Leigh Brackett Super Pack

by Leigh Brackett

Leigh Brackett was the undisputed Queen of Space Opera and the first women to be nominated for the coveted Hugo Award. She wrote short stories, novels, and scripts for Hollywood. She wrote the first draft of the Empire Strikes Back shortly before her death in 1978. Assembled here in this 200,000 word collection are fifteen of Brackett’s most memorable stories. If you enjoyed this book, you’ll want to search on Positronic Publishing Super Pack to see all of our Super Packs. Included here are:

The Stellar Legion
The Dragon-Queen of Jupiter
A World is Born
Child of the Sun
Outpost on Io
Citadel of Lost Ships
The Blue Behemoth
Thralls of the Endless Night
The Dancing Girl of Ganymede
Black Amazon of Mars
Shannach—The Last
The Ark of Mars
Last Call from Sector 9G
So Pale, So Cold, So Fair
The Road to Sinharat

488 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 26, 2020

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

[James T · Rating 4 out of 5]

Leigh Brackett is one of the best writers of all time. I discovered her through her Erik John Stark stories. I’ve read a couple others since then so I was thrilled to get a collection of 15 of her stories.

The stories are in publication order. The first half of them were written in the early 40s. They are pretty rough around the edges, but you can see the potential she had in them. Standouts were The Dragon Queen of Jupiter and Citadel of Lost Ships.

Then you get to what I think is the best era of her writing, the late 40s and early 50s. Her stuff takes a more fantasy (sword and planet) direction. The Dancing Girl of Ganymede, Black Amazon of Mars, and Shannach - the Last are all amazing. Brackett, when she is on, is the master of atmosphere and saying so much with so little.

There are a couple more stories written in the later 50s. The Ark of Mars is a real low point. Also a lot of typos, unlike everywhere else.

Finally, the book ends with the the Road to Sinharat. This is from the early 60s. It is an absolute masterpiece. It’s a spiritual sequel to the EJS story “Queen of the Martian Catacombs.”

Overall, good collection. Interesting to see her writing is uneven. Some lows, but when she is on she is the best there ever was.

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

A collection of Leigh Brackett short stories, spanning her career. I suppose the pedant in me would judge some of the earlier stories as less refined, and yet she's just such a good writer of yarns, so to speak, that I don't mind.
Many of these stories take place in an obvious kind of "shared universe"... primarily all dealing with the planets of the solar system, which are populated by various races/people. Early 20th century sci-fi and fantasy at its best, as far as I'm concerned.

[SUSAN · Rating 4 out of 5]

EXCELLENT STORIES--- WORST TYPOS

I love this series, but I spend so much time reporting typos that the enjoyment is gone from the stories. They cannot be using human proofread.ers. If they are human, they should be ashamed. I feel like the publisher should be paying me to proofread instead of.buying the books.