Overlooked Icons: Leigh Brackett

By pencil_cliff60

Leigh Douglass Brackett was born in Los Angeles in 1915, and I guess she only really got going after reading Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars. Her first thing showed up in 1940 (“Martian Quest” in Astounding Science Fiction), and after that she basically kept writing sci-fi nonstop—over twenty stories, with titles in all those pulp mags. I did notice her early Mars-y stuff leaned pretty hard on Burroughs (ruins, ray guns, sword fights, all that), but then she found her own lane. “Shadow Over Mars” in 1944 is where she really got the reputation, and then she kept stacking up more classics like The Starmen, The Sword of Rhiannon, The Long Tomorrow, and a bunch others. By the time she died in 1978, she was basically celebrated as a top genre writer. Okay, but why does this feel like it turned into Westerns at some point? Because it does. Before Shadow Over Mars she tried crime with No Good from a Corpse, and then Hawks called her about working on The Big Sleep. Later Hawks brought her back for Westerns with John Wayne—Rio Bravo, Hatari!, El Dorado, and Rio Lobo. She also did Follow the Free Wind about Jim Beckwourth and even won a Spur Award for it. And then she wrote the screenplay for Altman’s The Long Goodbye too, which is wild because it’s not even the same vibe as her sci-fi. But I’m still not fully sure where her “most remembered” spot is supposed to be—because the note about her doing the first draft of The Empire Strikes Back feels like the kind of thing you only remember because of the trivia, not because you actually know the details. Also, John Carpenter somehow named a Halloween character after her, so… yeah, she’s got a footprint in places.