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Hello. From WonderMedia Network, I'm Jenny Kaplan, and this is Womanica. This month we're talking about women of science fiction.
These women inspire us to imagine impossible worlds, alien creatures, and fantastical inventions, revealing our deepest fears and hopes for the future.
Today we're talking about a woman who wrote stories that were out of this world, literally.
Over the course of her career, she created characters that had adventures both here on Earth and throughout the universe.
Her work even includes an early draft of Star Wars The Empire Strikes Back.
Let's talk about Leigh Brackett.
Leigh was born in 1915 in Los Angeles.
When she was just two years old, her father passed away, a casualty of the 1918 flu pandemic.
Leigh and her mother moved around a lot after that, eventually settling in Santa Monica, where she attended an all-girls school.
Leigh later described the women in her family as Professional Ladies with a capital L.
They were prim, proper, and genteel.
In contrast, Leigh was a brash tomboy with an active imagination.
When she was eight years old, she read the novel The Gods of Mars and immediately fell in love with the science fiction genre.
All of a sudden, she was able to imagine all the strange worlds lurking beyond our planet, and she decided she was going to write about them.
Leigh started writing seriously at 13 years old. Around the same time, she also started performing in her school's theater productions.
When she graduated from high school, she turned down a scholarship to go to college because she couldn't afford the rest of the tuition cost. Instead, she wanted to make her living as a science fiction writer.
Leigh started submitting her short stories to science fiction magazines and received rejection after rejection.
Her family wasn't quite supportive either.
When her aunt caught wind of her niece's aspirations, she suggested that Leigh write for The Ladies Home Journal instead.
Leigh responded, I wish I could because they pay very well, but I can't read The Ladies Home Journal, so I can't write for it.
Leigh knew she could write science fiction, and in 1940, she sold her first story to Astounding Science Fiction magazine.
At the time, science fiction magazines like Astounding were incredibly interactive.
Readers would write in to share their opinions on stories, and writers would respond in subsequent issues.
After publishing some of her early works, readers reached out to tell Leigh that women couldn't write science fiction.
Later, Leigh said she thought that take was, quote, about as sensible as saying that a one-legged man is incapable of playing the violin.
She kept writing.
Leigh never planned her stories in advance. She would just sit down and start writing until she made it to an ending.
Her stories often involved characters wandering through otherworldly settings.
One of her favorite characters was Eric John Stark, an orphaned human raised by the natives of Mercury's Twilight Belt.
He grows up to become an intergalactic mercenary.
These styles of stories were often labeled as science fantasy or space operas.
In 1942, Leigh also started writing mystery stories, and two years later, she published her first novel of the genre, titled No Good From a Corpse.
The book was gritty and filled with rough-talking, Humphrey Bogart-type characters.
It was exactly the kind of story that Howard Hawks, the famous movie director, was looking for.
When he read it, he asked his assistant to call up this guy Brackett.
When he discovered Brackett was not a guy, but a woman, he must have been surprised, but he hired Leigh anyway.
Leigh wrote multiple screenplays for Howard Hawks, including The Big Sleep, which, fittingly, starred Humphrey Bogart.
When Bogart wanted one of his lines to sound rougher, he'd call Leigh to do the rewrite.
Working with Howard Hawks helped shape Leigh into a screenwriting pro.
It was useful experience, especially when she received a call from another filmmaker named George Lucas.
He needed someone to write an epic space opera, and so he went to the so-called queen of space opera, Leigh Brackett.
It was the perfect culmination of her career in science fiction and screenwriting.
In 1978, Leigh and George Lucas met to discuss the sequel to Star Wars. Over the course of a week, George hammered out the beats to the new movie Empire Strikes Back.
George created the character of Yoda and the plot twist of Leigh being Leigh's twin sister. After that meeting, Leigh wrote the first draft of the movie's screenplay.
Shortly afterwards, she died of cancer. She was 62 years old.
She never got to watch the movie she'd helped create, and the script was rewritten a few times.
But fans of hers could spot her literary voice in the film. Leigh had helped bring science fantasy into the mainstream.
During her career, Leigh published more than 50 stories and multiple full-length novels, one of which was nominated for a Hugo Award. In an interview shortly before her death, she reflected on the science fiction genre.
She said, quote,
All month we're talking about women of science fiction. For more information, find us on Facebook and Instagram, at Womanica Podcast.
Special thanks to Liz Kaplan, my favorite sister and co-creator. Talk to you tomorrow.
