Leigh Brackett's The Starmen: The Queen of Space Opera and the Book That Almost Wasn't

Leigh Brackett isn't among the "Big Three" of science fiction. But fans of the genre are certainly familiar with her work. She earned her nickname "the Queen of Space Opera" not only through her novels, but through her work on one of the most recognizable science fiction franchises in history. Brackett wrote the initial draft of The Empire Strikes Back in 1978 — and died of cancer that March, weeks after delivering the script, never seeing the film go into production.

It was the last chapter of a Hollywood career that had begun in 1944, when director Howard Hawks — impressed by the hard-boiled dialogue in her debut novel, No Good from a Corpse — had his secretary call "this guy Brackett" to come to Warner Bros. and help William Faulkner write the screenplay for The Big Sleep. Hawks was reportedly surprised when she turned out to be a woman. He hired her on the spot.

That's the arc of Leigh Brackett: a writer so good that the gatekeepers kept letting her through, even when they hadn't expected her.

The Queen of Space Opera

Long before Hollywood, Brackett had already made her name in science fiction. She sold her first story in 1940 and spent the next decade establishing herself as one of the most distinctive voices in the pulps — particularly in the pages of Planet Stories, where she developed a brand of planetary romance that blended the swashbuckling adventure of Edgar Rice Burroughs with something more sophisticated: real atmosphere, morally complicated heroes, and prose that could actually sing.

Her nickname wasn't ironic. She earned it. And she mentored a young Ray Bradbury along the way, which tells you something about the quality of her eye for storytelling.

What made Brackett unusual — and what makes her work hold up — is that she never treated science fiction as a lesser genre. Her stories had the bones of pulp adventure but the soul of noir fiction. That sensibility came directly from her crime writing, and it gave her SF a texture that most of her contemporaries couldn't match.

Writing While Female

Science fiction in the 1940s was, by any measure, a male-dominated field. Estimates suggest that women made up only around 10 to 15 percent of SF writers as late as 1948 — and the readership, the editorial ranks, and the fan community were similarly skewed. Many women who wrote in the genre during this period adopted gender-neutral initials or outright pen names to avoid bias from editors and readers. C.L. Moore — Brackett's most direct predecessor as a major female presence in SF adventure fiction — wrote under initials for exactly this reason.

Brackett navigated this landscape differently. Her first name was ambiguous enough that editors and readers frequently assumed she was male, and she wrote under her own name throughout her career. That ambiguity had practical value: it meant her work was often evaluated on its merits before anyone thought to question the author's gender. When the Planet Stories editors did clarify her identity in print, they did so matter-of-factly, and the magazine kept buying her stories.

But the broader cultural friction was real, and the Hawks anecdote illustrates it precisely. A legendary Hollywood director, having read and admired her work, assumed without question that "Brackett" was a man. When she walked through the door, he was surprised — and then hired her anyway, because the work was good enough that her gender became beside the point. That's not a story about a level playing field. It's a story about a writer talented enough to clear a bar that her male contemporaries didn't have to clear.

Brackett herself, in a 1975 interview, spoke about her career in practical terms — she wrote science fiction because she loved it, pivoted to crime fiction partly for financial reasons, and landed in Hollywood because a bookseller friend made sure Hawks picked up her novel. She didn't frame her experience primarily through the lens of gender, but the record is clear enough: she was operating in spaces where women were a distinct minority, under her own name, writing stories that editors repeatedly described as written "like a man" — as if that were the highest available compliment.

The Hugo Award, established in 1953, went to no women in its fiction categories until 1968. Brackett's The Long Tomorrow made her the first woman ever shortlisted for the award in 1956 — a milestone that arrived sixteen years into her career.

The Book

The Starmen began as a novella titled "The Starmen of Llyrdis," serialized in Startling Stories in March 1951. For the Gnome Press hardcover edition the following year, Brackett expanded the story — Martin Greenberg shortened the title — and the result was her second novel to appear in book form.

The story follows Michael Trehearne, a man who has always felt like a stranger in his own life, who discovers in Brittany that his sense of not-belonging has a reason: he carries the blood of the Vardda, the only race capable of enduring the physical rigors of interstellar travel. It's a classic Brackett setup — the outsider pulled toward something larger than himself — and she executes it with the efficiency and atmosphere that defines her best work.

Contemporary reviews were mixed. Galaxy Magazine's Groff Conklin called it "pleasurable," while Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas in F&SF were cooler, describing it as "able" but routine. That's the kind of notice that doesn't age well as a critical verdict. The book has outlasted the reviews. What Boucher and McComas read as routine was, in fact, Brackett doing what she always did — making the conventions of the genre look effortless, which is harder than it looks.

The Gnome Press Context

By 1952, Gnome Press was the most important specialty publisher in science fiction. Martin Greenberg had built his list by doing something the major New York houses weren't yet willing to do: take the best writers from the pulps seriously, and give their work a hardcover home. The Gnome catalog reads like a who's who of Golden Age SF — Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, Simak, and now Brackett.

If you've read our history of Gnome Press, you know the press had a complicated legacy — innovative and influential, but chronically undercapitalized, binding books in small batches and eventually folding in 1962 under the weight of unpaid royalties and competition from the major houses. A Gnome Press title from 1952 is, in many ways, a relic of a particular and precarious moment — when science fiction was proving it deserved a permanent shelf, and when a small operation in New York was doing most of the work of putting it there.

Identifying the First Edition

The Gnome Press first edition of The Starmen was issued in 1952 in a print run of approximately 5,000 copies — standard for the press at this period, and a number that tells you something about the scarcity you're dealing with today. Not all of those copies survived in collectible condition.

The binding is gray boards with black spine lettering — the cloth variant consistent with Gnome's early 1950s production before the press transitioned to cheaper paper-covered boards later in the decade. The spine cloth is tight-woven and, in well-preserved copies, shows minimal wear at the head and tail. Spotting or foxing to the boards is common and should be noted but not necessarily considered disqualifying, depending on severity.

The dust jacket features wraparound art by Ric Binkley and carries the original price of $2.75 on the front flap. An unclipped jacket at this price is your primary point of identification for a true first. Later remainder copies — sometimes called "Pick-a-Book" copies — will show a clipped flap. The Binkley jacket is evocative in the best pulp tradition: it captures the scale and strangeness of Brackett's universe without overselling it.

The copyright page states "FIRST EDITION." As with most Gnome Press titles, there is no number line. Condition issues to watch for include jacket chipping at the spine ends (common with Gnome's slightly oversized jackets), tanning to the pages, and hinge stress — all typical of a 70-year-old book that was produced with more ambition than resources.

Why It Belongs on Your Shelf

A first edition of The Starmen is, at its core, a first edition of a book by one of science fiction's most important writers, published by the press that did more than any other to give the genre its permanent form. That's a meaningful combination.

But for the reader-collector — the person who came to Brackett through The Empire Strikes Back, or through The Big Sleep, or through a battered paperback discovered in a used bookstore years ago — it's something more than a bibliographic artifact. It's a piece of a larger story about a writer who kept showing up, kept doing extraordinary work in genres that weren't supposed to take her seriously, and left her mark on nearly every corner of American popular fiction.

The copy currently in our inventory is a verified Gnome Press first with an unclipped Ric Binkley jacket at the original $2.75 price. If you'd like more details, you can find it in the store, or reach out directly — we're happy to talk through the points of issue or answer any questions about the copy.