The Starmen of Llyrdis

The Starmen follows the adventures of Matt Carse, a hard-drinking adventurer and thief, and Princess Aladoree, the daughter of the deposed ruler of a distant planet. Aladoree is seeking the aid of a legendary race of powerful beings known as the Star Men to help her reclaim her throne from Ciaran. Matt and Aladoree embark on a dangerous journey through space, encountering various alien races and facing many obstacles along the way.

As they get closer to their destination, they must navigate treacherous political intrigue and personal betrayals. In the end, they discover the true nature of the Star Men and must make a choice that will determine the fate of the universe.

Leigh Brackett was born on December 7, 1915 in Los Angeles, and raised near Santa Monica. Having spent her youth as an athletic tom-boy - playing volleyball and reading stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs and H Rider Haggard - she began writing fantastic adventures of her own. Several of these early efforts were read by Henry Kuttner, who critiqued her stories and introduced her to the SF personalities then living in California, including Robert Heinlein, Julius Schwartz, Jack Williamson, Edmond Hamilton - and another aspiring writer, Ray Bradbury.

In 1944, based on the hard-boiled dialogue in her first novel, No Good From a Corpse, producer/director Howard Hawks hired Brackett to collaborate with William Faulkner on the screenplay of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep.

Brackett maintained an on-again/off-again relationship with Hollywood for the remainder of her life. Between writing screenplays for such films as Rio Bravo, El Dorado, Hatari!, and The Long Goodbye, she produced novels such as the classic The Long Tomorrow (1955) and the Spur Award-winning Western, Follow the Free Wind (1963).

Brackett married Edmond Hamilton on New Year's Eve in 1946, and the couple maintained homes in the high-desert of California and the rural farmland of Kinsman, Ohio.

Just weeks before her death on March 17, 1978, she turned in the first draft screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back and the film was posthumously dedicated to her.

Fantasia / Ficção científica / Literatura Estrangeira