Marion Zimmer Bradley

Excerpt: "-SUDDEN PANIC- It was a week before the Lhari ship went into warp-drive, and all that time young Bart Steele had stayed in his cabin. He was so bored with his own company that the Mentorian medic was a welcome sight when he came to prepare him for cold-sleep. The Mentorian paused, needle in hand. "Do you wish to be wakened for the time we shall spend in each of the three star systems, sir? You can, of course, be given enough drug to keep...

Xanadu. Not the Xanadu of Coleridge's poem, but-to the half-forgotten space drifter who discovered the place thirty years ago-a reasonable facsimile. It was a cloistered nun of a city, hidden behind a wide skirt of the most impassable mountains on Mars. And the city was more impassable than the mountains. No human being had ever entered it-yet. They'd tried. Two expeditions, twelve years apart, had vanished without trace, without explanation other...

This is a story that they tell on the solitary farms on the borders of the Catskill mountains, where I grew up. It is a mistake to think that country is settled and modern, just because the big highways stretch from city to city, and the factories hold out clean jobs that pay better than the scratch-the-soil farming on shale rock. For between every farm is a stretch of woodland, and every farm has its own woods, and by night there are deer and rabbits...

The city-state of Merina has no means to stop an invading army, so Dowager Queen Adele, Queen Lydana, and Princess Shelyra disappear from the palace. Hiding in places no one would suspect, they lead a counter-attack against the Emperor and his forces.

Since time immemorial, the Kingdoms of Sun and of Night have been at war. Pamina, daughter of the Starqueen, supreme symbol of the Night, and of Sarastro, King of the Royal House of the Sun, must now choose which of her parents' ways she will follow. Together with her love, Prince Tamino, she must face the Ordeals at the Court of Wisdom, of Earth and Air, of Fire and Water. Only if she and Tamino pass all these trials can they have a life together....

This is not a typical Marion Zimmer Bradley novel. This book is the result of a bet between Marion and Don Wollheim, her editor for the Darkover novels at DAW Books. In addition, it's her response to the Gor novels - where men were men and women were slaves - that were also being published by DAW Books. Yes, this book does start out with a heroine who has been captured and is being sold as a slave, who has amnesia and remembers nothing of her life...

Tommy Zane hates lions, a major obstacle in a family of lion tamers. But Tommy's dreams--and talent--fly higher, up in the rigging with the trapeze. When rising star Mario Santelli offers him flying lessons, it looks like the start of wonderful new life, and to Tommy's surprise, his relationship with Mario deepens even as his skill soars in the rigging. But life in the 1940s forces them to keep their love a secret, and the stress pushes both Tommy...

Nobody alive knew how the feud between Storn and Hammefell had begun, but that didn't stop the fighting. When Storn's men burned Hammerfell's castle, his infant twin sons were separated, and each grew up thinking himself the rightful Duke of Hammerfell. Conn, raised in the mountains by his father's paxman, continued to fight the Storns. Alastair grew up with his mother in Thendara and planned to marry his cousin Floria. But when Conn came to Thendara...