The eighth Darkover anthology returns to stories about the Free Amazons, also called Renunciates. Here are twenty-two brand new tales about the Renunciates, including Marion Zimmer Bradley's account of how Camilla and Rafaella changed from enemies to best friends. Stories in this volume were written by Marion Zimmer Bradley, Deborah J. Ross, Mercedes Lackey, Diana L. Paxson, Elisabeth Waters, Emily Alward, Priscilla W. Armstrong, Lynne Armstrong-Jones, Chel Avery, Margaret L. Carter, Patricia B. Cirone, Mary Fenoglio, Kelly B. Jaggers, Judith Kobylecky, Jean Lamb, Vera Nazarian, Patricia Duffy Novak, Diann S. Partridge, Andrew Rey, Janet R. Rhodes, Annette Rodriguez, and Joan Marie Verba.

The eighth Darkover anthology returns to stories about the Free Amazons, also called Renunciates. Here are twenty-two brand new tales about the Renunciates, including Marion Zimmer Bradley's account of how Camilla and Rafaella changed from enemies to best friends. Stories in this volume were written by Marion Zimmer Bradley, Deborah J. Ross, Mercedes Lackey, Diana L. Paxson, Elisabeth Waters, Emily Alward, Priscilla W. Armstrong, Lynne Armstrong-Jones, Chel Avery, Margaret L. Carter, Patricia B. Cirone, Mary Fenoglio, Kelly B. Jaggers, Judith Kobylecky, Jean Lamb, Vera Nazarian, Patricia Duffy Novak, Diann S. Partridge, Andrew Rey, Janet R. Rhodes, Annette Rodriguez, and Joan Marie Verba.

While only women can command the power of the matrix and the secret sciences which keep Darkover from Terran hands, in most respects they are still chattels. But the Free Amazons are considered equal to men, and it is they who provide the key to the Terran-Darkover dilemma. About the Author 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.

It was a place on Darkover where the Order of the Renunciates dwelled - women as Free Amazons, who had renounced all subservience to men. And who sought for total equality in all spheres of society. To Thendara House came the Terran Magda in exchange for the Free Amazon Jaella, who had become the wife of an Earthman and had entered the Terran enclave. The cross-currents of these two cultures - one male-dominated, one egalitarian, brings into focus all the deepest questions of love and marriage, of male and female, of justice and injustice. Thendaria House is a novel of future speculation destined to be a classic masterwork o the role of women in any world.

Darkover, a planet of wonder, world of mystery, has been a favourite of science fiction readers for many years. For it is a truly alien sphere - a world of strange intelligences of brooding skies beneath a ruddy sun, and of powers unknown to Earth. In this new novel, Mario Zimmer Bradley tells of the original coming of the Earthmen, of the days when Darkover knew not humanity. This is the full bodied novel of what happened when a colonial starship crashlanded on that uncharted planet to encounter for the first time in human existence the impact of the Ghost Wind, of the psychic currents that were native only to that world, and of the price that every Earthling must pay before Darkover can claim for itself.

Fantasy.

Leonie Hastur has a high degree of laran, the telepathic power of the Comyn caste, and wants to be Keeper of Arilinn Tower, which will give her as much power as her twin brother Lorill, Heir to Hastur. But she has a premonition that something strange and disturbing will come from the sky and change their world forever. She is correct. Ysaye Barnett loves life on shipboard and would happily stay right there, with her beloved computers, forever. Her best friend Elizabeth Mackintosh, a musician and anthropologist, and her fiance, linguist David Lorne, want to marry and have children, which means they need a planet they can settle on and make their lives' work. They are very excited about the new planet, especially when they realize that it's a lost Terran colony. As five young lives and their very different cultures meet, all of them will be changed by the encounter.