S
TARS
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.
Rosemary Edghill (aka eluki bes
shahar) has published stories in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine as
well as MZB’s long-running Sword & Sorceress anthology series. This
led to her ghost-writing the urban fantasy series Witchlight, Ghostlight,
Gravelight, and Heartlight under Bradley’s name. A woman of many,
many talents, she’s also an anthologist and editorial mentor. Her most
recent books include the Shadow Grail series.
Deborah J. Ross How did Marion Zimmer Bradley influence your writing
career?
Rosemary Edghill: Of course she influenced me, just as she did all writers of
my generation by the stories she chose to tell, and by the founding of MZB’s Fantasy Magazine. Writing
for MZBFM and for the Sword and Sorceress
anthology series was an exercise in writing to market while putting aside the
preconceptions still widely held in the F/SF field of the time: it stretched my
imagination, and really showed me what I could manage to get away with in terms
of plot.
But more than that, having been privileged to collaborate
with her and to write as her, I had the opportunity to study her writing in
depth: her vocabulary and sentence structure, her themes and her methods of
drawing a character. It was really a master class in the “bread and
butter” aspects of storytelling, and I think it has affected the stories I
choose to tell, and the way I tell them, ever since.
DJR: Tell us about your story in Stars of Darkover.
RE: The title, SECOND CONTACT, is a play on the phrase “First
Contact”, which is usually used to describe the first meeting of human and
alien. But first contacts are easy: it’s figuring out what comes after
you learn to say “hello” that’s hard. The story is set a couple of years
after Rediscovery, and features one of my favorite themes: culture clash.
Jenny Lauren is doing her best to help Darkover fit into the Terran Empire:
Armsman Zhenyar thinks she’s going about it all wrong. It wouldn’t be a
good story if both sides weren’t completely right, of course!
Rediscovery is my favorite period of Darkovan history, and I
think some of MZB’s best tales were set there. The mix of “sorcerous”
Darkovans and blaster-wielding Terrans gives the stories a Leigh
Brackett/Fletcher Pratt space opera feel, while Marion’s modern sensibilities
kept the material fresh.
DJR: What have you written recently? What lies ahead?
Most of what I write these days is under a pseudonym that my
publisher prefers I do not disclose, but there are two things – one recent, one
forthcoming – I can talk about. I just finished the last book in my
four-book YA series SHADOW GRAIL (for Tor Teen). VICTORIES was a lot of
fun to write, both viscerally and technically: the trick to a short series
(Shadow Grail was planned and executed as four books) is to change things up
with each book: raising the stakes of the overstory while also providing a
relatively standalone narrative. I loved the final raise in VICTORIES,
and I hope the readers agree.
Meanwhile, I’ve just sold Baen a new book set in the
Underhill universe, though we’re unlikely to see any of the characters from the
BEDLAM’S BARD series. The new book is called HOME FROM THE SEA, and it’s
set in Maine, so it’s probably time for me to give Sharon Lee a call.
Right now I’m in the middle of a long-running series: I’m
seven books in, with (potentially) another five to go. So when that’s
done, I’d like to do some things with shorter arcs that don’t require me to
memorize the names for every element of 14th century plate armor…
DJR: What do you see for the future of Darkover?
RE: I think Darkover is forever. Like the Cthulhu Mythos
(a literary ancestor and very minor influence on Darkover), the canon is
sweeping enough to attract dozens of writers to different aspects of it, while
the “science fantasy” framework (in its time, the only way writers such as
Marion could sneak fantasy or sword and sorcery tropes past the editorial
gatekeepers) allows many many many different kinds of stories to be told.
Steampunks of Darkover? Set it during Rediscovery. High Fantasy
Epic? Ages of Chaos/Hundred Kingdoms. No matter what kind of story
you can imagine, it can be told beneath the Bloody Sun.
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