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.