George Lucas On Leigh Brackett

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

When we started publishing Planet Stories, one of our goals (in fact, the primary goal) was to publish books that were not just great stories, but also historically significant. Books that altered the course of science fiction history, that helped invent genres and whose authors managed to indelibly alter the way we think about SF.

Yet sometimes the impact of a given novel isn't felt immediately—as with music or any other art, it's sometimes the imitator or the student who makes a bigger splash than the original. (After all, Michael Jackson didn't invent the moonwalk, he just popularized it.) Leigh Brackett is the perfect example of this phenomenon—while she was huge in her day, modern readers know her mainly through those authors she mentored and works she influence. Folks like Ray Bradbury.

Or, you know, Star Wars.

Within the first ten pages of a Leigh Brackett book, you can immediately see the resemblance between her gritty, realistic worlds (and characters!) and the universe George Lucas brought us in what has come to be probably the most popular science fiction work of all time. (Heck, her Martian city of Jakara or Skeg on Skaith might as well be Mos Eisely, to my imagination.) But though we all knew that George Lucas must have taken inspiration from Brackett—why else would he commission her to write the first draft for The Empire Strikes Back?—we've never really heard him speak about it.

Until now. For The Reavers of Skaith, the last book in Leigh Brackett's marvelous Skaith trilogy, we were fortunate enough to have The Man Himself write an introduction talking about his relationship with Brackett's worlds, the character of Eric John Stark, and their influence on his beloved classics. And it confirmed everything we had suspected:

Beyond the mechanics of the adventure itself, beyond the clash of heroes and villains, beyond the heroic narrative, Leigh created a world of gritty complexity and layered reality. It was a universe with a working political system (wonderfully, painfully and realistically dysfunctional) and an unjust social hierarchy. I never had the sense that it was designed in service of a simple science fiction plot. Rather, it was as if she had selected this fully realized backdrop, and chosen to place Stark into a world already in motion. It was dense and rich and completely lived-in, a supposed reality that commanded respect. It was a complexity worthy of her genre-contemporaries, guys like Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov and J. R. R. Tolkien, but told by way of a swashbuckling, space-faring barbarian. If this was escapism, it was for a new generation of sophisticated genre fans.

It was into that climate—Leigh's climate—that Star Wars and I showed up on the scene. I had tried to capture my own nostalgia for the movies I grew up with, including the movies that Leigh had written. I loved that organic flow of film-speak that balanced between heightened reality and easy, comfortable, conversational dialogue. And her groundwork had helped to inspire me to move away from the squeaky-clean image of cinematic science fiction. I liked the idea of a lived-in universe, with a seamy, worn underbelly as fully cooked as the futuristic aspects. I loved exploring fringes and outskirts. It was there that Leigh had set Stark's adventures, and it was far from the center of the universe that I set Star Wars.

To hear the rest of what Mr. Lucas has to say, pick up The Reavers of Skaith and dive into a new world—one that may be more familiar than you imagine.

James Sutter
Planet Stories Editor