No one had ever escaped from Venus' dread Stellar Legion. And, as Thekla the low-Martian learned, no one had ever betrayed it and—lived.

Today's story is "The Stellar Legion," by Leigh Brackett. It appeared in the Winter 1940 issue of Planet Stories on pages 95 to 103.

The "Stellar Legion" was awarded the Retro Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 2016.

Leigh Douglass Brackett (December 7, 1915, Los Angeles, California – March 24, 1978, Lancaster, California) was an American author and screenwriter. Nicknamed "the Queen of Space Opera", she was one of the most prominent female writers during the Golden Age of Science Fiction. She worked on an early draft of "The Empire Strikes Back" (1980), elements of which remained in the film; she died before it went into production.

In 1956, her book "The Long Tomorrow" made her the first woman ever shortlisted for the Hugo Award for Best Novel, and one of the first two women ever nominated for a Hugo Award. In 2020, she posthumously won a Retro Hugo for her novel "The Nemesis From Terra," originally published as "Shadow Over Mars" (Startling Stories, Fall 1944).

Links

Reaper: reaper.fm

LibSyn: libsyn.com

"Mesmerizing Galaxy" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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