STARS OF DARKOVER – not just the glorious night
sky over the world of the Bloody Sun, but the authors who have been inspired
over the decades by Marion Zimmer Bradley’s favorite world. It will be released
on June 3, 2014, to celebrate Marion's 84th birthday.
Rachel Manija Brown's
post-apocalyptic YA novel "Stranger," co-written with Sherwood Smith,
is forthcoming from Viking in 2014. She is the author of the memoir
"All the Fishes Come Home to Roost: an American Misfit in India," and
also writes short stories, graphic novels, poetry, television, and plays. She
is currently a graduate student at Antioch University, Los Angeles, in the MA
program in clinical psychology, with a specialization in trauma.
Deborah J. Ross: What
inspired your story in Stars of Darkover?
Rachel Manija Brown: My
story, "The Fountain's Choice," was inspired by a brief scene in Stormqueen! which
shows riyachiyas, who are genetically engineered to be living sex toys,
always willing, always obedient.
I wondered what would it be like if a person who had never
had free will suddenly gained it. What would it be like to make a choice for
the very first time?
To play against that character, I wanted a character whose
choices had also been constrained, and who had internalized that constraint:
someone who could choose, but didn't know it. And since the female riyachiyas
were designed be more stereotypically feminine than any ordinary woman could ever
be, I wanted to set her against a character who didn't fit into ideas of
masculine and feminine at all: an emmasca.
That plus some of my favorite Darkover tropes - delicious
food, hurt-comfort, training sequences, interesting laran powers, Ages of Chaos
decadence, the harrowing wilderness journey in bad weather - made a story.
DJR: What have you written recently? What lies ahead?
RMB: My novel Stranger, which I co-wrote with
Sherwood Smith, is coming out this fall. It's a YA novel set in a
post-apocalyptic frontier town. I would describe it as The X-Men meet
the Wild West.
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