Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Author of the Week- Leigh Brackett

Leigh Douglass Brackett Hamilton (1915-1978) was an American author, particularly of science fiction. She was also a screenwriter, known for her work on famous films such as The Big Sleep (1945), Rio Bravo (1959), The Long Goodbye (1973) and The Empire Strikes Back (1980).

Brackett was first published in her mid-twenties. Her first published science fiction story was "Martian Quest", which appeared in the February 1940 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Her earliest years as a writer (1940–1942) were her most productive in numbers of stories written.
In 1946, Brackett married science fiction author Edmond Hamilton.

Most of Brackett's science fiction can be characterized as space opera or planetary romance. Almost all of her planetary romances take place within a common invented universe, the Leigh Brackett Solar System, which contains richly detailed fictional versions of the consensus Mars and Venus of science fiction in the 1930s–1950s. Mars thus appears as a marginally habitable desert world, populated by ancient, decadent, and mostly humanoid races; Venus as a primitive, wet jungle planet, occupied by vigorous, primitive tribes and reptilian monsters.

Brackett worked on the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back. The movie won the Hugo Award in 1981.

You can find out more information about Leigh Brackett at Internet Speculative Fiction Database and Wikipedia

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