


Planet Stories published the novella "Lorelei of the Red Mist", in which the protagonist is a thief named Hugh Starke. It won a Retro Hugo for best novel in 2020. Shadow Over Mars (1944) was her first novel-length story though rough-edged, it marked the beginning of a new style influenced by the characterization of the 1940s detective story and film noir. After this, Brackett's science fiction stories became more ambitious. The book led to her first big screenwriting assignment. īrackett's first detective story, "Murder in the Family", was published in Mammoth Detective in 1943.īrackett's first novel, No Good from a Corpse (1944), was a hard-boiled mystery novel in the tradition of Raymond Chandler. At the time, she was an active member of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society (LASFS), and participated in local science fiction fandom by contributing to the second issue of Pogo's STF-ETTE, an all-female science fiction fanzine (probably the first such). Some of her stories have social themes, such as "The Citadel of Lost Ships" (1943), which considers the effects on alien cultures of Earth's expanding trade empire. Her earliest years as a writer (1940–42) were her most productive. Career Fiction writer īrackett first published in her mid-20s the science fiction story "Martian Quest" appeared in the February 1940 issue of Astounding Science Fiction.

She attended a private girls' school in Santa Monica, California, where she was involved in theater and began writing. Her father died when she was very young her mother did not remarry. Leigh Brackett was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. In 2020, she won a Retro Hugo for her novel The Nemesis From Terra, originally published as "Shadow Over Mars" ( Startling Stories, Fall 1944). Moore, one of the first two women ever nominated for a Hugo Award. In 1956, her book The Long Tomorrow made her the first woman ever shortlisted for the Hugo Award for Best Novel, and, along with C. She also worked on an early draft of The Empire Strikes Back (1980), elements of which remained in the film she died before it went into production. Leigh Douglass Brackett (Decem– March 18, 1978) was an American science fiction writer known as "the Queen of Space Opera." She was also a screenwriter, known for The Big Sleep (1946), Rio Bravo (1959), and The Long Goodbye (1973).
