Robin Wayne Bailey on “Sea of Dreams” in REALMS OF DARKOVER

Realms of Darkover®, the newest Darkover anthology, will be released in May 2016. You can pre-order it at Amazon (and it will be available at other outlets soon). Here’s a contributor interview to whet your appetite!

Marion Zimmer Bradley’s beloved world of Darkover encompasses many realms, from glacier-shrouded mountains to arid wastelands, from ancient kingdoms to space-faring empires. Now this all-new anthology welcomes old friends and new fans to explore these landscapes of time and place, history and imagination.

Robin Wayne Bailey is the author of numerous novels, including the Dragonkin trilogy and the Frost series, as well as Shadowdance and the Fritz Leiber-inspired Swords Against The Shadowland.  His short fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies with numerous appearances in Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword And Sorceress series and Deborah J. Ross's Lace And Blade volumes. Some of his stories have been collected in two volumes, Turn Left To Tomorrow and The Fantastikon, from Yard Dog Books.  He's a former two-term president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and a founder of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.  He's the co-editor, along with Bryan Thomas Schmidt, of Little Green Men - Attack!

Deborah J. Ross: When and why did you begin writing?

Robin Wayne Bailey: It's a cliche for writer to answer this with "When I was a child," but that's pretty much true in my case. I remember writing a poem in third grade -- call it a Hiawatha pastiche, although I wouldn't learn the word "pastiche" for years -- but it impressed the teacher. She made me read it to the class, then to the principal who made me read it before a school assembly, then at a PTA. Then my parents made me read to to relatives. It got to be embarrassing but, on the other hand, I realized, "Hey, an easy road to attention!" So I kept at it with lots of stories and poems.  I started my first novel in what was once called Junior High School, writing a spy novel mostly during study halls.  About sixty pages into it, I turned my back briefly, and somebody stole my work.  In a crazy, utterly dysfunctional family of wildly talented, but self-destructive people, writing became my way of standing out.  Note, I did not say, "staying sane."

DJR: Tell us about your introduction to Darkover. What about the world or its inhabitants drew you in?

RWB: Toward the end of high school, already a compulsive science fiction reader, I discovered a book called Darkover Landfall. The idea of a shipload of colonists going off-course and becoming lost to the rest of humanity and having to create their own culture wasn't exactly new to me, but Bradley's handling of it fascinated. I read four or five more Darkover novels after that, but must admit that I eventually drifted away from the series.  But that early paperback edition of Darkover Landfall, now signed by Marion, still resides in an honored spot on my bookshelves.

INTERVIEW: Robin Wayne Bailey on Stars of Darkover

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

Robin Wayne Bailey is the author of numerous novels, including the Dragonkin trilogy and the Frost series, as well as Shadowdance and the Fritz Leiber inspired Swords Against The Shadowland.  His short fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies with numerous appearances in Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword And Sorceress series and Deborah J. Ross's Lace And Blade volumes.  His novelette, "The Children's Crusade" was a 2008 Nebula Award nominee.  Some of his stories have been collected in two volumes available from Yard Dog Press.  He is a former president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and co-founder of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, now located in Seattle, Washington.  He lives in Kansas City, Missouri.

Deborah J. Ross: How did Marion Zimmer Bradley influence your writing career? What inspired your story in Stars of Darkover?

Robin Wayne Bailey: Marion Zimmer Bradley was an early supporter of my writing.  I had just sold my first novel, Frost, when I saw an announcement that Marion was seeking stories for a new anthology called Sword And Sorceress.  I decided to take a shot at that and wrote a story called “Child of Orcus,” involving female gladiators in the Roman arenas during the reign of Caligula, which was a little-known or discussed historical fact at the time.

Marion loved the story and wrote an astonishingly complimentary introduction for it, stating, among other very nice things, that “I bought this story under the impression that this was a woman writing about a woman.  Only after deciding to purchase it did I discover that Robin Bailey was a man; but like all really good writers, gender is unimportant to the perceptive eye he brings to the study of his heroine.”  That’s a compliment I’ve always held closely.  “Child of Orcus” became my second professional genre sale and saw publication exactly one year after my first novel appeared.

I sold a good number of stories to Marion after that for further Sword And Sorceress volumes and for such anthologies as Spells Of Wonder.  Indeed, one of my favorite stories, “The Moon Who Loved the Man,” appeared in Spells.  I also sold to her magazine, too.  Marion was always very complimentary and supportive, even going so far as to provide a couple of nice blurbs for my subsequent novels.  But then came a very special anthology invitation.  Marion had decided to put together a special small-print hardback volume of stories by writers she considered “her literary children,” and it would be called Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Worlds.  That she considered me one of her children was immensely flattering, but by that time I was, I thought, leaving the kind of fantasy I had previously sold to her behind and exploring other directions.