Stirring Off-World Epics from the Undisputed Queen of Space Opera

Leigh Brackett’s Stark Planets

by Leigh Brackett

 
 

In a literary landscape where names such as Frank Herbert, John Norman, and Edgar Rice Burroughs became legendary, only one writer would create stories of adventure, romance, and exotic worlds that would earn her the crown of queen of the genre: Leigh Brackett. Imagining pulse-pounding action, dizzying spectacle, and dangerous planets, she forged a decades-long writing career that spanned print and film and ended famously with her penning the original screenplay for the Star Wars sequel The Empire Strikes Back shortly before her death.

This Legendary Planet edition includes two of Brackett’s masterful novels of planetary adventure: Black Amazon of Mars and A World Is Born

Black Amazon of Mars
Adventurer, mercenary, savage, and agent of the Earth government, Eric John Stark had set out to fulfill his promise to a dying friend. Little did he know of the secrets of the relic he promised to return... or the dangers awaiting him in the old Martian city... or the roaming horde of reavers and their brutal, black-armored chief who would relentlessly pursue him... or the stolen talisman’s power to unlock the ancient danger guarded behind what the Martians call the Gates of Death... 

A World Is Born
Under the unrelenting sun of the planet Mercury, prisoner Mel Gray toils at a life sentence of hard labor. Building a new colony on the harsh and unforgiving world, faced with a choice between a future for himself or for the corporation he’s enslaved to, Gray leads a desperate and dangerous escape that will shape the fate of the planet forever...