". . . Brackett's tone derives more from the noir writers than from her fellow SF authors. Life is hard, brutal and treacherous, and demands constant alertness and ingenuity from those who wish to survive. And although she uses stock landscapes, there is always a wealth of sensual details—sweat down a spacesuit's collar; the hot control handles of a ship close to the sun—to render everything vivid. Finally, her pacing is relentless. She starts each story with a bang and never lets up. Combine all these skills and predispositions into one package and you are talking about a writer who simply imprinted her forceful style and worldview onto everything she wrote . . . This volume should be an essential part of every hardcore SF reader's collection.”
     —Paul di Filippo, Science Fiction Weekly

". . . Brackett's first sale, "Martian Quest," was to John Campbell at Astounding. That story and nineteen others published over the next three years in such pulps as Planet Stories, Startling Stories, Amazing Stories and Super Science Stories, 478 pages of them, are collected in Martian Quest: The Early Brackett from Haffner Press. As with many true originals, much of Brackett's work, for all its seeming diversity--hardboiled, standard mystery, Westerns, high fantasy, science fiction—falls in a remarkably straight line. Here in Martian Quest are adumbrated the themes and preoccupations she'll fulfill in later work: the creation of an entire world in precis, details forthcoming. Here, too, is clear demonstration of the power, the narrative inertia that once set in motion cannot be stopped, and the genius for description that will forever be her hallmarks and heritage . . . I grew up on stories by Brackett, Kuttner, Sturgeon, and their contemporaries, moving pretty much in a straight line from pabulum to solid food to science fiction. Reading Brackett's earliest work again after all these years reminds me of the early hold science fiction had on me and causes me to consider how deeply not only my taste in literature but my very view of the world was formed by science fiction. The stories in Martian Quest and I are of an age. I limp. They don't."
     —James Sallis, Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction