In my imagination it goes down like this: George Lucas is surrounded by movie execs and yes-men anxious to hear about the sequel to Star Wars. He has passed out an outline of his ideas… but no script. “I’m not a script writer,” Lucas explains. “I am a director, a producer… an idea man!”
“Yeah, George, of course. But then who is going to write it?” asked a nervous exec, glancing over the outline to see if Bea Arthur figured in it.
“I have an idea about that,” Lucas grins. “What about Leigh Brackett?”
“I hear she is working in TV now,” said one yes man with an interest in detective films.
“But she wrote Hatari! and The Big Sleep,” countered another yes man with a little knowledge of Hollywood history.
“She wrote The Big Sleep AND Rio Bravo,” confirmed yes man number three. Then he threw down his trump card to prove his film knowledge superior to the other yes men. “Rio Lobo too. But, George, does she know anything about science fiction? Can she handle it?”
At this point George Lucas, in my imagined version, shakes his head in disbelief. “Don’t you guys know anything? She was in the LASFS.” Nothing. “She is married to Edmond Hamilton!” Blank stares. “Ray Bradbury was at their wedding!”
“Maybe Ray Bradbury could write it!” piped in yes man four.
“Listen to me you nerf herders,” Lucas said in frustration. “Before The Big Sleep, before Rio Bravo or Lobo Leigh Brackett was the Queen of Space Opera!”
I have no idea how things actually happened, but it is known when George Lucas was developing the as-of-yet-unnamed sequel to Star Wars he reached out to Leigh Brackett. She most definitely did work on an early version of the script, which she finished shortly before her death in 1978. It is up to the Star Wars scholars to argue over how many of Brackett’s ideas made it into, or at least influenced, the final film or if she would have continued to work with Lucas had she not died from cancer so early in Empire’s development (and they do). However, it is undeniable the queen of space opera was involved in the film’s development. Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, The Fully Illustrated Script lists both Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan as the scriptwriters. What was presented (and is generally accepted) as Leigh Brackett’s original script was leaked online over a decade ago so fans can read it and draw their own conclusions.
While not a hugely prolific script writer, it is certainly reasonable to assume Hollywood yes men might know her name. IMDB credits Leigh Brackett with nine film scripts (other than Empire and related properties), a few TV scripts (including an episode of The Rockford Files and a pair of Alfred Hitchcock Presents) and as the author of three novels which were the basis of movies. While nine film scripts may not seem very significant, they are memorable films. She wrote her first screenplay in 1945 (The Vampire’s Ghost) and the very next year she was teamed with William Faulkner to adapt Raymond Chandler’s novel The Big Sleep into a big budget Humphrey Bogart feature directed by Howard Hawks. She went on to work with director Howard Hawks and John Wayne four times (Rio Bravo, Hatari!, El Dorado and Rio Lobo) and returned to adapting Chandler in 1973 for Robert Altman’s satirical neo-noir version of The Long Goodbye.
Howard Hawks supposedly requested Brackett to adapt The Big Sleep because of her 1944 crime novel No Good From A Corpse. The detective story was her first published novel but she had been consistently publishing science fiction in pulp magazines such as Planet Stories since 1942. In fact, after No Good From A Corpse she combined the detective genre with science fiction for her novel length story Shadow Over Mars. Work on The Big Sleep interfered with a science fiction story she was already committed to write so Brackett turned her half-finished story over to long time friend Ray Bradbury to finish. Lorelei of the Red Mist was credited to both authors when it appeared in the summer 1946 issue of Planet Stories.
In 1949 Leigh Brackett introduced her best known, and arguably best loved, character in The Queen of the Martian Catacombs. Eric John Stark, an unrepentant outlaw pressed to interrupt a potential Martian revolution by the Planet Police, was a throwback to the Edgar Rice Burroughs novels which drew her to science fiction as a young woman. Stark was human but had been raised among the harsh, savage tribes of Mercury’s Twilight Belt. Eventually captured by miners from Earth, who kept the wild boy in a cage, Stark was finally freed by the police officer who would draw him into the events of Queen of the Martian Catacombs. Stark is like Burroughs’ Tarzan: a modern man raised by a primitive culture and still loyal to their values after his return to civilization. He is also, though, like Burroughs’ John Carter in that he inhabits a strange sword and planet Solar System which sees him moving from planet to planet on rockets while fighting with swords and knives. Unlike Tarzan or John Carter, though, Eric John Stark is decidedly a fixture in the underworld. He would return in stories which continued to mix swords, sorcery and science such as The Enchantress of Venus (Planet Stories, September 1949) and The Black Amazon of Mars (Planet Stories, March 1953).
Stark would be resurrected in the 1970s. After Queen of the Martian Catacombs was adapted into a novel called The Secret of Sinharat and The Black Amazon of Mars was adapted into People of the Talisman, Brackett would pen the original novels The Ginger Star (1974), Hounds of Skaith (1974) and Reavers of Skaith (1976). The 1970s books move Eric John Stark from his early sword and planet style solar system, which had since been proven by NASA to be completely impossible, out into a more “modern” style science fiction universe.
OCTOBER 2026 UPDATE: About half of this post (an Edmond Hamilton sized half…) seems to have disappeared thanks to the mysteries of the Internet. I will try to sort that out in the future. Until then, though, check out this audio recording of the 1964 Pacificon II science fiction convention awards, which includes comments made by guests of honor Brackett and Hamilton).
Pulp magazines, science fiction and fantasy history, Star wars, women in science fiction