From archive (archive) Subject: Author Lists: Marion Zimmer Bradley From: JWenn.ESAE@XEROX.COM Date: 30 Jan 89 08:36:46 GMT Marion Zimmer Bradley's most famous work is the Darkover series. I've listed them in approximate order of internal chronology (although I'm certain I've gotten some of it wrong). She's taken an interesting approach to the internal consistency of the series: If she later decides that she earlier wrote something badly (which happens early in your carrer), she feels free to ignore those portions which she would do differntly now. This can frustrate readers that keep a close eye on the internal logic of a series, but it does free the author to write better stories when her writing skills have improved. And as you can see, while Darkover forms a large portion of her work it is by no means all. Another major theme is revisionist legends (Arthur - "The Mists of Avalon", Mozart - "Night's Daughter" & Troy - "The Firebrand"). Personally I recommend Darkover stories from the Age of Chaos ("Stormqueen!" & "Hawkmistress!") and "The Mists of Avalon" (provided you don't mind revisionist arthurian legends). [A] == Anthology. (A bunch of stories written by other people) [C] == Short Story Collection. [CP] == Chapbook (a very short book, or pamphlet).. [NSF] == Not SF [O] == Omnibus. Includes other books. [S] == Scholarly abr == Abbreviation of other listed title aka == Also known by this other title. as == Originally published using this pen name exp == Expansion of other listed title rev == revision of an older title /John arpa: JWenn.ESAE@Xerox.com ---------------------------------------------------------------- Bradley [Breen], Marion [Eleanor] Zimmer [,B.A.] [U.S.A., 03/06/1930- ] [sister of Paul Edwin Zimmer] The Fall of Atlantis [1985] [O] [aka "Web of Darkness"] Web of Light [1983] Web of Darkness [1983] The Arwen Series: [continuation of Tolkein story] The Jewel of Arwen [1974] [CP] The Parting of Arwen [1974] [CP] The Darkover Novels: Darkover Landfall [1972] Stormqueen! [1978] Hawkmistress! [1982] Two to Conquer [1980] The Spell Sword [1974] The Forbidden Tower [1977] Star of Danger [1965] The Winds of Darkover [1970] The Bloody Sun [1964,1979] The Oath of Renuciates Trilogy: The Oath of Renuciates [1984] [O] The Shattered Chain [1976] Thendara House [1983] City of Sorcery [1984] The Children of Hastur [1982] [O] The Heritage of Hastur [1975] Sharra's Exile [1981] [rev. of "Sword of Aldones"] The Planet Savers / The Sword of Aldones [1980] [O] The Planet Savers [1962] The Sword of Aldones [1962] The World Wreckers [1971] [anthologies with "The Friends of Darkover"] The Keeper's Price [1980] [A] Sword of Chaos [1982] [A] Free Amazons of Darkover [1985] [A] The Other Side of the Mirror [1987] [A] Red Sun of Darkover [1987] [A] Four Moons of Darkover [1988] [A] In Series: Dark Satanic [1972] The Inheritor [1984] Seven from the Stars [1961] The Door Through Space [1961] [protoDarkover universe] The Colours of Space [1963, 1983] The Dark Intruder and Other Stories [1964] [C] The Falcons of Narabedla [1964] [protoDarkover] The Brass Dragon [1969] Hunters of the Red Moon [1973] [followed by "Survivors"-Bradley & Zimmer] In the Steps of the Master [1973] ["Sixth Sense" tv show #2] Men, Halflings & Hero Worship [1973] [CP] [S] The Necessity for Beauty: Robert W. Chambers and the Romantic Traditon [1974] [CP] [S] Endless Voyage [1975] The Ruins of Isis [1978] Endless Universe [1979] [exp. of "Endless Voyage"] Survey Ship [1980] The House Between the Worlds [1980] The Mists of Avalon [1983] Greyhaven [1983] [A] Sword and Sorceress [1984] [A] Warrior Woman [1985] Night's Daughter [1985] The Best of Marion Zimmer Bradley [1985] [C] Sword and Sorceress II [1985] [A] Lythande [1986] [C] Sword and Sorceress III [1986] [A] The Firebrand [1987] Sword and Sorceress IV [1987] [A] Sword and Sorceress V [1988] [A] Non SF works: [NSF] I am a Lesbian [1962] [as Lee Chapman] My Sister, My Love [1963] [as Miriam Gardner] Spare Her Heaven [1963] [as Morgan Ives] Twilight Lovers [1964] [as Miriam Gardner] Anything Goes [1964] [abr. of "Spare Her Heaven"] [as Morgan Ives] Castle Terror [1965] Knives of Desire [1966] [as Morgan Ives] No Adam for Eve [1966] [as John Dexter] The Strange Women [1967] [as Miriam Gardner] Souvenir of Monique [1967] Bluebeard's Daughter [1968] Witch Hill [1972] [as Valerie Graves] Can Ellen Be Saved? [1975] [tv novelization] Drums of Darkness [1976] The Catch Trap [1979] Bradley, Marion [Eleanor] Zimmer & Zimmer, Paul Edwin Survivors [1979] [sequel to "Hunters of the Red Moon"-MZB] From rec.arts.sf-lovers Mon Oct 14 10:47:46 1991 Path: herkules.sssab.se!isy!liuida!sunic!seunet!mcsun!unido!fauern!ira.uka.de!yale.edu!qt.cs.utexas.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!caen!kuhub.cc.ukans.edu!husc-news.harvard.edu!das.harvard.edu!abacus!jmf From: jmf@abacus.uucp (Joan Frankel) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf-lovers Subject: Re: SF Slumming/Oh! The embarrassment! Summary: excessively long Keywords: Darkover, MZB Message-ID: <2132@endor.das.harvard.edu.harvard.edu> Date: 13 Oct 91 05:46:25 GMT References: <1991Sep30.071610.10102@crash.cts.com> <4688@kluge.fiu.edu> Sender: usenet@das.harvard.edu.harvard.edu Organization: DAS Purchasing, Harvard University Lines: 205 Nntp-Posting-Host: abacus My newsfeed was down for close to a week, which of course left me without sufficient distractions & therefore with more time to tack things on this; its long even for this group; you've been warned. In article <4688@kluge.fiu.edu> aaron@fiu.edu (aaron) writes: >>>Rob Masters sez: >>> >>>And last of all : Darkover. >>>There. The truth is out ... This is embarassing. I die. My heart beats grow, >>>pounding, pounding, they shatter the ground on which I stand, the city, the >>>country, the planet. All die, Oh! The embarassment! >> >WAIT! . . . Waitwaitwaitwaitwait . . . what's wrong with Darkover?!? What is >this I see? Trashing Darkover? What's wrong with Darkover? I've got 90% of >everything MZB has written about Darkover, and have read elsewhere the 10% I >don't have, and while I tend to find the Renunciates stuff a touch strident >at times, I don't see a thing wrong with Darkover and the works around it. >In fact, I admire it, and most certainly admire the authoress who allows >others to share in her world. The storytelling is almost always tight (the >only stuff which might fall apart a little is some of the fan-fic), the >characters are very colorful and deep . . . what the heck more could you >want? But it certainly ain't slumming, or embarrassing . . . Ok, 'what is wrong-wrong-wrong with MZB (lately)' or 'why has Darkover been trashed for me' or 'what is left to like???': I was lucky enough, or maybe unlucky, to read the 2 best books 1st, The Bloody Sun & Heritage of Hastur (NOT with Sharra's Exile tacked on. Although now they're packaged as one set, at the time SE hadn't been written.) Bloody Sun is a straightforward, very formulaic heroic saga of 'foundling goes home to a home he never knew he had'. What is makes it distinct & compelling is the carefully worked-out Comyn society/Tower Circle society & how our hero fits his way in & then reshapes his niche. Psychic powers are almost a given in a lot of science fiction, but MZB's careful break-down of distinct skills to individual people & use of a gestalt-group approach in their accurate use, reminiscent of Sturgeon's And Baby Makes Three, was refreshing to find in this corner of the genre, although this aspect of her construct has been borrowed & elaborated upon since by other authors in different settings. The star of the show, in both books I like, was the elaborate setting with careful use of archetypical characters. I'm not Christian but was certainly brought up in Western society with all its lingering mythical overlays, and the idea of celebacy=power, with a constraint on the powerful not to break out of the strictures grown up around them, was suprisingly resonant to me. She puts her leronises at the same position as head wizard in many fantasies, or regional head priest in medieval society, which the switch being, of course, that leronises have to be women. MZB's Comyn is pretty much a point-for-point medieval equivalent, with Tower exercises replacing religious ceremonies & leronises replacing priests in the minds of the local populace. Of course, ceremonies from which the general populace is excluded wouldn't have much staying power, but MZB glosses over this in her early books by focusing only on the lucky ruling class, who have the powers in question & for whom all the customs grown up around possesion of laran have meaning. She states with fair conviction that all the common folk are cowed & scared witless of but glad to have wonders performed on their behalf by the Comyn, and leaves it at that. She does a convincing depiction of a society which desperately wants to remain 'separate but equal' & 'underdeveloped' in relation to the Terran empire which has rediscovered them, and their problems in keeping their distance & maintaining their diginity & secrets against insistant pressure. Heritage of Hastur further explores what happens when another batch of renegades & outcasts pushes the structure by experimenting with & changing the rules even more than the group in Bloody Sun. Thinking I had found a really good series I went on to the pre-Bloody Sun books, which I found amateurishly written & dull, & the post-Bloody Sun/pre-Hastur books, which were still careful in their treatment of of Comyn society but increasingly interested in exploring MZB's interest in soft-core-porn. She writes an introduction in one of the books which relates how she wanted to take writing techniques in that field that she'd developed for the admitted trash she was selling to earn a living & apply them to her non-lucrative (back then) literary love-child, Darkover. Then we get to Sharra's Exile, the sequel to Heritage & a rewrite of her very first book ever (the title of which I forget). Sharra has all the accoutrements of a great, flashy epic and much of the cast from Heritage, but manages to lose any effect by sticking strictly to the mis-fitted plot-line of the original book rather than by modifying it with references to all the stuff in between. That original had unbelievable characters, events & development, and she manages to recapitulate it all, throwing in the only unalloyed villain from Heritage, a child-abuser who, when finally confronted, is allowed to get away just by proclaiming "I won't do that any more & I'll become a vegetarian too!" and is rewarded by hugs all around. Just a sign that Californian 80's mind-set was creeping into Darkover, but the worst was yet to come. MZB post-Sharra seems uninterested in further investigating Comyn society as outlined to that point. She seems to want to write on feminist themes, but chose to graft them onto her developed picture of Darkover. The graft doesn't take for me. She creates the Renunciates, which develop into the Amazons, & who are supposed to be an alternate way of life for stifled Darkovan women who don't fit or don't want to fit themselves into specialized Tower Circle roles and who want out of the male-dominated culture. I have no objection to the idea; the Renunciates evoke the medieval function of nunneries; the Amazons are a possible, though not very likely, extrapolation, given that Darkovan society even though strongly male-oriented had a strong & respected role for women as leroni & Circle acolytes, and might have grudgingly accepted women in other roles of responsibility. My problem is with how the Renunciates/Amazons are used. They seem to be Californians through & through. The books about them, which are many, start off plausibly but not convincingly, relating the life of a repatriated captive of previously undocumented non-Comyn human society on Darkover, which turns out to be styled on Earth's Middle-East and which keeps its women literally in chains, and have progressed, to date, to the absurd tale of a climb up a mountain which turns out to be populated at the top by a city full of women who love to watch people, including fellow women refugees who would greatly benefit from their sanctuary, fall off the mountain in attempts to reach them. Making it to the top of this precipice at this price means more to MZB's creatures than it ever could to me. Sort of a logical conclusion of the old Outward Bound ethic, I guess. There is a lot of excreble fan-fiction about & around the Renunciates/Amazons, the idea of which apparently caught fire among MZB's friends & fans in a way Darkover-as-originally-postulated never did. It wasn't so terrible at first, but in recent years MZB has given her editorial benediction to some worshipful fans who can't write at all coherently, let alone effectively. The rest of the great Darkover revision includes many terrible, clearly- written-for-those-who-just-can't-get-enough, books on the 'great gap' in Darkovan history, the period when those laran powers hadn't been tamed & harnessed & ritualized & just anybody could use them to consolidate his/her empire. These books completely lack the tension devloped in the earlier books between the stridently clannish & self-protective, voluntarily iron-age Comyn & the colonial boors from Earth who want to all-at-once absorb them, mechanize them & usurp through study their considerable psychic skills, because, of course, the rediscovery ship from the Terran Empire (why isn't it ever the Earth Empire? How many of you live on 'Planet Terra'? A show of hands, please) hasn't landed yet. We have to watch the proto-Comyn fight among themselves &, regrettably, it was much more scary & convincing as a referent legend than as several-teen 300+ page novels. I can certainly understand why radioactive contamination scares MZB (& me), but why does she have this 20th century mode of self-poison be 'discovered' & used by hostile warring Darkovan forces? If you can create your own psychically generated 'clean' fire-storm, why destroy the land in dispute with less obvious but much longer-lasting fallout? It just seemed a modern concern intruding into medieval Darkover. We also get shown the evils of having males as leroni without, as well as I can recall, ever being exactly shown when the switch was made to females-only as Tower group foci, or how the mystic/religious rules around them grew. She develops the premise of males as perfectly functional foci; why then do the radical circles of Bloody Sun & Heritage need even their token, pushover leronises? Tradition & ignorance of history are the derived-from-the books reason; the real reason is just 'those books were written 1st'. In any reading, the fangs are pulled from the 'only women can do this' premise which powered the later-set, earlier-written books. She also yanks the cord on the religious-fanatic motivation of the off-screen massacre important to Bloody Sun, making it a calculated Terran plot, sort of CIA-style dirty tricks to hurry the absorption of Darkover into the empire; this makes historical sense but robs Bloody Sun of most of its cultural resonance. I liked the characters in Bloody Sun & Heritage, and don't like to see their histories robbed of meaning. I don't like the male straw-dog characters who figured periodically in the Renunciate/Amazon books any more than I like the books they briefly appear in, but feel even they are being unjustly ill-used; the escapee-from-chains' husband is originally described merely as self-centered & puerile, while her Terran friend's ex-husband is originally described as a concerned, intelligent member of the diplomatic mission, but later in the series it suits MZB to reveal them both to be malicious & malevolent cads. This would work if she at all set it up, but she just drops it in. (She does the same personality-switching on Guenivere in Mists of Avalon; the poor lady is a shallow twit in early sections, a sympathetic, intelligent matron later on, but an ignorant, snivelling pawn again a few pages later, all in service of MZB's plot & with no concessions to previously developed character.) She put so much work & real affection into her early male characters, Jeff in Bloody Sun, Lew Alton in Hastur, Lew's father, Damon I-forget-his name, & the exact even balance of motivation-without-expanded-background in the spectacular, ever-shadowy Robert Kadarin, that it pains me to see her inept, cavalier treatment of most of them in later books. It hurts worse to have plowed through the clumsy, trite prose of the proto-Comyn books at all, & then to admit here in semi-public that I did it. Nobody made me do it, I used to have this feeling, extrapolated into a what-next-from-the-library rule, that if I start reading a series, I'm obliged to finish it. This was formulated in the good old days (maybe 10-15 years ago) when authors actually stopped writing when the idea was played out. I'm older & have less time to kill now, & have revised my rule to only apply to sequels & prequels I'm actively looking forward to, but I still have this curiosity about further developments in situations I once found compelling, or by authors I once respected. Bradley managed to kill Darkover stone dead at about the level of the 2nd Amazon book; I keep trying to retroactively apply my own stop-sign rule, but then I give in & keep reading this junk.