Fantastic Metropolis

Leigh was never very easy with journeyman work, no matter how good she was when she did it. Her keen sense of freedom made her, like many other fine writers of her generation, choose the more precarious living of writing science fantasy. It was a form which appealed to the romantic visionary in her, to her love of the exotic, the ancient and the long-civilised, as well as an enduring belief in the rights of the individual. She loved England and was proud of her English and Scots ancestry, but she was American to the core. And pretty much the best that an American can be.

It was their work that attracted my admiration, but it was their old-fashioned integrity, their generosity and their honest common sense that attracted me to both Leigh and her husband as people. We met at a science fiction convention. I was in my early twenties. I heard they had been seeking me out to congratulate me. For what? I wondered. I was almost speechless, not knowing what I could have done to impress such influential giants. Perhaps they’d congratulate me on my expertise as a literary thief? Perhaps they had recognised some obvious, if unconscious, plagiarism? We were introduced and Ed immediately began pumping my hand. “I just wanted to shake your hand,” he said. “They used to call me ‘the Galaxy smasher’ but you, Mike, you destroyed the universe!” He was kind enough not to mention that my ramshackle book could scarcely have been written at all without the voice of Leigh Brackett echoing in my soul. If I were to quote the opening, you would think it was Leigh on a bad day. It turned out that I didn’t quite have her penchant for interplanetary romance, but her example and her influence runs clearly through every Earth- or Mars-bound fantasy adventure story I have ever told and through virtually every other fantasy adventure story that has been told since!

When Ed died, Leigh wrote to let me know. A sad, matter of fact note in her usual laconic style, born of an age when to be self-referential was considered a bit indecent. Nobody wrote to me when Leigh died the next year. I heard the news from Harlan Ellison, who had also enjoyed her friendship. It broke my heart to lose her company but I couldn’t imagine her wanting to go on living without her companion of some thirty-five years. And, of course, she does live on, as every influential writer does, through her readers and all the romantic young people, like me, whom she encouraged to dream and be proud of it.

Michael Moorcock
Circle Squared Ranch,
Lost Pines, Texas
October 2000