Lorelei of the Red Mist: Planetary Romances is the companion volume to Martian Quest: The Early Brackett, a volume that collected the First twenty published stories by the ?undisputed Queen of ?Space Opera.? ?With the stories in this volume, Brackett takes the foundation of the Fictional universe established in her early work, and populates these worlds with colorful characters and locales teeming with adventure and intrigue. Here, hard-bitten and cynical rogues risk (and sometimes lose) all to battle stellar horrors, escape from decadent tyrannies, and yes, rescue the girl.During the timeframe when these stories were written, Brackett First broke into writing screenplays for Hollywood. With only modest success for Republic Pictures, it was on the strength of her First mystery novel that she was offered to co-author the screenplay for Warner Bros.? The Big Sleep with William Faulkner by director Howard Hawks.Appropriately, Lorelei of the Red Mist: Planetary Romances features an introduction by a protege of Leigh Brackett, a one-time collaborator (on this volume?s title story) and 2004 recipient of the National Medal of Arts, Ray Bradbury.

Hugh Starke had died he was absolutely certain of that. He had not survived when his spaceship crashed as he desperately tried to escape the authorities after pulling off the greatest lone-wolf heist in history. And then he awakened in a new body to find himself a powerful rich man on a world of bizarre loveliness. He was pleased by his good luck . . . until he discovered that his new body was hated by everyone on this strange and lovely planet and that his soul was owned by Rann devil-goddess of Falga who was using him for her own gain. A grand adventure from the golden age of pulps by two masters of the genre.

Acclaimed sci-fi author Alan E. Nourse offers up an exciting tale of treachery, adventure, and vast wealth in the novel Gold in the Sky. The story unfolds among the rarefied and rough-and-tumble crews who mine the surface of asteroids for valuable metals and minerals. Much like the lawless mining towns of the Old West, these groups are made up of rapacious types who will stop at nothing to strike it rich.

Even in this grip of alien horror a man could not throw away his lifetime goal . . . and not stand idly by as endless rows of alabaster, shapes seated in their chars of stone, thought-rules this gargoyle planet from the dead blackness of deep Mercurian caverns. Leigh Brackett was the undisputed Queen of Space Opera and the first women to be nominated for the coveted Hugo Award. She wrote short stories, novels, and scripts for Hollywood. She wrote the first draft of the Empire Strikes Back shortly before her death in 1978.

Ray Bradbury is, indisputably, one of America's greatest storytellers. The recipient of the 2000 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, he ranks among the most beloved -- and widely read -- of American authors. In The Cat's Pajamas, this "latter-day O. Henry" (Booklist) takes us on an amazing walk through his six-decade career, presenting twenty-two tales -- some old, some new, all but two never before published. Here you will find stories strange and scary, nostalgic and bittersweet, humorous and heart-touching, ranging from the not-so-long-gone past to an unknowable future: a group of senators drinks a bit too much -- and gambles away the United States; a newlywed couple buys an old house and finds their fledgling relationship tested; two mysterious strangers arrive at a rooming house and baffle their fellow occupants with strange crying in the night; a lonely woman takes a last chance on love. The final piece in the collection is a story-poem, a fond salute from Bradbury to his literary heroes Shaw, Chesterton, Dickens, Twain, Poe, Wilde, Melville, and Kipling. The Cat's Pajamas is just that -- the bee's knees -- a touching, timeless, and tender collection from the incomparable Ray Bradbury, and a anoramic view of an amazingly long, rich, and fertile creative career.

More feared than the deadly green snakes, the hideous red beetles of that outpost of Earth Empire, was the winged dragon queen of Jupiter and her white Legions of Doom! A pulp classic from the "queen of space opera"!

In a crystalline death lay the only release for those prisoners of that Ionian hell-outpost. Yet MacVickers and the men had to escape—for to remain meant the conquering of the Solar System by the inhuman Europans.