sergebroom | a family's fabric tighter than genes

This is one of my most treasured memories. It was the last time I saw Leigh Brackett. She was sitting alone at the counter in the coffee shop of El Rancho Tropicana in Santa Rosa, California. It was October 1977. Leigh had been invited to attend a convention (...) Now we asked Leigh why she was eating dinner all alone and asked her to join us at our table. Ed Hamilton had died earlier that year and Leigh was obviously depressed. I had no idea that Leigh was seriously ill herself, and would die within six months.

She said, "I don't know why I came here. Nobody knows me, nobody remembers me, nobody cares."

But we were able to persuade Leigh to come to our table and sit with us. Within five minutes Marion Zimmer Bradley walked by. She stopped, did a double take, and exclaimed, "Leigh Brackett!" We invited Marion to join our group and she pulled up a chair and entered the conversation.

Soon other professional writers and longtime fans began to cluster around, adding chairs to the crowd, filling the aisles, and eventually taking over much of the establishment for an impromptu banquet in Leigh Brackett's honor.

I hope that Dick Lupoff won't mind if he comes across this rather lengthy excerpt from his review of Lorelei of the Red Mist in Locus's April 2008 issue, but I had to post it. You see, I discovered real SF in the early 1970s, coming across all its eras mixed together - the modern stuff, some of it experimental, some of it not, the not-so-modern stuff. And there was Leigh Brackett, who stood out. I devoured The Ginger Star and the other novels of the planet Skaith. Over the years, I came across her older stories, of a planet Mars that didn't exist anymore in the real world, but which lived oh so much in the imagination.

I'd have loved to be there in 1977 to be one of those who reminded her that she was not forgotten by the family of science-fiction.