo for Best Novel for Shadow Over Mars, originally published in Startling Stories in the Fall of 1944. The Book of Skaith, a trilogy published between 1974 and 1976, had brought Eric John Stark back one last time, transplanted from his old haunts on Mars and Venus to an extra-solar planet. Stark and the Star Kings, a collaborative story with Edmond Hamilton, appeared posthumously in a 2005 collection bearing the same name. The career that began with "Martian Quest" in 1940 stretched across decades, genres, and media, and its products kept finding readers long after she was gone.