"Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Best Of Marion Zimmer Bradley" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bradley Marion Zimmer)

Introduction

I've told the story before; how, on a train journey from Watertown, New York,
back to my family home in Rensselaer County, I changed trains in Utica, and,
almost for the first time in my life, bought myself a box of chocolates and a
magazine of my own free choice. It was literally the first time in my life that
I had been in a newsstand with money from my summer job in my pocket; and I
happened to have memory of reading a couple of issues of Weird Tales which I'd
found in our attic before my mother, troubled by the lurid covers and the fear
I'd have nightmares, took them away from me. I had intended to buy myself a copy
of Weird Tales; but they didn't seem to have that magazine, so I looked around
and bought myself a copy of Startling Stories containing the Kuttner novel THE
DARK WORLD, which I later knew to have been written by Catherine Moore Kuttner
instead.
Looking back over a long, not uneventful life, I can honestly say that no
experience in my life has ever given me the same excited delight as riding
through the twilight, reading Kuttner's wonderful mythic novel of a man who
changed worlds. Perhaps it could compare only with the fascination of my first
LSD trip, or the time I first walked through the British Museum of which I had
read so much, or my first Turandot at Lincoln Center, or standing high atop the
shrine at Delphi and looking down at the old Sacred Way. To this day, I can
remember the shock of delight reading Tennyson's poem Tithonus where I
discovered the quote which must have been used for the title: "A soft wind blows
the mists away: I feel A breath from that dark world where I was born."
When I finished the Kuttner novel, I read a couple of the short stories - I
remember Jack Vance's "Planet of the Black Dust" - and then turned to the "fan
letter columns" in the back. Shock of thrills: there were other people who loved
this kind of story and were willing to talk about them, and even published
fanzines to write about them.
By the time my journey was finished, I knew not only that I wanted to be a
writer but that I wanted to write science fiction. Later that summer I typed a
first draft of the novel I had written the year before, which ten years later
was to see print under the name THE SWORD OF ALDQNES, and submitted it to
Startling Stories: it was kindly rejected by Sam Merwin, the editor at that
time. Later, Leo Margulies, the editor of Startling and its sister magazine
Thrilling Wonder, bought several of my short stories. At that time I also began
writing to magazines and to fanzines, and that fall I started fan activity.
After a desperately lonely childhood as a bookworm among kids interested only in
throwing various shapes and sizes of balls, or dressing up in short skirts and
jumping around yelling "Yay, yay, yay" about the ball-throwers (an activity
which is still, I consider, the only activity sillier than throwing the balls
themselves), I discovered congenial people, who would and could talk to me as if
I were a person, not a little girl.
Three years later, still an active fan, I married (it was, and in some areas
still is the only way for a young woman to get away from a bad home situation)
and during fourteen years in Texas in small and smaller towns, following the
fortunes of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad for which my first
husband worked as an Agent-telegrapher, I substituted fan activity for the
football -and-church centered life of Texas. To this day the mail is the high