More than four decades ago, best-selling author Marion Zimmer Bradley first envisioned the world of Darkover - a frigid world lit by the dim glow of a dying red giant star. On this mysterious planet of the Bloody Sun, a generational starship from faraway Terra crash-landed, stranding her colonists in a land of unknown dangers and unimagined potential.
Now in The Fall of Neskaya, the lands of Darkover are fragmented into a multitude of small belligerent realms torn apart by constant border conflict.
High in the mountainous Hellers, Corin Leynier, adolescent son of a minor nobleman, wakes from a nightmare of a raging forest fire, only to find that the fire is real. Running toward the fire lines, Corin fights to suppress waves of nausea and dizziness - feelings that have become more and more frequent over the passing months - to help his kinsmen. As all the inhabitants of Verdanta lands, nobleman and commoner alike, struggle hopelessly to contain the worst fire in memory, Lord Leynier sends a desperate message to his nearest neighbors, The Storns of High Kinnally, with an appeal for help and passage through Storn lands to Tramontana Tower. But despite the tradition of "fire truce" Lord Storn refuses aid to the Leyniers because of an ancient feud. When all seems lost, and Verdanta doomed by uncontrollable flames, help arrives.
Marion Zimmer was born in Albany, NY, on June 3, 1930, and married Robert Alden Bradley in 1949. Mrs. Bradley received her B.A. in 1964 from Hardin Simmons University in Abilene, Texas, then did graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1965-67.
She was a science fiction/fantasy fan from her middle teens, and made her first sale as an adjunct to an amateur fiction contest in Fantastic/Amazing Stories in 1949. She had written as long as she could remember, but wrote only for school magazines and fanzines until 1952, when she sold her first professional short story to Vortex Science Fiction. She wrote everything from science fiction to Gothics, but is probably best known for her Darkover novels.
In addition to her novels, Mrs. Bradley edited many magazines, amateur and professional, including Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine, which she started in 1988. She also edited an annual anthology called Sword and Sorceress for DAW Books.
Over the years she turned more to fantasy; The House Between the Worlds, although a selection of the Science Fiction Book Club, was "fantasy undiluted." She wrote a novel of the women in the Arthurian legends -- Morgan Le Fay, the Lady of the Lake, and others -- entitled Mists of Avalon, which made the NY Times best seller list both in hardcover and trade paperback, and she also wrote The Firebrand, a novel about the women of the Trojan War. Her historical fantasy novels, The Forest House, Lady of Avalon, Mists of Avalon are prequels to Priestess of Avalon
She died in Berkeley, California on September 25, 1999, four days after suffering a major heart attack. She was survived by her brother, Leslie Zimmer; her sons, David Bradley and Patrick Breen; her daughter, Moira Stern; and her grandchildren.
