They mocked her "science fantasy" Then she wrote Empire Strikes Back - Charlie Jane Anders

"Also, in her introduction to The Best of Planet Stories #1 in 1976, Brackett describes "space opera" as "a pejorative term often applied to a story that has an element of adventure." And she offers a defense of space opera as "the folk-tale, the hero-tale, of our particular niche in history." Sputnik, she writes, startled the wits out of all the high-minded, important people who hadn't wanted to talk about space. But she adds: But the space opera has been telling us tales of spaceflight, of journeys to other worlds in this solar system... These stories served to stretch our little minds, to draw us out beyond our narrow skies into the vast glooms of interstellar space, where the great suns ride in splendor and the bright nebulae fling their veils of fire parsecs-long across the universe; where the Coal-Sack and the Horsehead make patterns of black mystery; where the Cepheid variables blink their evil eyes and a billion nameless planets may harbor life-forms infinitely numerous and strange. Escape fiction? Yes, indeed! But in its own ironic way, as we see now, it was an escape into a reality which some people are even now trying to fight off." 5 out of 5 http://io9.com/they-mocked-her-science-fantasy-then-she-wrote-empir-489586578

Leigh Brackett's Planetary Romances - Andrew Liptak

"Brackett was born on December 7th, 1915 in Los Angeles, California to a family of declining fortune. Her early life was met with hardship early on in 1918 when her father passed away, one of the many casualties of the global flu epidemic. After that, her family moved quite a bit, and Brackett later recalled that she had a haphazard education as they travelled the country before settling down. Her love of science fiction came when she was 8 years old, after picking up a copy of Edgar Rice Burrough's second Barsoom novel, The Gods of Mars. She later said that she knew from that point what she wanted to do: "I was never the same after that. Suddenly, I became aware of other world out there and then, from that time on, I was destined to be a science fiction writer."" 4 out of 5 https://www.kirkusreviews.com/features/leigh-bracketts-planetary-romances/

Library of America: On the Long Tomorrow - Nicola Griffith

"The opening of The Long Tomorrow reads like a King James Bible for the American myth: sure, rhythmic, and implacable. Brackett sets up her major theme in the first sentence: knowledge is sin, and fourteen-year-old Len Colter is about to take the step that will lead to his loss of Eden. This is the theme of the Bildungsroman: loss of innocence, change, and the journey from safety into the unknown in pursuit of knowledge. But because Brackett's ambition was huge, she chose for her setting a post-nuclear Ruined Earth. She aimed for no less than the first serious science fiction novel of character. In mid-century North America, I doubt there was any writer better equipped for the challenge." 3.5 out of 5 http://www.loa.org/sciencefiction/appreciation/griffith.jsp

Leigh Brackett: American Writer - Howard Andrew Jones

"This 4th of July I thought I’d take a look at one of my very favorite writers, the late, great Leigh Brackett, queen of planetary adventure. Only a few generations ago planetary adventure fiction had a few givens. First, it usually took place in our own solar system. Second, our own solar system was stuffed with inhabitable planets. Everyone knew that Mercury baked on one side and froze on the other, but a narrow twilight band existed between the two extremes where life might thrive. Venus was hot and swampy, like prehistoric Earth had been, and Mars was a faded and dying world kept alive by the extensive canals that brought water down from the ice caps. To enjoy Brackett, you have to get over the fact that none of this is real — which really shouldn’t be hard if you enjoy reading about vampires, telepaths, and dragons, but hey, there you go. Yeah, Mars doesn’t have a breathable atmosphere, or canals, or ancient races. If you don’t read her because you can’t get past that, you’re a fuddy duddy and probably don’t like ice cream." 3.5 out of 5 http://www.blackgate.com/2012/07/04/leigh-brackett-american-writer/

Leigh Brackett: Heroic Fantasy at its Best - John M. Whalen

"Whenever there are discussions of heroic fantasy fiction, the usual names are trotted out: Howard, Leiber, Carter, Moorcock. But there is one name that is sometimes overlooked and really should be added to that list. Leigh Brackett (1915-1978) may best be known to some as a Hollywood screenwriter, but she also wrote some of the best heroic fantasy stories ever published."


3.5 out of 5

http://www.roguebladesentertainment.com/2011/06/leigh-brackett-heroic-fantasy-at-its-best/

Leigh Brackettt - Dianne Newell and Victoria Lamont

"Dianne Newell and Victoria Lamont, “Leigh Brackett (1915-1978),” Fifty Key Figures in Science Fiction, Mark Bould et al., eds. (Routledge: 2009), 37-41."

"Leigh Brackett was one of a handful of women associated with early American sf. She is one of the only ones remembered for writing space opera, which she began doing for the pulp magazines in the early 1940s, when it was popular but looked down upon by many writers and editors. The tenacity and volume of her writing in this subgenre led to her being given the title the "Queen" of space opera. A consummate science-fantasist, she is remembered for her very visual picture of Mars and Venus and for Eric John Stark, the maverick, part-native hero she created to wander the solar system. Through the repackaging of her classic science fantasy, especially her Stark stories of the 1950s, Brackett contributed to the new traditions in, and revival of, space opera in the 1970s, though she was at odds with emerging feminist approaches to sf.
Brackett grew up in California. Her diverse and prolific career spanned from the 1940s, her period of greatest activity in the sf magazines, until her death. Her first story, the realistic "Martian Quest" (1940), was written for Astounding Science-Fiction, but she moved on to writing space opera for the pulp magazines Planet Stories, Startling Stories, and limiting Wonder Stories, scripts for Hollywood thrillers and westerns (notably for Howard Hawks), hard-boiled detective stories and novels, television scripts, and updating her Stark stories for 1970s audiences. At the time of her death, she had drafted the screenplay for Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (Kershner 1980), for which she posthumously received a Hugo in 1981. She is often (perhaps overly) discussed in the context of her marriage to Edmond Hamilton, a popular author of classic space opera.
Brackett's rendering of Mars was inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs's Mars stories, of which she was a voracious reader, and to a lesser
extent by Rudyard Kipling, H. Rider Haggard, and A. Merritt. Like Burroughs, Brackett drew from American frontier mythology to represent Mars as a far more ancient planet than Earth, a planet whose "civilized" period had long since passed. First appearing in Planet Stories in 1949, Brackett's Stark is a forerunner to the morally ambivalent frontier heroes of westerns in the 1960s. Whereas Burroughs's John Carter embodies unambiguously American cultural superiority over the declining civilization of Barsoom (Mars), Stark is introduced as a mercenary with ambiguous allegiances. A human raised by the indigenes of Mercury in a semi-savage state, Stark is captured while still a child by human colonists who display him in a cage like a zoo animal, before he is rescued and civilized by Simon Ashton, who works for an agency implicated in the administration of Earth's interplanetary empire. With his allegiances thus divided between his savage adopted tribe and his civilizing foster-father, Stark is as likely to take the side of the indigenous inhabitants of Mars and Venus as that of the colonizers. For example, in "Queen of the Martian Catacombs" (1949), Stark exposes the plot of a Martian chieftain to install himself in a puppet government propped up by colonial "outlanders." In "The Enchantress of Venus" (1949), Stark searches for a friend who has disappeared and finds himself entangled in the attempts of the declining ruling class to maintain their tyrannical hold over the people of Shuruun. In both cases, Stark is offered the opportunity to rule at the side of a conniving princess if he will only prop up her rule, and he refuses.
Stark is a complex character, haunted by his primitive upbringing and suffering from frequent flashbacks to his childhood, when, as N'Chaka, he lived in a state of constant vigilance. Civilization has not completely supplanted the primitive part of his character, which surfaces during moments of threat. Stark frequently feels fear, a sensation linked to his primitivity - but one which gives him an advantage by enabling him to respond to threats with the instinctive speed of an agile, wild animal. Brackett further figures Stark as racially mixed, his skin burnt "dark" by the hot sun of his home planet Mercury.
Martian romantic exotica also flourished in Brackett's "Black Amazon of Mars" (1951), "The Last Days of Shandakor" (1952), and "The Arc of Mars" (1953), at a time when most sf visions of Mars moved away from romance to take on new, realistic overtones as a result of scientific investigations. Brackett's sf and her hero Stark had already expanded into other worlds - mainly Venus, notably in "Lorelei of the Red Mist" (1946, with Ray Bradbury), "The Moon that Vanished" (1948), and "Enchantress of Venus."
Contrary to the common view that she moved away from the genre after the 1950s, Brackett continued to publish and reprint sf and science fantasy for the rest of her life. She always claimed that she wrote what she loved to read. Sf alone, she said, allowed a "soaring freedom of the imagination," but for money, she added, she wrote in other fields (Mallardi and Bowers 1969: 19-20).
In the 1940s and 1950s the reception of Brackett's space opera was mixed; it was praised for its rich settings and imaginative fantasy, but also found derivative and simplistic. Anxious to legitimize a disreputable pulp genre, sf critics have long deployed space opera and science fantasy as the "other" of sf, constructing a canon purportedly based on scientific accuracy. By these standards, the big winner for Brackett was her postapocalyptic, non-space-opera "legitimate" sf epic The Long Tomorrow (1955), which received rave reviews - for its realism, serious subject matter, and literary quality - from major critics such as Damon Knight and Anthony Boucher, and more recently John Clute and Brian Stableford. It also garnered Brackett a Hugo nomination. Set a couple of generations after a nuclear apocalypse, it depicts a future America under the sway of Mennonite principles. The Mennonites, a Christian sect that eschews technological development, find themselves in a position of power when technological civilization has been all but destroyed. Blamed for the nuclear apocalypse, advanced technology of all kinds is forbidden. A complex and subtle exploration of the relationship between the technological and the social, The Long Tomorrow enabled Brackett to explore issues that the short, sensational pulp format could not comfortably accommodate. It would be a mistake, however, to characterize Brackett as a "serious" writer trapped in the pulps, for she was a lifelong avid fan and defender of the popular.
Brackett revived her Stark series in the 1970s — this time in interstellar space, with The Ginger Star (1974), Vie Hounds of Skaith (1974), and The Reavers of Skaith (1976) — to good reviews. Paul A. Carter described Skaith as a prime example of the dying planet archetype, and Frederick Patten compared Skaith to J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle- earth. Whereas the earliest Stark tales depicted the Earth-led galactic empire as exploitative of the worlds in its path, the Skaith trilogy shifted away from the critique of empire, casting the Galactic Union as liberators. This mirrors the cultural climate in which Brackett was writing, which was in transition from the counterculturalism of the 1960s and polarized by US involvement in Vietnam.
The praise of male editors and critics of the 1970s notwithstanding, Brackett's sf understandably came under the scrutiny of feminist sf critics and anthologists of that decade. In interviews, Brackett spokewarmly about the sf community and denied that gender was an obstacle for her. Tellingly, she once remarked that if she was going to include a woman in one of her stories, she has to be doing something,
suggesting that Brackett was critical of conventions of female passivity in space opera. If so, she did not convert these conventions, but chose to focus on male-centered adventure stories and maverick heroes such as Stark, in which the most prominent female characters tend to be exotic alien queens or princesses. Not easily fitting the mold of the emerging feminist sf of the 1970s, Brackett (and space opera) were criticized by the likes of Joanna Russ and excluded from Pamela
Sargent’s groundbreaking Women ry Wonder (1975) anthology.
Although Brackett’s work made it into Sargent’s More Women of Wonder (1976), her masculine style and aggressive heroes were emphasized as characteristic of her style and the fact that it did not seem to matter to readers that she was a woman was noted (Sargent 1976: xix). In later decades, however, Brackett was reconsidered by feminist critics such as Sargent, who praised her strong female characters.
Despite Brackett’s intentionally hard-boiled approach in her sf writing, she capitalizes upon the classic identification between the categories of the alien, the primitive, and the land, which in Western culture have along tradition of identification with the feminine, to create alien beings and landscapes that function as less obvious, yet potent, sites of identity subversion. For example, “The Woman from Altair" (1951) is told by a man but centered around an alien woman who appears, but turns out to be far from, frail. Similarly, feminine psychic
power - the ability to empathize with and assimilate foreign subjects, whether human or alien - is a futuristic manifestation of traditional feminine influence. Psychic or empathetic female characters appear in Brackett's “Mars Minus Bisha” (1954) and Alpha Centauri - or Die! (1963). In Alpha Centauri, Brackett also describes the chaotic atmosphere aboard a ship, focusing in particular on domesticity in outer
space and depicting a woman-led mutiny against the ship’s captain.
Yet, despite her impressive accomplishments, Brackett’s long, media-spanning career garnered her no sf awards in her lifetime (though she did win the 1957 jules Verne Fantasy Award and the 1963 Western Writers of America Golden Spur Award). Perhaps she
was not in the end appreciated in sf circles; no critical studies of her work exist and only one anthology of her sf stories not edited by herself was published during her lifetime: Edmond Hamilton’s The Best of Leigh Brackett (1977). There are, however, signs that Brackett's reputation is undergoing a revival. Michael Moorcock in an anthology of her early stories listed a “who’s who” of male sf authors who would count her as an important influence, including himself (Moorcock 2002: xi-xvi). ln 2005 she was awarded the Cordwainer Smith Foundation Rediscovery Award. In their 2006 examination of the space opera “renaissance,” David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer remind us that Brackett’s contribution to the Star Wars franchise
established a link between space opera and commercial success.
Brackett is also beginning to receive attention as a pioneer of women's sf it is clear that Leigh Brackett was a prolific, versatile, and thoughtful writer whose space opera and science fantasy stories and books continue to lend themselves to reinterpretation."

Nine Ways of Looking at Space Operas Part 1 - David G. Hartwell

"Nine Ways of Looking at Space Operas, Part 1

Hartwell, David G.

New York Review of Science Fiction 18(12): 17-21. August 2006. (No. 216)"


Unseen.

http://sffrd.library.tamu.edu/browse/75057/

The Long Tomorrow - Gary K. Wolfe

"The Long Tomorrow

Wolfe, G. K.

in: Magill, Frank N., ed. Survey of Science Fiction Literature, Vol. 3. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press, 1979. pp. 1242-1245."

Unseen.

http://sffrd.library.tamu.edu/browse/26943/

The Long Tomorrow - David Pringle

"Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett (1955)

Pringle, David

in: Pringle, David. Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1985. pp.55-56."

Unseen.

http://sffrd.library.tamu.edu/browse/16282/

Leigh Brackett : Writer - Martin Quigley and Barry Monush

An article from this publication:

Brackett, Leigh: Writer.
Author: Martin Quigley; Barry Monush
Edition/Format: Article : English
Publication: First century of film


Unseen.

http://www.worldcat.org/title/brackett-leigh-writer/oclc/495793767

Leigh Brackett - John Hamilton

A short article in here it appears.

The final frontier / by John Hamilton.
Edina, Minn. : ABDO Pub. Co., - The world of science fiction
32 pages 2007 English

Contents
Space Opera page 4
E. E. Smith page 10
Edmond Hamilton page 12
Leigh Brackett page 14
Buck Rogers page 16
Flash Gordon page 18
Star Trek page 20
Dune page 22
Star Wars page 24
New Space Opera page 26
Glossary page 30
Web sites page 31
Index page 32


3 out of 5

http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/19540362

At Google Book Search

http://books.google.com/books?id=BZ4jHxBQD8sC&printsec=frontcover&cd=1&source=gbs_ViewAPI#v=onepage&q=leigh%20brackett&f=false

Leigh Brackett, screenwriter and sci-fi royalty - Marc Haefele

A short article from a Southern California public radio station. Also with an audio version you can download.


3.5 out of 5

http://media.scpr.org/audio/upload/2010/04/29/or-haefele-brackett.mp3

http://www.scpr.org/programs/offramp/2010/05/01/marc-haefele-leigh-brackett-screenwriter-and-sci-f/

Lorelei of the Red Mist - Leiji Matsumoto

(If anyone has seen this manga, would love to hear more!)

From Kinejun Magazine (August, 1978):

"Interviewer: You once adapted a story co-written by Ray Bradbury and Leigh Brackett in an old SF magazine.

Matsumoto: Yes, it was titled Lorelei of the Red Mist. But it was difficult to draw as a manga [in 1958]. When I draw, it's much easier to use my own inclinations. My best parts don't come out when I adapt a novel written by someone else."


3.5 out of 5

http://www.starblazers.com/html.php?page_id=305

Alternative Draft Week - Original "The Empire Strikes Back" draft - Carson Reeves

"Genre: Sci-Fi Fantasy
Premise: While Han Solo goes in search of his Father-In-Law, Ovan Marekal, who has political ties with Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker heads to the Bog Planet where he meets a frog-like Jedi named Minch, who teaches him the ways of the force.
About: This is not the widely circulated “4th Draft” which has Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasden’s name on it. This is Brackett’s original first draft of the movie, titled, “Star Wars Sequel.” Brackett was best known (outside of her contribution on “Empire”) for scripting the films, “The Big Sleep,” and “The Long Goodbye.” She was also a prolific science-fiction writer, writing over 200 stories of various lengths in the genre. As a novelist, she wrote crime stories and westerns as well. It was in 1978 that Lucas gave Brackett the first shot at his sequel to Star Wars, which at that time, he apparently didn’t have a title for yet. This was based off the success of Brackett’s space opera novels, though she had never written a science fiction screenplay at the time. Sadly, Brackett died of cancer soon after she turned in this draft.
Writer: Leigh Brackett
Details: 128 pages (2-17-78)"


4.5 out of 5

http://scriptshadow.blogspot.com/2010/03/alternative-draft-week-original-empire.html

Raymond Chandler and His Followers - Michael E. Grost

"Leigh Brackett was an occasional writer of detective fiction, in the hard-boiled tradition of Raymond Chandler. Two of the stories I have read, including the well done "So Pale, So Cold, So Fair" (1957), deal with a man who cleans up a crooked town. This is basically similar to the plot subjects of her Howard Hawks movie westerns, Rio Bravo (1959) and El Dorado (1967). In an earlier tale, the overly gruesome and morbid "I Feel Bad Killing You" (1944), she calls her crooked area the Surfside Division of L.A., an obvious homage to Raymond Chandler, who created "Bay City" as the ultimate town run by crooked cops, in Farewell My Lovely (1940). Chandler's original was Santa Monica, now a lovely beach community near L.A., but at the time a notoriously corrupt burg. (Two of my favorite films were shot there, Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (1958) and Curtis Harrington's Night Tide (1960).) No one in Chandler succeeds in cleaning the city up: it just sits there and festers. Brackett takes the opposite approach, one that seems more in tune with traditional Westerns, such as Destry Rides Again (1939), in which the hero reforms the whole crooked town. Brackett clearly is expressing a personal vision here. Her fiction is emotionally sensitive, and deals with men who are trying to find renewed meaning in their lives. She also pays attention to plot logic, and includes real mysteries in both tales. I think the second, 1957 tale is much better than the first 1944 one, and I also enjoyed her 1960's film scripts such as Hatari! and El Dorado much more than her 1940's adaptation of The Big Sleep. Brackett seemed to grow as a writer as she got older. "


3.5 out of 5


http://web.archive.org/web/19981203163717/http://members.aol.com/mg4273/chandler.htm

Eric John Stark Begins - Ryan Harvey

"Stark was the most famous creation of Leigh Brackett (1915–1978), one of the first female authors to break down the gender barriers around science-fiction and fantasy publishing. Brackett was a multi-talented writer who could write not only epic space opera and scientific romances, but also hard-boiled mysteries and Westerns. When the pulp market dried up in the mid-'50s, principally her chief publisher Planet Stories, she entered into the burgeoning world of TV writing. She also wrote a number of screenplays, The Big Sleep (co-written with some guy named William Faulkner), Rio Bravo, and The Long Goodbye. Her last work before her death from cancer (at the too young age of sixty-two) was the first draft screenplay to The Empire Strikes Back, although apparently little of her contributions made it into the final draft."


4 out of 5

http://realmofryan.blogspot.com/2007/08/erick-john-stark-begins.html

Swords-and-Sisters: Leigh Brackett and women in fandom - Al Harron

"However, my first introduction to Brackett wasn’t with one of her stories: it was in the introduction to a Robert E. Howard collection. The introduction to The Sword Woman is inspired, heartfelt and full of genuine appreciation for Howard’s skills as an author in a way that seems a million miles away from the prevailing “don’t look for philosophical puzzles, there are none” attitude of the time.

It’s too bad that Robert E. Howard didn’t write more stories about his Sword Woman, Dark Agnes de Chastillion. She was quite a character… more intelligent than Conan, more attractive than Solomon Kane, and as fine a swashbuckler as any of Howard’s heroes. Perhaps she came a litle before her time. Women who could do things were not very popular in fiction back in the ’30s, particularly in the adventure story field. C.L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry, who gained considerable fame at that time, operated solely in the fantasy field, where there was a good bit more latitude."


4 out of 5

http://www.thecimmerian.com/?p=12160#more-12160

Leigh Brackett in Paperback - Elwanda Holland

Leigh Brackett in Paperback

Holland, Elwanda

Books Are Everything 1(3):24-26. May 1988.

Unseen.


http://web08.library.tamu.edu/browse/36115/

Leigh (Douglass) Brackett (1915-1978) - Eric L. David

Leigh (Douglass) Brackett (1915-1978)

Davin, Eric L.

in: Davin, Eric L. Partners in Wonder: Women and the Birth of Science Fiction 1926-1965. New York: Ibooks, 2006. p. 372.

This concludes :-

"known to be female first. She became popular later. In one of the most famous instances used to "prove" prejudice against women, then, we discover that it is completely impossible to find any prejudice at all from editors, fans, or readers. Nor can we find any evidence that there was ever any attempt at gender-concealment on Leigh Brackett's part or on the part of the editors who published her. Indeed, the latter went out of their way to proudly publicize her gender with photographs, profiles and announcements, and it was fellow writers, such as Henry Kuttner, who brought her into the science fiction world. Thus, as with Leslie F. Stone, it is a complete fiction to use Leigh Brackett as an example of a woman author who either attempted to conceal her gender, or whose gender was unknown to editors or readers, or who was discriminated against because of her gender."

http://web08.library.tamu.edu/browse/72865/

http://books.google.com.au/books?id=ZoNDebTvUnsC&pg=PA105&lpg=PA105&dq=earth's+renaissance+leigh+brackett&source=bl&ots=gkJrpIu4Lu&sig=KvYKVjO8BNH1JyVyqM3is6eAboI&hl=en&ei=ZOlITYP8GoyyuAPZmLGhBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CCUQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=earth's%20renaissance%20leigh%20brackett&f=false

King's cross in orbit: Edmond Hamilton and Leigh Brackett in Sydney - P. A. M. Terry

King's cross in orbit: Edmond Hamilton and Leigh Brackett in Sydney

Terry, P. A. M.

Australian Science Fiction Review No. 14:25-31. February 1968.


Unseen.


http://web08.library.tamu.edu/browse/8037/