In the mid 80′s, two authors stood at the top of the DAW line of Sword and Sorcery novels. One was John Norman, the author of the Gor novels. The other was Marion Zimmer Bradley whose Darkover series took the slant of swords in space.

While Norman’s work was clearly a “man’s world” complete with rape, pillage, murder, slavery and women as nothing more than chattel, Bradley was trying to take the approach of empowering women in the Sword and Sorcery genre.

Marion Eleanor Zimmer was born in Albany, NY on June 3rd of 1930. She was married twice (first to David R. Bradley, then to Walter Breen—both marriages ended in divorce) and the mother of two children. She achieved a Bachelor of Arts degree from Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, TX before moving to Berkley, CA to pursue graduate studies. Settling in Berkley, she was one of those who helped to found the Society for Creative Anachronism and was an avid fan of the science fiction and fantasy genres. Her childhood was spent reading the works of such writers as Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore and Leigh Brackett, and their wonders influenced her enjoyment of adventure fantasy and her work. She died in September of 1999 from heart failure, and two months later, her ashes were scattered on Glastonbury Tor.

She left behind quite a large literary legacy. Her first novel, The Falcons of Narabella, first appeared in the May 1957 issue of Other Worlds. Her novel Mists of Avalon launched her to the NYT bestseller list. She used the money she made from that series to start a magazine and encourage new writers in the field.

Her Darkover series, introduced in the novel The Planet Savers in 1958, was a world where humans had visited the stars and become stranded on a planet with a red sun. To survive, they intermarried with the native sentients and eventually produced the race of Darkovians. Over time, they developed a medieval society, and certain members were born with “laran” which was a sort of ability to communicate from afar. In time their human roots were forgotten. Swords and magic became a way of life—at least until technology tried to worm its way back into the world through a new generation of human settlers determined to take over the world of Darkover.

The series spawned a huge fandom for Bradley’s works, which encouraged her to write in her worlds for a time. She became a mentor to many a young writer (myself included), helping to launch the careers of such authors as Mercedes Lackey.

But back in the 80′s she assisted reading slush piles for DAW, and she found herself just a little disgusted with the plethora of John Norman-like submissions coming into the offices of DAW in which women were nothing but slaves to the whims of men (which seemed to permeate a lot of the Sword and Sorcery fiction of the time, in spite of such wonderful characters as Howard’s Red Sonja, Moore’s Jirel of Jorey, and Eowyn from Lord of the Rings). She had launched the Sword and Sorceress series in an attempt to give women characters a better place in fiction as an influence. And though she despised the “rape and revenge” perception of what women could do in fantasy, she made a bet with Don Wollheim at DAW that she could write a story in a Norman-type world better than anything she saw in the slush pile, and she would sell it to DAW under an assumed name.

Thus it was she wrote Warrior Woman. Published in 1985, it was the story of a woman who earned the name Zadieyek (meaning “dreaded woman”). Zadi has no memory of her past. She only remembers pain and a blast of white light before she was taken into slavery, raped repeatedly, and then sold to the gladiators to be a whore. Except in spite of being sick and manacled like a slave, when one of the gladiators tried to push his advances on her, she grabs a sword and kills him. The master of gladiators recognizes her skill as a warrior and decided that rather than punish her for killing the man, he would let her become one of his gladiators.

For Zadi, this becomes a turning point. Her skill with a sword is quite good. She trains regularly with a man name Hassim who falls in love with her, but never tries to take advantage of her. She meets another woman warrior who thinks she might know where Zadi hails from. She has nightmares of her abduction, always remembering a white pain and then the rapes and the trip across the desert, but never quite knowing who she is. Her prowess in the arena soon leads her to be purchased by a woman seeking to start a whole tammarin of gladiators that are women, and pit them against men. She learns the lesson that friendship is a fragile thing for a woman of the sword, but eventually launches herself into a position of great power while seeking to remember her past.

The bet Bradley had was that she could write a better “Norman-type” novel and fool Don Wollheim into buying it. He bet that she would never write anything of the sort. She bet that she could send it in under a pen name, and only if Wollheim recognized it as her work would he be allowed to publish it under her name. But Bradley ended up being so proud of this grim and gritty book where women are empowered by the sword that instead of sending it to Wollheim with an assumed name attached, she sent it to her agent and allowed it to be submitted under her own name. And of course, Wollheim bought it, and it stands to this day as a testament to Bradley’s storytelling skills.

For me, Marion was probably one of the biggest influences in my own early writing career. She bought my first short story in 1987 for Sword and Sorceress V, and to date, I am pleased to be able to boast that I was in 10 of the 20 original books in the series before her death (as well as selling her more fiction for her Marion Zimmer Bradley’s FANTASY Magazine through its 50 issue run). After years of knowing her only through correspondence, in 1998 I was able to meet the woman who opened the career path in fantasy and Sword and Sorcery for me.

I owe much to Ms. Bradley and her encouragement. She has left a legacy that cannot be matched even in today’s world of blockbuster novels. And she proved that a woman could be a hero, even on the battlefield with the men.