Leigh Brackett
Leigh Brackett was an influential American science fiction author and screenwriter, born on December 7, 1915, in Los Angeles, California. She grew up near Santa Monica, where her love for extraordinary tales was sparked by reading the adventure stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Brackett became a prominent figure in the science fiction community during the 1940s and 1950s, earning the title "Queen of Space Opera" for her compelling narratives that blended adventure with strong literary elements. Her works featured complex alien characters and challenged imperialistic stereotypes, promoting a more egalitarian view of different races. Notably, her literary partnership with her husband, Edmond Hamilton, enriched her storytelling, evident in her novels like *The Sword of Rhiannon* and the Skaith trilogy, which explored themes of coexistence and adaptation among intelligent species. In addition to her space operas, Brackett ventured into post-apocalyptic narratives with *The Long Tomorrow*. She is also recognized for her contributions to cinema, having penned the final screenplay for *The Empire Strikes Back*. Brackett passed away on March 18, 1978, leaving a lasting legacy in science fiction literature and film.
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Leigh Brackett
Writer
- Born: December 7, 1915
- Birthplace: Los Angeles, California
- Died: March 18, 1978
- Place of death: Lancaster, California
Biography
Leigh Brackett was born in Los Angeles, California, on December 7, 1915. She spent her childhood exploring the beaches near her home in Santa Monica, where she developed a love of the extraordinary and the larger-than-life. Reading the pulp adventures of Edgar Rice Burroughs fueled her imagination and turned it in the direction of sword-and-planet swashbucklers.
As early as 1939 she was already a full-time freelance writer, and throughout the 1940’s and 1950’s she was considered the uncontested “Queen of Space Opera.” Although the term “space opera” has since come to be seen in a derogatory light, often as little more than a Western or a pirate swashbuckler rewritten with rockets and rubber science, in that period heroic tales of adventure were the primary staples of science fiction magazines. While many of her colleagues did write cheap potboilers, Brackett brought a strong literary sensibility to her works. Her aliens were not mere humans in funny suits or one-dimensional caricatures but carefully considered beings who thought as well as humans, but very differently. Brackett also rejected the imperialistic stereotypes of aliens as inferior to humanity in favor of a more egalitarian schema in which alien races have their own valuable contributions to make.
Her 1946 marriage to Edmond Hamilton was a literary partnership as well as a romantic one, and with his help she greatly deepened the level of characterization and world-building in her works. For instance, in her early novel The Sword of Rhiannon (1953), she had three different species of intelligent Martians coexisting, each from a different original stock. By the time she wrote her Skaith trilogy, she instead decided that the various races who coexisted under her dying Ginger Star should all be descended from a common stock, but sundered by different means of coping with the increasingly harsh environment of their world.
Although Brackett is best known for her star-spanning stories of adventure, she also wrote The Long Tomorrow ()1955, an after-the-bomb story in the tradition of Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), but with the Mennonites rather than the Catholic Church as the predominant religious force. Brackett’s last work was the final screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back. She died on March 18, 1978.