Leigh Brackett

Leigh Brackett has been hailed as the “Queen of the Space Opera”—a master of richly-detailed stories of planetary romance.

Brackett began writing during the early years of the Golden Age of science fiction and quickly gained prominence as a novelist and screenwriter. She joined the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society in 1939 where she met other emerging science fiction authors including Ray Bradbury and Robert A. Heinlein. In 1940, Brackett’s first published science fiction story, Martian Quest, appeared in Astounding Science Fiction. She worked in many genres—science fiction, crime, mystery, and westerns. Most of her science fiction falls into the planetary romance style (also called science fantasy)—sagas of adventure and struggle across a fantastical solar system that included deserts on Mars, jungles on Venus, and deadly storms on Mercury.

At the time it was known that these planets couldn’t harbor such wonders, hence the term science fantasy. Brackett embraced the escapist nature of the genre, saying, “These stories served to stretch our little minds, to draw us out beyond our narrow skies into the vast glooms of interstellar space…” Some of her notable works include Shadow Over Mars (1951), The Long Tomorrow (1955), and Alpha Centauri or Die! (1963).

Simultaneously, Brackett built a career as a screenwriter, notably with The Big Sleep (1946), Rio Bravo (1959), El Dorado (1966), and The Long Goodbye (1973). In 1977, director George Lucas hired Brackett to write the screenplay for Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back, bridging her space opera and screenwriting talents. She completed the first draft in 1978, just weeks before her death.