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    It was the Christmas of 1993. My parents had bribed, begged and finally forced me into the car, with the set destination of Northern California to see the beloved family of my father for Christmas. There is nothing more volatile than a 13 year-old girl locked in the confines of a car for three days with her parents, having to endure her father's love of Cajun music. The only solace in my possession was The Mists of Avalon (Ballantine) by Marion Zimmer Bradley. Somehow, those three days turned into three minutes, and when we arrived I resented the fact that I had to leave the car to socialize with uncles, aunts and cousins whom I barely knew. I felt a deeper connection to the characters in Bradley's novel than to the members of my own family.

    This is when I first discovered the works of Marion Zimmer Bradley. She was born June 3, 1930 in Albany, New York and recently passed away September 25, 1999 following a heart attack. She wrote over fifty science fiction and fantasy novels including the highly praised Darkover series. It was this series that established her presence in the science fiction and fantasy community. The novels lead the reader through the world of Darkover, a rediscovered lost colony of Earth's "Terran Empire." The centuries of neglect allowed the world to develop it's own technology and society. The central themes that fascinated readers were the internal and external conflicts within the world of Darkover. An example is that the psychic abilities of the Darkover population clashed with the technology of the Terran Empire. It is conflicts and relationships like these throughout the series that "test various attitudes about the importance of technology, and more important, they study the very nature of human intimacy," says Rosemarie Arbur in Twentieth-Century Science-Fiction Writers. Bradley's ability to cultivate this world, which developed and changed through the course of over twenty novels, firmly rooted her presence in the science fiction community.