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The Best of Marion Zimmer
Bradley
Marion Zimmer Bradley
A SPHERE BOOK
First published in theUSA by Daw Books Inc. 1988 First published inGreat Britain by Sphere Books
Limited 1990
Copyright © Marion Zimmer Bradley 1985
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any
form or by any means without the prior
permission in writing of the publisher, nor be
otherwise circulated in any form of binding or
cover other than that in which it is published and
without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent
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purchaser.
Reproduced, printed and bound inGreat Britain by Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading.
ISBN 0 7474 0465 8
Contents
Introduction
Centaurus Changeling
The Climbing Wave
Exiles of Tomorrow
Death Between the Stars
Bird of Prey
The Wind People
The Wild One
Treason of the Blood
The Day of the Butterflies
Hero’s Moon
The Engine
The Secret of the Blue Star
To Keep the Oath
Elbow Room
Blood Will Tell
Sphere Books Ltd
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The Best of Marion Zimmer Bradley
Introduction
I’ve told the story before; how, on a train journey fromWatertown,New York , back to my family home
inRensselaerCounty , I changed trains inUtica , and, almost for the first time in my life, bought myself a
box of chocolates and a magazine of my own free choice. It was literally the first time in my life that I had
been in a newsstand with money from my summer job in my pocket; and I happened to have memory of
reading a couple of issues of Weird Tales which I’d found in our attic before my mother, troubled by the
lurid covers and the fear I’d have nightmares, took them away from me. I had intended to buy myself a
copy of Weird Tales; but they didn’t seem to have that magazine, so I looked around and bought myself
a copy of Startling Stories containing the Kuttner novel THE DARK WORLD, which I later knew to
have been written by Catherine Moore Kuttner instead.
Looking back over a long, not uneventful life, I can honestly say that no experience in my life has ever
given me the same excited delight as riding through the twilight, reading Kuttner’s wonderful mythic novel
of a man who changed worlds. Perhaps it could compare only with the fascination of my first LSD trip,
or the time I first walked through the British Museum of which I had read so much, or my first Turandot
at Lincoln Center, or standing high atop the shrine at Delphi and looking down at the old Sacred Way.
To this day, I can remember the shock of delight reading Tennyson’s poem Tithonus where I discovered
the quote which must have been used for the title: “A soft wind blows the mists away: I feel A breath
from that dark world where I was born.”
When I finished the Kuttner novel, I read a couple of the short stories - I remember Jack Vance’s
“Planet of the Black Dust” - and then turned to the “fan letter columns” in the back. Shock of thrills: there
were other people who loved this kind of story and were willing to talk about them, and even published
fanzines to write about them.
By the time my journey was finished, I knew not only that I wanted to be a writer but that I wanted to
write science fiction. Later that summer I typed a first draft of the novel I had written the year before,
which ten years later was to see print under the name THE SWORD OF ALDQNES, and submitted it
to Startling Stories: it was kindly rejected by Sam Merwin, the editor at that time. Later, Leo Margulies,
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the editor of Startling and its sister magazine Thrilling Wonder, bought several of my short stories. At that
time I also began writing to magazines and to fanzines, and that fall I started fan activity. After a
desperately lonely childhood as a bookworm among kids interested only in throwing various shapes and
sizes of balls, or dressing up in short skirts and jumping around yelling “Yay, yay, yay” about the
ball-throwers (an activity which is still, I consider, the only activity sillier than throwing the balls
themselves), I discovered congenial people, who would and could talk to me as if I were a person, not a
little girl.
Three years later, still an active fan, I married (it was, and in some areas still is the only way for a young
woman to get away from a bad home situation) and during fourteen years in Texas in small and smaller
towns, following the fortunes of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad for which my first husband
worked as an Agent-telegrapher, I substituted fan activity for the football -and-church centered life of
Texas. To this day the mail is thehigh point of the day, and an empty mailbox will make me sulk or fall
into a depression. I published fanzines, wrote voluminously for them, wrote reams of letters (I still do),
and tried to write for the pulp magazines I still passionately loved. (I couldn’t afford to buy books, and it
never would have occurred to me then to try writing them. That came later, with my first novel, SEVEN
FROM THE STARS. “Falcons of Narabedla,” and “Bird of Prey,” which later became novels, were
novelette length Kuttner pastiches; not because I was deliberately imitating but because I wanted to write
stories like the ones I read in the magazines.
Nevertheless my first long published novelette was not a pastiche, but my first really original work; in this
day of embryo transfers and test tube babies it seems almost prophetic. “Centaurus Changeling” reflected
my love of reading medical books. “The Wind People” was, I think, a dream I had inTexas . Most of
those earlyTexas stories were reflecting a drab daily life cooking and washing diapers and cleaning our
small rented houses; and an extremely lively interior life based on the books I read and the people I knew
only through fanzines. Big events in my life were a sandwich at the local hamburger cafe (a night out);
there was nothing else to do except go to church or listen to football games, and I have kept a perfect
record: I have never yet attended a football game. I was, on the other hand, a vigorous listener to the
Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts, and my first use of money, when I began having it, was to buy
season tickets to the San Francisco Opera; my biggest indulgence now is for telecast video tapes and
laser disc performances of real operas.
Well, a day came when I sold my first long novelette: “Bird of Prey,” later to be DOOR THROUGH
SPACE, a novel about the Dry Towns which would surface later in the Darkover novels. Then I began
writing about Darkover. About the time I was beginning to write science fiction again after a long hiatus
writing pseudonymous novels for a trashy publisher called Monarch Books, I leftTexas and my first
husband. I have nothing bad to say about my first marriage: the enforced loneliness threw me on my own
resources and gave me leisure to write. Brad thought I spent too much money on paper and postage, but
if I was willing, as he put it, to have these things instead of fashionable clothes and possessions, it was
OK with him; he was not ambitious. Also, if I was willing to live modestly on his salary instead of getting
a job (I preferred not to raise our son in the care of someone whose market worth was even less than
mine - i.e., leave him in the care of an uneducated woman who would otherwise be doing unskilled labor)
he allowed me to do so. Eventually, the Monarch romances paid my tuition to a local small college -
ostensibly so I could get a teaching certificate and support the family after Brad retired from the railroad.
Instead I leftTexas , moved toBerkeley , and married again; had two younger children by my second
marriage, and once again discovered that writing was a way to stay home with my kids while working.
This is why I have never believed the story that domesticity damages a woman’s intellectual life; while the
kids were small I wrote a few books every year.
Not easily. I remember training the kids that Mommy was never to be interrupted at the typewriter, and
I bribed them shamelessly for letting me alone - they call it positive reinforcement, now.
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But I had to learn to be sociable. I remember being afraid that with intellectual stimulation, libraries,
music, free concerts and a loving husband who wished for my company instead of using me as a
housekeeper, cook, laundress, I would lose the impulse to write. I still prefer to keep people at arm’s
length so that I can find the best company in the world; the characters who come out of my brain and
mind.
Becoming an editor - when I had money enough, I published a fiction fanzine - helped me at long last to
write more than the occasional short story. I never felt much at ease writing short stories: my “natural”
feeling is to write novels, the longer the better. I learned painfully during the “Monarch years” to write
novels to severe plot and deadline requirements, to cut my work to the bone: but only when I was freed
of these length requirements by Don Wollheim’s willingness to experiment with long novels like THE
HERITAGE OF HASTUR (1975) did I really begin to write naturally.
Over a forty year writing career I have written forty odd novels (some of them, as I like to say, very odd
indeed) and considerably fewer short stories, the great majority of them being impulses - I would wake
up with an idea, juggle the plot a bit, and sit down and write it on a sustained impulse, not stopping till I
finished it. Since I usually write novels “on contract,” the short stories were seldom profitable. I write a
short story only if I can’t figure out a way to make the idea into a novel, or want to write a little known
episode in the life of a character from one of my novels. “To Keep the Oath” is such a story; I was
curious as to how Camilla met Kindra. Both characters were in THE SHATTERED CHAIN (1976).
I don’t imitate Kuttner any more, or even Leigh Brackett. My current enthusiasms, besides opera, are
Gay Rights and Women’s Rights - I think Women’s Liberation is the great event of the twentieth century,
not Space Exploration. One is a great change in human consciousness; the latter is only predictable
technology and I am bored by technology.
I write on a word processor, but prefer my typewriter. And I am still a fan at heart - because I am still
looking for any reading matter which will arouse in me the old thrill of those early pulp magazines. FOR
BETTER OR WORSE, A WRITER IS WHAT I AM, and I no longer bother to explain or excuse it. I
prefer science fiction to any other reading or writing, and to people who ask why I don’t read
mainstream (or write it), I say I cannot imagine that the content of the mainstream spy novels, corruption
in the streets, adultery in the suburbs can possibly compete with a fiction whose sole raison d’etre is to
think about the future of the human race.
Centaurus Changeling
“. . . the only exception to the aforesaid policy was made in the case of Megaera (Theta Centaurus IV)
which was given full Dominion status as an independent planetary government; a departure almost
without precedent in the history of the Terran Empire. There are many explanations for this variation from
the usual practice, the most generally accepted being that which states that Megaera had been colonized
from Terra only a few years before the outbreak of the Rigel-Procyon war, which knocked out
communications in the entire Centaurus sector of die Galaxy and forced the abandonment of all the
so-called Darkovan League colonies, including Megaera, Darkover, Samarra and Vialles. During these
Lost Years, as they were called, a period embracing, in all, nearly 600 years ... the factors of natural
selection, and the phenomenon of genetic drift and survival mutation observed among isolated
populations, permitted these ‘lost1 colonies to develop along scientific and social lines which made their
reclamation by the Terran Empire an imperative political necessity. ...”
From J. T. Bannerton: A Comprehensive History of Galactic Politics, Tape IX.
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