"Leigh Brackett – Born on December 7th, 1915 in Los Angeles, California, her birth name was Leigh Douglass Brackett and she was the daughter of William Franklin and Margaret Douglass Brackett. Her father was a certified public accountant who died in the influenza epidemic of 1918. Brackett was subsequently raised in Santa Monica by her mother and grandparents."
3.5 out of 5
http://wonder.swordsmith.com/guide/index.php/archives/417
Showing posts with label introduction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label introduction. Show all posts
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Friday, January 8, 2010
Leigh Brackett - Bill Pronzini
One page introduction to her story in the Hard-Boiled anthology.
You can find it by Google Books now apparently. It is Page 348. Search for Leigh Brackett works, too.
"Until the runaway popularity of the female private eye in recent years, few women wrote hard-boiled and noir fiction. Most women authors seem to have preferred their crimes and misdemeanors to take place in poundings more genteel than Raymond Chandler's mean streets and to be couched in less graphic and violent prose. But a few women did enter what was perceived as a "man's world" in the 1940s and 1950s, and some of them had significant careers. One was Georgia Ann Randolph Craig, who
(under the pseudonym Craig Rice) created Chicago lawyer John F. Malone. Other notables wear Helen Nielsen, M. V. Heberden, and Dolores Hitchens. But the woman with the most impressive body of work, whose achievements rank her as one of the top hard-boiled—fiction writers of all time, was Leigh Brackett.
Brackett was an avowed admirer of Chandler and the Black Mask schooland her novel No Good from a Corpse (1944) a southern California tale featuring private detective Edmond Clive, is so Chandleresque in style and approach that it might have been written by Chandler. Indeed Brackett was one of the coauthors of the screenplay of The Big Sleep in 1940 and twenty-five years later she wrote the script for the Robert Altman-Elliot Gould film version of The Long Goodbye (1974). The Tiger Among Us and An Eye for an Eye. her two 1957 suspense novels, are also powerful noir stories set against midwsetern backdrops. Oddly 1957 was the only year in the 1950s in which Brackett published crime fiction; the balance of her output during that decade consisted of science fiction and screenplays. "So Pale. So Cold. So Fair," a gripping tale of political corruption and murder in a small Ohio town where "sin is organised, functional and realistic." first appeared in the men's magazine Argosy in July 1957. Like the best of her handful of crime shorts published in the 1940s, this story contains echoes not only of Chandler but of both Dashiell Hammett and Paul Cain. It might well have been featured in black Mask one or two decades earlier—a magagne in which Brackett did not appear even once.
4 out of 5
http://books.google.com.au/books?hl=en&lr=&id=XJQzRX8wJagC&oi=fnd&pg=PA335&dq=leigh+brackett&ots=gGXOD4jhlq&sig=XJJdA42NCXcBQ4jLkwkGmtIMgS0
You can find it by Google Books now apparently. It is Page 348. Search for Leigh Brackett works, too.
"Until the runaway popularity of the female private eye in recent years, few women wrote hard-boiled and noir fiction. Most women authors seem to have preferred their crimes and misdemeanors to take place in poundings more genteel than Raymond Chandler's mean streets and to be couched in less graphic and violent prose. But a few women did enter what was perceived as a "man's world" in the 1940s and 1950s, and some of them had significant careers. One was Georgia Ann Randolph Craig, who
(under the pseudonym Craig Rice) created Chicago lawyer John F. Malone. Other notables wear Helen Nielsen, M. V. Heberden, and Dolores Hitchens. But the woman with the most impressive body of work, whose achievements rank her as one of the top hard-boiled—fiction writers of all time, was Leigh Brackett.
Brackett was an avowed admirer of Chandler and the Black Mask schooland her novel No Good from a Corpse (1944) a southern California tale featuring private detective Edmond Clive, is so Chandleresque in style and approach that it might have been written by Chandler. Indeed Brackett was one of the coauthors of the screenplay of The Big Sleep in 1940 and twenty-five years later she wrote the script for the Robert Altman-Elliot Gould film version of The Long Goodbye (1974). The Tiger Among Us and An Eye for an Eye. her two 1957 suspense novels, are also powerful noir stories set against midwsetern backdrops. Oddly 1957 was the only year in the 1950s in which Brackett published crime fiction; the balance of her output during that decade consisted of science fiction and screenplays. "So Pale. So Cold. So Fair," a gripping tale of political corruption and murder in a small Ohio town where "sin is organised, functional and realistic." first appeared in the men's magazine Argosy in July 1957. Like the best of her handful of crime shorts published in the 1940s, this story contains echoes not only of Chandler but of both Dashiell Hammett and Paul Cain. It might well have been featured in black Mask one or two decades earlier—a magagne in which Brackett did not appear even once.
4 out of 5
http://books.google.com.au/books?hl=en&lr=&id=XJQzRX8wJagC&oi=fnd&pg=PA335&dq=leigh+brackett&ots=gGXOD4jhlq&sig=XJJdA42NCXcBQ4jLkwkGmtIMgS0
Introduction To I Feel Bad Killing You - Max Allan Collins
From A Century Of Noir by Max Allan Collins and Mickey Spillane:
"Leigh Brackett (1915–1978) finished her extraordinary career by writing the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back. Yes, that Empire Strikes Back. She wrote a number of other screenplays as well, most notably for The Big Sleep and Rio Bravo.
Despite her Hollywood reputation, her fine stories and novels have been somewhat overlooked. She worked in two genres essentially, science fiction and hard-boiled crime, although the Western Writers of America awarded her the Spur award for fiction in 1964. But she was magnificent in noir and science fiction. Look up such novels as No Good from a Corpse and The Tiger Among Us if you want to see a first-rate writer at the top of her talent."
3 out of 5
"Leigh Brackett (1915–1978) finished her extraordinary career by writing the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back. Yes, that Empire Strikes Back. She wrote a number of other screenplays as well, most notably for The Big Sleep and Rio Bravo.
Despite her Hollywood reputation, her fine stories and novels have been somewhat overlooked. She worked in two genres essentially, science fiction and hard-boiled crime, although the Western Writers of America awarded her the Spur award for fiction in 1964. But she was magnificent in noir and science fiction. Look up such novels as No Good from a Corpse and The Tiger Among Us if you want to see a first-rate writer at the top of her talent."
3 out of 5
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Introduction to Enchantress Of Venus - Donald L. Lawler
In Approaches To Science Fiction, page 101-102. With biographical notes.
Unseen.
Unseen.
Introducing the Guest Of Honor - Jack Williamson
Brackett and Hamilton, at an unidentified conference.
Unseen.
Unseen.
Introduction to Women Of Wonder - Pamela Sargent
Points out Brackett's writing rather macho. Book is of course about the feminist angle, and also of course suggesting someone should not write a particular way because of their gender and you don't like it is sexist. Particularly if praising Moore for doing the exact same thing.
3.5 out of 5
3.5 out of 5
Introduction to Enchantress Of Venus - Leo Margulies and Oscar J. Friend
Finds it brilliant, comparable to the best of Haggard's fantasies.
Unseen.
Unseen.
Friday, January 1, 2010
Sword Woman - Leigh Brackett
An introduction to the Robert E. Howard collection:
"It is also interesting to speculate on whether or not Dark Agnes was inspired by the Lady of Joiry. Certainly Howard was aware of Jirel. He had read Black God's Shadow and liked it, and said so, and he had sent a copy of Sword Woman lo C.L. Moore to read, (She loved it, and hoped there would be more.) But at this late date it is impossible to say which character was first conceived, or whether indeed there was any connection between them at all. (Jirel, of course, appeared in Weird Tales
before Sword Woman was written.) It is reasonable to assume that Howard and Moore both got the inspiration for their martial ladies from the same sources ... the historical accounts of those women to whom Howard dedicated his chronicle of Dark Agnes, from the ballad about Mary Ambree, and quite likely from that famous saint-inarmor, Joan of Arc, though saintliness is not, fortunately, a quality possessed by either heroine. In any case, the resemblance between Agnes and Jirel is purely superficial. They both had red hair. They both wore armor and wielded swords with deadly effect. But Jirel was fire and ice, she was silken and subtle, and she dwelt in the Neverlands of fantasy, in a different continuum from Howard's historical France. Jirel was concerned with dark gods and sorcerers, with love and magic.
We never really know why or how she came to be a sword woman. She is simply the Lady of Joiry, mailed and proud and beautiful.
Agnes, on the other hand, is a total pragmatist. Howard's talents were multi-faceted, but subtle he was not, nor silken, and his heroine isn't either. Agnes lived in a hard cruel time when women were somewhat less valuable and less well-treated than the family beast of burden, which would cost money to replace. (If there was no beast of burden, she was it.) Agnes was peasant-born, to a brutal
father, in a pigsty village, and she grew up tough because if she had not been tough she would nothave grown up at all."
4.5 out of 5
"It is also interesting to speculate on whether or not Dark Agnes was inspired by the Lady of Joiry. Certainly Howard was aware of Jirel. He had read Black God's Shadow and liked it, and said so, and he had sent a copy of Sword Woman lo C.L. Moore to read, (She loved it, and hoped there would be more.) But at this late date it is impossible to say which character was first conceived, or whether indeed there was any connection between them at all. (Jirel, of course, appeared in Weird Tales
before Sword Woman was written.) It is reasonable to assume that Howard and Moore both got the inspiration for their martial ladies from the same sources ... the historical accounts of those women to whom Howard dedicated his chronicle of Dark Agnes, from the ballad about Mary Ambree, and quite likely from that famous saint-inarmor, Joan of Arc, though saintliness is not, fortunately, a quality possessed by either heroine. In any case, the resemblance between Agnes and Jirel is purely superficial. They both had red hair. They both wore armor and wielded swords with deadly effect. But Jirel was fire and ice, she was silken and subtle, and she dwelt in the Neverlands of fantasy, in a different continuum from Howard's historical France. Jirel was concerned with dark gods and sorcerers, with love and magic.
We never really know why or how she came to be a sword woman. She is simply the Lady of Joiry, mailed and proud and beautiful.
Agnes, on the other hand, is a total pragmatist. Howard's talents were multi-faceted, but subtle he was not, nor silken, and his heroine isn't either. Agnes lived in a hard cruel time when women were somewhat less valuable and less well-treated than the family beast of burden, which would cost money to replace. (If there was no beast of burden, she was it.) Agnes was peasant-born, to a brutal
father, in a pigsty village, and she grew up tough because if she had not been tough she would nothave grown up at all."
4.5 out of 5
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Leigh Brackett - David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer
Multi-page introduction to 'The Enchantress of Venus' in the The Space Opera Renaissance. Amazon's Search Inside will let you see it. http://www.amazon.com/Space-Opera-Renaissance-David-Hartwell/dp/0765306174
Search for Leigh Brackett, select page 92.
"There was another, less serious, more crowd-pleasing form of space travel fiction in science before space opera. If the latter emerged around 1928, with doc Smith's Skylark of Space and Hamilton's "Interstellar Patrol" stories as its best-known early exampes, then the former had already produced its paradigm text more than a decade and a half earlier Edgar Rice Burroughs's "Under the Moons of Mars," serialized in All-Story magazine in 1912 and later republished as A Princess of Mars. The form this tale exemplified is what has come to be known as the "planetary romance." I find this a tremendously useful label for another distinct subgenre of popular sf, one that contrasts with space opera in several ways, though it has some things in common. Many casual commentators have confused the two forms...
Moorcock says, in the same essay quoted earlier:
It's commonly known, because Ray has said so, that Ray Bradbury's Mars, like Ballard's Vermillion Sands, is not a million miles from Brackett's Mars. And before the whole world realised how good he was, Bradbury regularly appeared in the same pulps. Leigh would have credited Edgar Rice Burroughs for everything, but Burroughs lacked her poetic vision, her specific, characteristic talent, and in my view her finest Martian adventure stories remain superior to all others.
The central character of "Enchantress of Venus," Erik John Stark, is also the hero of many of Brackett's Martian stories, and of three novels written in the 1970s. Born on Mercury and raised by subhuman savages, he is a Tarzan figure who wanders the solar system and is here on the strange watery Venus of early SF. This story is one of the archetypes or models of space opera as it came to be understood by the 1970s, and as it has been understood since."
4.5 out of 5
Search for Leigh Brackett, select page 92.
"There was another, less serious, more crowd-pleasing form of space travel fiction in science before space opera. If the latter emerged around 1928, with doc Smith's Skylark of Space and Hamilton's "Interstellar Patrol" stories as its best-known early exampes, then the former had already produced its paradigm text more than a decade and a half earlier Edgar Rice Burroughs's "Under the Moons of Mars," serialized in All-Story magazine in 1912 and later republished as A Princess of Mars. The form this tale exemplified is what has come to be known as the "planetary romance." I find this a tremendously useful label for another distinct subgenre of popular sf, one that contrasts with space opera in several ways, though it has some things in common. Many casual commentators have confused the two forms...
Moorcock says, in the same essay quoted earlier:
It's commonly known, because Ray has said so, that Ray Bradbury's Mars, like Ballard's Vermillion Sands, is not a million miles from Brackett's Mars. And before the whole world realised how good he was, Bradbury regularly appeared in the same pulps. Leigh would have credited Edgar Rice Burroughs for everything, but Burroughs lacked her poetic vision, her specific, characteristic talent, and in my view her finest Martian adventure stories remain superior to all others.
The central character of "Enchantress of Venus," Erik John Stark, is also the hero of many of Brackett's Martian stories, and of three novels written in the 1970s. Born on Mercury and raised by subhuman savages, he is a Tarzan figure who wanders the solar system and is here on the strange watery Venus of early SF. This story is one of the archetypes or models of space opera as it came to be understood by the 1970s, and as it has been understood since."
4.5 out of 5
The Good Old Stuff The Last Days Of Shandakor Introduction - Gardner Dozois
This is from the late nineties:
"For some unknown reason--they don't grow up with a "boy's adventure" tradition of Young Adult literature to inspire them, perhaps? They're more thoughtful and/or emotionally mature than the men are? Market forces (i.e male editors) discourage them from writing it? Sunspot cycles?--straightforward adventure SF, especially the space adventure tale--and especially Space Opera--has been largely a male domain.
There were exceptions then (C. L. Moore, Katherine MacLean, Andre Norton) and there are exception s now (C. J. Cherryh, Eleanor Arnason, Janet Kagan, Lois McMaster Bujold), but it remains more true than not; certainly male would be the way to bet if you were uncertain of the gender of a particular Space Opera writer. Even today, when some of the Biggest Names in mainline science fiction are women, there are far
more men writing that specialized sub-variety known as Space Opera than there are women--and the situation was even more lopsided in the '40s and '50s.
One of the most obvious "exceptions" to the rule was the late Leigh Brackett. Even in the male-dominated world of the adventure pulps of the '40s and '50s, testosterone-drenched venues such as Planet Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, and Startling Stories, where it was taken for granted that the reading audience was primarily composed of equally testosterone-drenched teenage boys, and even in an era where women were expected to stay safely in the kitchen and away from the typewriter
keys, nobody could doubt that Leigh Bracket had earned the right to sit at the high-stakes table with The Men. In fact, her stuff was more popular with the readers than the work of most of her male compatriots, and ultimately more influential than almost anything else that appeared in those adventure pulps, with the possible exception of the work of Ray Bradbury and Jack Vance. There is little doubt that she was the Queen of the Planetary Romance during this period, especially as, by the mid-'40s, C. L. Moore--her major competitor for the title, whose
work for magazines such as Weird Tales in the '30s had always had one foot in the horror genre anyway--had moved away from the adventure pulps and into more respectable mainline science fiction work for Astounding (except f or the occasional collaboration with her husband Henry Kuttner, where her contribution was often hidden by the work appearing under his solo byline).
Brackett sold her first story in 1940, and by the late '40s and 'early '50s had become one of the mainstays of magazines such as Planet Stories, Startling Stories, Astonishing Stories, and Thrilling Wonder Stories, particularly Planet Stories, where much of her best work appeared. Although her best novel by a considerable margin is the mature, thoughtful The Long Tomorrow, one of the best SF novels of any
sort of the '50s, that was an atypical work for her. More typical of her output, and more popular, were her series of stories about the savage, swashbuckling, half-feral Eric John Stark--a sort of Conan of the Spaceways, with a touch of Tarzan of Mercury thrown in--that appeared in the magazines and were later expanded into books such as The Secret of Sinharat and People of the Talisman. Other novels in a
similar richly romantic vein included The Sword of Rhiannon and The Nemesis from Terra. She also wrote more standard interstellar Space Operas, including The Starmen of Llyrdis, The Big Jump, and Alpha Centauri--or Die!, which are competent, but lack the extravagant color and lush romanticism of her sword-and-planet work.
Brackett's autumnal vision of a decadent, dying Mars, the abode of Lost Cities and attenuated, hypercivilized Elder Races on the brink of extinction, is one of the three most influential conceptualizations of the Red Planet in science fiction, ranking only behind Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom and the Mars of Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. (Burroughs's Mars strongly influenced both Brackett and Bradbury, but although their visions of Mars are clearly similar--close cousins at least, if not blood brothers--it's an open question how much influence was swapped between Brackett and Bradbury, or who influenced whom--they were close working colleagues, critiquing each others stories, as early as 1941, and their Martian stories were published roughly contemporaneously, often in the same magazines.) It's hard to sort out whether later influences on the Martian story are coming from
Burroughs, Brackett, or Bradbury, and any such judgments must remain subjective to some degree, but I think I can see the influence of Brackett's Mars in particular on Roger Zelazny's famous story "A Rose for Ecclesiastes," and perhaps even on Robert A.
Heinlein's Mars in Red Planet and Stranger in a Strange Land. Her influence on Ursula K. Le Guin is clear, as well as on writers of the '70s such as John Varley and George R. R. Martin and Elizabeth A. Lynn, and has probably continued on down to the '90s in the work of later writers such as Eleanor Arnason (although, with writers of newer generations, you have to take in to consideration the possibility that that influence is filtered through Le Guin's work, which had an immense
impact, rather than directly derived).
Brackett's vision of Mars was never expressed in any clearer or more concentrated form than in the intense, brooding, melancholy story that follows, in which a well-meaning Earthman inadvertently ushers in the last days of an immensely ancient civilization...
By the mid 1950s, Brackett had drifted away from science fiction and into crime novels, which subsequently led to her writing scripts for television and for movies such as Rio Bravo, El Dorado, Hatari!, Rio Lobo, and The Long Goodbye. (Legend has it that after reading her novel No Good From a Corpse, Howard Hawks told an assistant to "get me that guy Brackett" to work with William Faulkner on her first major film, the 1946 classic The Big Sleep). In the mid-1970s, she briefly returned to science fiction with an attempt to revive her old series hero, Eric John Stark, in the novels The Ginger Star, The Hounds of Skaith, and The Reavers of Skaith, but by then space probes had determined that none of the planets in the solar system were likely abodes for life, and she felt constrained to abandon the Mars, Venus,
and Mercury that had been the settings for her earlier stories and set Stark's new adventures on the planets of distant stars instead.
Somehow it was just not the same; the innocent exuberance of her earlier work was gone, and the series faltered and died after three volumes. At about the same time, she edited an anthology of stories drawn from Planet Stories magazine, The Best of Planet Stories No. 1, which, as the name implies, was supposed to be the first in a series of similar anthologies, but that series died as well, never reaching a
second volume. Her last work with any significant impact on science fiction was the screenplay for the immensely successful movie The Empire Strikes Back, for which she received in 1980 a posthumous Hugo, her only major award. Her many short stories, which is where she did most of her best work (with the significant exception of The Long Tomorrow) have been assembled in the collections The Coming of the Terrans, The Halfling and Other Stories, and, most recently (1977), The Best of Leigh Brackett. Almost all of Brackett's work is out-of-print."
Note: 10 years later and a whole lot of Brackett is back in print.
4 out of 5
"For some unknown reason--they don't grow up with a "boy's adventure" tradition of Young Adult literature to inspire them, perhaps? They're more thoughtful and/or emotionally mature than the men are? Market forces (i.e male editors) discourage them from writing it? Sunspot cycles?--straightforward adventure SF, especially the space adventure tale--and especially Space Opera--has been largely a male domain.
There were exceptions then (C. L. Moore, Katherine MacLean, Andre Norton) and there are exception s now (C. J. Cherryh, Eleanor Arnason, Janet Kagan, Lois McMaster Bujold), but it remains more true than not; certainly male would be the way to bet if you were uncertain of the gender of a particular Space Opera writer. Even today, when some of the Biggest Names in mainline science fiction are women, there are far
more men writing that specialized sub-variety known as Space Opera than there are women--and the situation was even more lopsided in the '40s and '50s.
One of the most obvious "exceptions" to the rule was the late Leigh Brackett. Even in the male-dominated world of the adventure pulps of the '40s and '50s, testosterone-drenched venues such as Planet Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, and Startling Stories, where it was taken for granted that the reading audience was primarily composed of equally testosterone-drenched teenage boys, and even in an era where women were expected to stay safely in the kitchen and away from the typewriter
keys, nobody could doubt that Leigh Bracket had earned the right to sit at the high-stakes table with The Men. In fact, her stuff was more popular with the readers than the work of most of her male compatriots, and ultimately more influential than almost anything else that appeared in those adventure pulps, with the possible exception of the work of Ray Bradbury and Jack Vance. There is little doubt that she was the Queen of the Planetary Romance during this period, especially as, by the mid-'40s, C. L. Moore--her major competitor for the title, whose
work for magazines such as Weird Tales in the '30s had always had one foot in the horror genre anyway--had moved away from the adventure pulps and into more respectable mainline science fiction work for Astounding (except f or the occasional collaboration with her husband Henry Kuttner, where her contribution was often hidden by the work appearing under his solo byline).
Brackett sold her first story in 1940, and by the late '40s and 'early '50s had become one of the mainstays of magazines such as Planet Stories, Startling Stories, Astonishing Stories, and Thrilling Wonder Stories, particularly Planet Stories, where much of her best work appeared. Although her best novel by a considerable margin is the mature, thoughtful The Long Tomorrow, one of the best SF novels of any
sort of the '50s, that was an atypical work for her. More typical of her output, and more popular, were her series of stories about the savage, swashbuckling, half-feral Eric John Stark--a sort of Conan of the Spaceways, with a touch of Tarzan of Mercury thrown in--that appeared in the magazines and were later expanded into books such as The Secret of Sinharat and People of the Talisman. Other novels in a
similar richly romantic vein included The Sword of Rhiannon and The Nemesis from Terra. She also wrote more standard interstellar Space Operas, including The Starmen of Llyrdis, The Big Jump, and Alpha Centauri--or Die!, which are competent, but lack the extravagant color and lush romanticism of her sword-and-planet work.
Brackett's autumnal vision of a decadent, dying Mars, the abode of Lost Cities and attenuated, hypercivilized Elder Races on the brink of extinction, is one of the three most influential conceptualizations of the Red Planet in science fiction, ranking only behind Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom and the Mars of Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. (Burroughs's Mars strongly influenced both Brackett and Bradbury, but although their visions of Mars are clearly similar--close cousins at least, if not blood brothers--it's an open question how much influence was swapped between Brackett and Bradbury, or who influenced whom--they were close working colleagues, critiquing each others stories, as early as 1941, and their Martian stories were published roughly contemporaneously, often in the same magazines.) It's hard to sort out whether later influences on the Martian story are coming from
Burroughs, Brackett, or Bradbury, and any such judgments must remain subjective to some degree, but I think I can see the influence of Brackett's Mars in particular on Roger Zelazny's famous story "A Rose for Ecclesiastes," and perhaps even on Robert A.
Heinlein's Mars in Red Planet and Stranger in a Strange Land. Her influence on Ursula K. Le Guin is clear, as well as on writers of the '70s such as John Varley and George R. R. Martin and Elizabeth A. Lynn, and has probably continued on down to the '90s in the work of later writers such as Eleanor Arnason (although, with writers of newer generations, you have to take in to consideration the possibility that that influence is filtered through Le Guin's work, which had an immense
impact, rather than directly derived).
Brackett's vision of Mars was never expressed in any clearer or more concentrated form than in the intense, brooding, melancholy story that follows, in which a well-meaning Earthman inadvertently ushers in the last days of an immensely ancient civilization...
By the mid 1950s, Brackett had drifted away from science fiction and into crime novels, which subsequently led to her writing scripts for television and for movies such as Rio Bravo, El Dorado, Hatari!, Rio Lobo, and The Long Goodbye. (Legend has it that after reading her novel No Good From a Corpse, Howard Hawks told an assistant to "get me that guy Brackett" to work with William Faulkner on her first major film, the 1946 classic The Big Sleep). In the mid-1970s, she briefly returned to science fiction with an attempt to revive her old series hero, Eric John Stark, in the novels The Ginger Star, The Hounds of Skaith, and The Reavers of Skaith, but by then space probes had determined that none of the planets in the solar system were likely abodes for life, and she felt constrained to abandon the Mars, Venus,
and Mercury that had been the settings for her earlier stories and set Stark's new adventures on the planets of distant stars instead.
Somehow it was just not the same; the innocent exuberance of her earlier work was gone, and the series faltered and died after three volumes. At about the same time, she edited an anthology of stories drawn from Planet Stories magazine, The Best of Planet Stories No. 1, which, as the name implies, was supposed to be the first in a series of similar anthologies, but that series died as well, never reaching a
second volume. Her last work with any significant impact on science fiction was the screenplay for the immensely successful movie The Empire Strikes Back, for which she received in 1980 a posthumous Hugo, her only major award. Her many short stories, which is where she did most of her best work (with the significant exception of The Long Tomorrow) have been assembled in the collections The Coming of the Terrans, The Halfling and Other Stories, and, most recently (1977), The Best of Leigh Brackett. Almost all of Brackett's work is out-of-print."
Note: 10 years later and a whole lot of Brackett is back in print.
4 out of 5
Fifty Years Of Wonder - Leigh Brackett
Her introduction at some length to The Best Of Edmond Hamilton collection.
"WHEN it was decided that Ballantine was going to do a Best of Edmond Hamilton and that I was going to edit it, Ed allowed as how after nearly thirty years of being married to him I was probably better qualified than most, having read more Hamilton stories, and he gave me only one word of advice concerning the introduction I was to write.
"Years ago," he said, "a young reader wrote to me, saying that if he had his way there would be a golden statue of Edmond Hamilton in every city, and that each of those golden statues would be garlanded with roses. I said at the time that that was all I had ever wanted from my readers . . . not praise, just good honest criticism. And that is all I want from you."
Gazing into the middle distance, he added thoughtfully, "You should also bear in mind that I am going to edit a Best of You . . ." So, getting briskly to it .. .
Edmond Hamilton's remarkable career spans half a century, and is still going strong. This says much for his staying power. It says even more for his ability to give the readers what they want in 1976 as well as he did in 1926. The world has changed in five decades, so much so that it is hardly the same planet. Yet Hamilton has managed, not only to keep abreast of the changes, but to stay a couple of jumps ahead of them."
4.5 out of 5
"WHEN it was decided that Ballantine was going to do a Best of Edmond Hamilton and that I was going to edit it, Ed allowed as how after nearly thirty years of being married to him I was probably better qualified than most, having read more Hamilton stories, and he gave me only one word of advice concerning the introduction I was to write.
"Years ago," he said, "a young reader wrote to me, saying that if he had his way there would be a golden statue of Edmond Hamilton in every city, and that each of those golden statues would be garlanded with roses. I said at the time that that was all I had ever wanted from my readers . . . not praise, just good honest criticism. And that is all I want from you."
Gazing into the middle distance, he added thoughtfully, "You should also bear in mind that I am going to edit a Best of You . . ." So, getting briskly to it .. .
Edmond Hamilton's remarkable career spans half a century, and is still going strong. This says much for his staying power. It says even more for his ability to give the readers what they want in 1976 as well as he did in 1926. The world has changed in five decades, so much so that it is hardly the same planet. Yet Hamilton has managed, not only to keep abreast of the changes, but to stay a couple of jumps ahead of them."
4.5 out of 5
Monday, December 14, 2009
Beyond Our Narrow Skies - Leigh Brackett
Brackett talks about the importance of and disparaging treatment of space opera in by writers who keep saying it is dead. Imagine she might enjoy Reynolds et. al. :) More quotes from this later.
5 out of 5
5 out of 5
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Leigh Brackett - Harry Turtledove
An introduction to the Haffner Lorelei Of the Red Mist volume, talking of his admiration and things old-fashioned.
4 out of 5
4 out of 5
Stark and the Star Kings Introduction - John Jakes
An introduction to Haffner's Stark and the Star Kings volume, telling of the little he remembers about meeting Hamilton and Brackett at a convention, and their inspiration to him as a kid.
3 out of 5
3 out of 5
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Author's Introduction to Stark and the Star Kings - Leigh Brackett and Edmond Hamilton
"Twenty-six-and-a-half years ago, when we got married, we thought collaboration would be an easy and delightful thing. We could, we thought, begin now to turn out twice as many stories with half the effort.
We tried it.
Once."
4 out of 5
http://www.webscription.net/chapters/1893887162/1893887162.htm
We tried it.
Once."
4 out of 5
http://www.webscription.net/chapters/1893887162/1893887162.htm
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Queen Of the Martian Mysteries an Appreciation Of Leigh Brackett - Michael Moorcock
A lengthy one, too, and used as the Introduction to the Haffner edition Martian Quest.
4.5 out of 5
http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/i/brackett/1/
4.5 out of 5
http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/i/brackett/1/
Letting My Imagination Go - Leigh Brackett
Written in 1969, used as the introduction to the Fantasy Masterworks Sea-Kings Of Mars.
3.5 out of 5
3.5 out of 5
Eric John Stark - Algis Budrys
The introduction to Baen's 'The Eric John Stark Saga' giving an overview.
4 out of 5
http://www.webscription.net/chapters/0345318277/0345318277.htm
4 out of 5
http://www.webscription.net/chapters/0345318277/0345318277.htm
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