One of the strangest things in my life as a writer has been the success of the Darkover Books—not simply as books, but the way in which the self-contained universe of Darkover has become not only self-sustaining, but has encouraged other writers to write their own stories, first about Darkover, and then, increasingly, in their own self-created universes. I was the very first, although since then, many writers, especially women—I need only name Mercedes Lackey and Jacqueline Lichtenberg—have encouraged others to write in their own universes. I think there are many reasons for this; some more feminist than others.
Women are not and were not encouraged to create universes of their own; especially in the days when I entered fandom. In other writings I have spoken of those days in the forties and fifties when women were not only not encouraged to write, but were not encouraged even to read very much—and then nothing but Nancy Drew, Sue Barton, and various saccharine romances, meant to convey the idea that a woman’s only duty and pleasure was to secure a man—by fair means or foul didn’t much matter; she’d be accused of the foul ones anyhow. No one born in these post-Star Trek days can imagine quite how segregated all writing and, indeed, all mental activity was. And by and large, girls cooperated in this segregation, insisting that educators were right; the only degree worth having was Mrs., and a girl who wanted to work should obviously be prepared to neglect her God-given responsibilities to home and children—and to accept all kinds of abuse for so doing.
Yet there have obviously been women in science fiction and fantasy from the beginning. The very field of science fiction was created by a woman, Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. The “Gothic novels” which preceded today’s fantasy were created by one “Mrs. Radcliffe” and her imitators. The difference was simple; a woman had to be, as I was, and as most of my better known predecessors from Charlotte Bronte on were, obsessed, prepared to ignore the brainwashing given in schools to all females. One woman at a mid-seventies’ woman’s meeting I attended said that no woman could possibly escape her brainwashing. I stood up and called her a liar to her face; I was living proof, and so was everybody else in the room, that some of us had managed to escape it—or none of us would have been there.
But, in a sense, she was right. The vast majority of girls in my school seemed brainwashed to me—and I have heard similar stories from everybody else, from Leigh Brackett and Catherine L. Moore to Joanna Russ and Diana L. Paxson. The many woman who wrote, from Ms. Bronte to me, from Leigh Brackett to C.L. Moore, were obsessed. They were prepared to ignore anything and everything, from their stern Victorian fathers to their brainwashed mothers, in order to write.
Everyone familiar with women writers knows the famous answer of William Wordsworth to Charlotte Bronte when that lady sought his support for her writing; but anyone who, like so many of today’s teenagers, thinks the past “Irrelevant” should remember that Wordsworth told Charlotte to finish the dishes first. This, unfortunately, is an answer which we have heard ad nauseam, all of us, starting with Andre Norton and ending with the little girls who write for my anthologies, one of whom is about thirteen.
I was the very first writer to encourage other writers to write in my universe. Not everybody approved; Lester Del Rey told me that he, for one, would never consent to read one single word of Darkover fiction written by anyone else. All I can say to that is that it is a free country and he is entitled to his opinion. It’s his loss. Most of the Darkover stories were about as good as any slush anywhere, which means not very good, at least at first; but after reading a lot of it, I came to the conclusion that a lot of it—being written by women who were obsessed with writing—was readable. If there were the kind of conspiracy in science fiction that the louder and more obnoxious feminists kept insisting, Don Wollheim—about whose masculinity no one ever had any question—would never have agreed to let me publish an anthology of fan writings.
But he did; and here we are. For the anniversary of the tenth of these anthologies I have decided—for the benefit of Mr. Del Rey and his ilk—to publish my own shorter Darkover stories all in one place. Here they are.
—Marion Zimmer Bradley