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Category: Fantasy/Science Fiction
Description: The first anthology of short stories set on Darkover, spanning Darkovan history--from shortly after the arrival of the lost Terran ship, through the Ages of Chaos, the rise of the Comyn and the establishment of the Compact, and the eventual return the Terrans.

This anthology, first published in 1980, contains stories by Marion Zimmer Bradley, Elisabeth Waters, Diana L. Paxson, Susan M. Shwartz, Patricia Shaw Mathews, Cynthia McQuillin, Jacqueline Lichtenberg and Jean Lorrah, Linda MacKendrick, Kathleen Williams, Penny Ziegler, Eileen Ledbetter, Linda Frankel, and Paula Crunk.
eBook Publisher: Marion Zimmer Bradley Literary Works Trust, 1980
eBookwise Release Date: July 2012

Available eBook Formats: OEBFF Format (IMP) [352 KB]
Words: 77718
Reading time: 222-310 min.

"Take your favorite Darkover novel, compress it into a few pages but leave all the emotional impact in place -- that's "The Keeper's Price." I notice that MZB and Lisa Waters kept coming back to Hilary Castamir's charcter, and I wish there had been a novel about her. :) Leaving aside the brilliance of the title masterpiece, the rest of the collection is strong and well-organized. Even the stories I didn't like as much at first ("A Simple Dream" comes to mind, as does "Ambassador to Corresanti") have grown on me. I've read and re-read this collection probably twenty times in the past year. I still want to read it over again. These are wonderful stories!" --A.J. Chodan

One of the many misconceptions suffered by young writers trying to break into print is this: to think of the editor as a harsh, cruel, unfeeling and judgmental individual who gets sadistic jollies out of rejecting manuscripts with impersonal printed slips, insists that his writers must have a "big name" before he will condescend to read anything they submit to him, and in general tries to put every obstacle possible in the path of the would-be young writer.

There are many things wrong with this picture of the professional editor, the main one being that it simply isn't so. As an editor myself, over a period of years, and also from working with many editors--including the editor of DAW Books, Donald A. Wollheim--I can say that most editors have kept their own personal sense of wonder about good science fiction, and that they spend much of their professional lives in search of a good new writer. Because no matter how many fine writers an editor may have in his (or her) "stable" of published authors, it's never possible to rely on "names" alone. Authors die. They get sick and miss deadlines. They go off for a year to Europe, Africa, Katmandu or Trappist monasteries. They have babies or decide to spend the next three years researching the Great American novel. For whatever cause, this leaves the editor with nothing to publish; and when he doesn't publish, he doesn't make any money.

And so the editor spends a good deal of time leaving no stone unturned in the search to find and encourage new writers. And one of the stones turned by Don Wollheim was Starstone, the magazine of apocryphal Darkover fiction by the Friends of Darkover. I have always encouraged young writers to write in my world; I think it's fun. Besides, how else can I get to read Darkover stories without going to the trouble of writing them?

Don knew that I made a habit of publishing, in Starstone, various short bits of Darkover fiction which I considered too short, or too fragmentary, to develop into novels. He spoke to me once about doing an anthology of short Darkover fiction, and when I told him there simply weren't enough of these short stories to make up a paperback, he suggested that I might include the best of the short stories written by the Friends of Darkover, some of whom showed tremendous talent.

Another misconception about professional editors in the science fiction and fantasy field is that they have a prejudice against women authors. This is another misconception, so exasperating that I have been known to call any woman who repeats it to me a liar to her face. One young woman who sank to the level of vanity publishing excused herself by saying to me (to me!). "Well, I had no choice. Everybody knows that women can't get published in fantasy or science fiction." And this, believe it or not, in the days of Ursula le Guin and Anne McCaffrey winning Nebulas and Hugos!

Well, even back when ninety percent of science fiction readers were men, there were a great many women who never made any secret of their sex writing and editing science fiction. Weird Tales was ably edited for many years by Dorothy McIlwraith, Famous Fantastic Mysteries (one of the best pulps) by Mary Gnaedinger, and Amazing Stories, for a long time, by Cele Goldsmith. Leigh Brackett, Catherine L. Moore, Wilmar Shiras and Judith Merril--not to mention myself--were all writing long before the current explosion of feminism, back in the thirties, forties, and fifties. Nor did the supposedly all-male readership of the science fiction magazines complain about any of them.