Leigh Brackett Audiobooks

Crowned the Queen of Space Opera, and Enchantress of Venus shows exactly why

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Who is Leigh Brackett?

Leigh Brackett, born in 1915, was an American author and screenwriter, nicknamed ‘the Queen of Space Opera’ and one of the most prominent women writing during the Golden Age of Science Fiction. She broke ground repeatedly: her 1956 novel The Long Tomorrow made her the first woman ever shortlisted for the Hugo Award for Best Novel, and alongside C. L. Moore she was one of the first two women nominated for a Hugo at all. In 2020 she was posthumously awarded a Retro Hugo for The Nemesis From Terra, originally published in 1944 as Shadow Over Mars.

Hollywood knew her too. On screen she was best known for her collaborations with the director Howard Hawks, chiefly on Westerns and crime films, and she worked on an early draft of The Empire Strikes Back – elements of which survived into the finished film – though she died in 1978, before it went into production.

Leigh Brackett in audiobooks

This catalogue carries Enchantress of Venus, and the title alone announces the register: space opera from the era that coined the term, when other planets were stages for adventure rather than data sets. Brackett earned her crown in exactly this mode, and in audio the material recovers the form it always secretly had – the pulp serial, made to be devoured in instalments.

For UK listeners it is a chance to hear the roots of the genre from the writer trusted with an early draft of The Empire Strikes Back. Vintage, unashamedly so, and better company than a good deal of the genre’s modern output.