SF Masterwork of the Week: The Long Tomorrow

Leigh Bracket was one of SF’s early greats and had an accomplished career as a writer of both SF and fantasy. She also worked as a Hollywood screenwriter, producing screenplays for such classic films as The Long Goodbye, The Big Sleep and Rio Bravo – and winning a posthumous Hugo Award for the script for The Empire Strikes Back.

But it is her literature with which we’re concerned, and so we are delighted to present as SF  Masterwork of the Week: The Long Tomorrow, a stunning novel of a post-nuclear world:

‘No city, no town, no community of more than one thousand people or two hundred buildings to the square mile, shall be built or permitted to exist anywhere in the United States of America.’

~ Thirtieth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States

Two generations after the nuclear holocaust, rumours persisted about a secret desert hideaway where scientists worked with dangerous machines and where men plotted to revive the cities.

Almost a continent away, Len Coulter heard whisperings that fired his imagination. Then one day he found a strange wooden box…

‘By far Leigh Brackett’s best novel . . . a great work of science fiction’

~ New York Times

The Long Tomorrow is available as an SF Masterworks paperback and an SF Gateway eBook. You can find more of Leigh Brackett’s work via her author page on the SF Gateway website and read more about her in her entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.