I’m frequently mystified that so many modern readers only want to read the shiny and new; that they never look back. There are a lot of wonderful treasures in the past that are overlooked, and one of them is the work of Leigh Brackett.
She wrote a lively mix of space opera and sword-and-planet/fantasy and was so far ahead of her time that I wonder if Star Wars or Firefly would even have existed without her blazing a trail. To get people’s attention about her I often start by telling them the last thing she wrote was the first draft of The Empire Strikes Back, but that always saddens me a little, because she was writing about characters who were similar to Han Solo and Mal Reynolds decades before they ever appeared on screen.
It sounds as though she must have been writing science fiction, but to today’s readers, the “science” in a lot of it was just an excuse to tell fantasy adventures – that’s how sword-and-planet can be. Sure, you have a rocket ship to get you somewhere, but after that, the travel and martial exploits are all using pretty primitive technology, of the sort you’d find in a fantasy tale. Sometimes she mixed space opera backgrounds WITH sword-and-planet so that she was crossing at least two genres as she wrote. She didn’t care: she just wanted to tell a cracking good adventure tale, and she nearly always did.
Only a few generations ago planetary adventure fiction had a few givens. First, it usually took place in our own solar system. Second, our own solar system was stuffed with inhabitable planets. Everyone knew that Mercury baked on one side and froze on the other, but a narrow twilight band existed between the two extremes where life might thrive. Venus was hot and swampy and crawling with dinosaurs, like prehistoric Earth had been, and Mars was a faded and dying world kept alive by the extensive canals that brought water down from the ice caps.
To enjoy Leigh Brackett, you have to get over the fact that none of this is true -- which really shouldn't be hard if you enjoy reading about vampires, telepaths, and dragons, but some people can’t seem to make the jump. Yeah, Mars doesn't have a breathable atmosphere, or canals, or ancient races. If you don't read Brackett because you can't get past that, you're a fuddy duddy and probably don't like ice cream.
A few of Brackett's finest stories were set on Venus, but it was Mars that she made her own, with vivid, crackling prose.
Here. Try this, the opening of one of her best, "The La
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I picked up a copy of this story because it won this year's Retro Hugo award. It came in a tête-bêche style book, being paired with Collision Course, by Robert Silverberg, which is not important, but very cool to me. As I'm reading this story about a playboy who easily seduces the women, and alien females, around him, it gave me pause think about the year it was originally written (1944), and that it was written by a women. Every time the protagonist kissed of got intimate with one of the females it felt like a man was writing these scenes. It felt very much like the pulp fiction I would imagine being printed around the time. It seemed to paint the women mostly as set pieces and second class citizens. I'm aware this was pretty much the status quo at the time, but again, this was written by a woman. Do you think she wrote it this way on purpose to get it printed? Did she write it this way because, that's how things were done back then? Do you think there was an editor who pushed for certain scenes to feel this way, or-? I don't know. It really felt like it was a woman trying to write a male fantasy. I have no objections to the story, or how it was written, or to how characters were portrayed, but I would like to hear some of your thoughts on why the way this story was written seems a little off to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leigh_Brackett
Everyone always gives the nod to Kirsh. But she wrote this movie. I just learned this somewhat recently. Never knew this.
HERE IS THE DRAFT.....read for your self and decide
http://www.starwarz.com/starkiller/the-empire-strikes-back-first-draft-by-leigh-brackett-transcript/
I know GL supposedly wrote two subsequent drafts, then handed it over to Lawrence Kasdan. After doing some research it seems it is only available to read at some library in NM and can't be checked out, and also at the Lucasfilm archives. I'm curious because for a lot of years in my head I just thought Kasdan was the sole writer, and after TFA I thought "really, the Kasdan that wrote ESB contributed to this?" Now I'm wondering just how much of ESB's greatness should be attributed to Leigh Brackett, who has written a lot of other great scripts like The Big Sleep and Rio Bravo.
Stupid womans writing my spacekino reeee
