The Leigh Brackett Science Fiction MEGAPACK®

by Leigh Brackett

The Leigh Brackett Science Fiction MEGAPACK® presents 13 classic science fiction works -- 2 novels and 13 shorter stories -- by an acclaimed master of the genre, dubbed the "Queen of Space Opera" by her legion of fans.


Included






THE STELLAR LEGION
A WORLD IS BORN
THE DRAGON-QUEEN OF JUPITER
OUTPOST ON IO
THRALLS OF THE ENDLESS NIGHT
CITADEL OF LOST SHIPS
THE BLUE BEHEMOTH
TERROR OUT OF SPACE
THE JEWEL OF BAS
THE VANISHING VENUSIANS
BLACK AMAZON OF MARS
THE STARMEN
LAST CALL FOR SECTOR 9G


If you enjoy this ebook, check out the hundreds of others in the MEGAPACK® series, covering science fiction, fantasy, horror, mysteries, westerns, and much, much more. Search your favorite ebook store for "Wildside Press Megapack" to see all available titles.

754 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 23, 2023

About the author

Leigh Brackett was born on December 7, 1915 in Los Angeles, and raised near Santa Monica. Having spent her youth as an athletic tom-boy - playing volleyball and reading stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs and H Rider Haggard - she began writing fantastic adventures of her own. Several of these early efforts were read by Henry Kuttner, who critiqued her stories and introduced her to the SF personalities then living in California, including Robert Heinlein, Julius Schwartz, Jack Williamson, Edmond Hamilton - and another aspiring writer, Ray Bradbury.

In 1944, based on the hard-boiled dialogue in her first novel, No Good From a Corpse, producer/director Howard Hawks hired Brackett to collaborate with William Faulkner on the screenplay of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep.

Brackett maintained an on-again/off-again relationship with Hollywood for the remainder of her life. Between writing screenplays for such films as Rio Bravo, El Dorado, Hatari!, and The Long Goodbye, she produced novels such as the classic The Long Tomorrow (1955) and the Spur Award-winning Western, Follow the Free Wind (1963).

Brackett married Edmond Hamilton on New Year's Eve in 1946, and the couple maintained homes in the high-desert of California and the rural farmland of Kinsman, Ohio.

Just weeks before her death on March 17, 1978, she turned in the first draft screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back and the film was posthumously dedicated to her.

Reviews

[Terence · Rating 3 out of 5]

Leigh Brackett was a long-time SF author who flourished in the ‘40s and ‘50s and beyond. To modern readers perhaps she would be best known as the writer of The Empire Strikes Back’s first draft. Sadly she died soon after submitting it; fortunately, Lawrence Kasdan was up to carrying on her work there.

I’ve liked Brackett since I was a teen-ager and read The Science Fiction Book Club’s omnibus edition of her Skaith novels. This edition collects several of her SF novellas from the ‘40s, including Black Amazon of Mars, which features her best known character, Eric John Stark, a Tarzan-like figure rescued from the half-human savages of Mercury by an Earthman who raises him like a son.

Though dated, I enjoyed these stories. If you’re interested in classic SF authors, then you owe it to yourself to read Brackett.

[William E. Ferreira · Rating 1 out of 5]

Poor, not worth reading

Juvenile heroics and moralistic nonsense. From the era when we thought monsters were science fiction. Wells would roll over in his grave.