(And only us lucky big-city folk had a single line most rural or semi-rural people had party lines.) The idea that you’d soon (in relative terms) be able to carry a pocket-sized device that you could make phone calls on, play games on, talk to (and have it talk back), watch TV and movies on, and even read books on, would have been pure SF! And it had a cord connected to a handset that you put in front of your ear and mouth. Your phone was this big black thing that sat on a table in the front hall or on a wall in the kitchen. There was none of this newfangled stuff like e-ink or electronic readers or cell phone apps. Heck, even the corner store had SF/F paperbacks and magazines, alongside the Westerns, comics, and hardboiled detective and action paperbacks and magazines.
The bookstores had hardcovers and paperbacks in a wide range of authors and types of SF/F, and magazines sometimes. When I was a youngster, the library had several shelves full of hardcover SF/F, ranging from the 1930s to the 1950s (seldom paperbacks). It doesn’t include fanzine work, Mysteries or Westerns.I pity the modern reader, who can’t go to the local library or bookstore and find more than a few tie-in novels for TV or movies, with the occasional Herbert or Heinlein thrown in. She and Ray Bradbury inspired each other in the pages of Planet Stories, and no one else deserves the title more, Leigh Brackett, Queen of Space. Not the most prolific of Pulp writers, the stories she produced were the high water mark against which all others are tested. Or she would spend time in California, where she grew up. Or she would work on the old farm house she and Ed bought in Kinsman, OH. When Leigh wasn’t writing movies, perhaps because of a writers’ strike, she would continue the adventures of her great hero, Eric John Stark.
Many Star Wars fans do not like it because of it being the middle piece of three but so what? You have all the great Space Opera elements (romance, action, aliens, chases, etc.) and a better budget than the first Star Wars film. This film is the most perfect example of great Space Opera ever done. Brackett may be best remembered for writing The Big Sleep (1946 ) screenplay with William Faulkner or the Rio Bravo (1959) movies for Howard Hawks, but I will always remember her as the one who wrote The Empire Strikes Back (1980) with Lawrence Kasden.
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