Stark Trio (Heathen Edition)
Leigh Douglass Brackett (1915-1978) was an American author hailed as "the Queen of Space Opera" and a screenwriter best known for The Big Sleep, Rio Bravo, The Long Goodbye, and the first draft of The Empire Strikes Back. She was one of the first two women ever nominated for a Hugo Award and the first woman ever shortlisted for the Hugo Award for Best Novel. Around 1950, Brackett's planet-hopping "man without a tribe" Eric John Stark bare-knuckled his way through the pages of sci-fi pulp Planet Stories in a razor-sharp, hardboiled trio - Queen of the Martian Catacombs, Black Amazon of Mars, and Enchantress of Venus - all three collected here as first published.
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"There's only one Leigh Brackett and there's only one Eric John Stark - both stand alone in their field!" -Ray Bradbury
"Leigh took science fiction and lifted it above the genre preconceptions. This is fiction as its most exciting, in the hands of master storyteller." -George Lucas
"Brackett is absolutely at the top of her genre." -Publisher's Weekly
"Leigh Brackett combines the best of A. Merritt and Edgar Rice Burroughs with much that is uniquely her own!" -Lester Del Rey
"Miss Brackett's . . . books have been sheer romantic space operas (which no one does better)." -H. H. Holmes, New York Herald-Tribune
"I believe that Enchantress of Venus is one of the best of the Stark stories . . . the scenes in the strange depths of the gaseous Red Sea lead inexorably toward a final struggle - and a final failure. And indeed, this is a favorite and recurring theme of the Leigh Brackett stories - the theme of a strong man's quest for a dream and of his final failure when it turns to smoke and ashes in his hands." -Edmond Hamilton, The Best of Leigh Brackett
"Brackett not only continued the great romantic tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs (though with infinitely more sophistication), but she managed to sneak into the Puritan pulps . . . a sensuousness which the male writers of the period couldn't seem to achieve, both in descriptive ability and hints that the hero and heroine wanted more than for the former to save the latter from a bug-eyed monster . . . Brackett's works are adventurous world-creating at its best." -A Reader's Guide to Science Fiction
"She approached all she wrote with economy and vigor: everything about her early stories - their color, their narrative speed, the brooding forthrightness of their protagonists - made them an ideal and fertile blend of traditional space opera and sword and sorcery." -The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
