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

I would lose the impulse to write. I still prefer to keep people at arm's length
so that I can find the best company in the world; the characters who come out of
my brain and mind.
Becoming an editor - when I had money enough, I published a fiction fanzine -
helped me at long last to write more than the occasional short story. I never
felt much at ease writing short stories: my "natural" feeling is to write
novels, the longer the better. I learned painfully during the "Monarch years" to
write novels to severe plot and deadline requirements, to cut my work to the
bone: but only when I was freed of these length requirements by Don Wollheim's
willingness to experiment with long novels like THE HERITAGE OF HASTUR (1975)
did I really begin to write naturally.
Over a forty year writing career I have written forty odd novels (some of them,
as I like to say, very odd indeed) and considerably fewer short stories, the
great majority of them being impulses - I would wake up with an idea, juggle the
plot a bit, and sit down and write it on a sustained impulse, not stopping till
I finished it. Since I usually write novels "on contract," the short stories
were seldom profitable. I write a short story only if I can't figure out a way
to make the idea into a novel, or want to write a little known episode in the
life of a character from one of my novels. "To Keep the Oath" is such a story; I
was curious as to how Camilla met Kindra. Both characters were in THE SHATTERED
CHAIN (1976).
I don't imitate Kuttner any more, or even Leigh Brackett. My current
enthusiasms, besides opera, are Gay Rights and Women's Rights - I think Women's
Liberation is the great event of the twentieth century, not Space Exploration.
One is a great change in human consciousness; the latter is only predictable
technology and I am bored by technology.
I write on a word processor, but prefer my typewriter. And I am still a fan at
heart - because I am still looking for any reading matter which will arouse in
me the old thrill of those early pulp magazines. FOR BETTER OR WORSE, A WRITER
IS WHAT I AM, and I no longer bother to explain or excuse it. I prefer science
fiction to any other reading or writing, and to people who ask why I don't read
mainstream (or write it), I say I cannot imagine that the content of the
mainstream spy novels, corruption in the streets, adultery in the suburbs can
possibly compete with a fiction whose sole raison d'etre is to think about the
future of the human race.

Centaurus Changeling

". . . the only exception to the aforesaid policy was made in the case of
Megaera (Theta Centaurus IV) which was given full Dominion status as an
indepenнdent planetary government; a departure almost without precedent in the
history of the Terran Empire. There are many explanations for this variation
from the usual practice, the most generally accepted being that which states
that Megaera had been colonized from Terra only a few years before the outbreak
of the Rigel-Procyon war, which knocked out communications in the entire
Centaurus sector of die Galaxy and forced the abandonнment of all the so-called
Darkovan League colonies, including Megaera, Darkover, Samarra and Vialles.
During these Lost Years, as they were called, a period embracing, in all, nearly
600 years ... the factors of natural selection, and the phenomenon of genetic
drift and survival mutation observed among isolated populaнtions, permitted