Quote:
Originally Posted by koland
I've looked thru the official and unofficial sites trying to figure it out and finally just gave up (all of them are pretty much a mess, some don't even acknowledge the anthology, few list the short stories in any coherent or identifiable order).
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The very best site I've ever seen for Darkover is actually a French fan site which is amazingly comprehensive when it comes to cataloguing all the officially printed stuff.
For those who don't speak French,
it also exists in English, Portuguese, and Japanese translations. I should warn that the site has obnoxious 90s-style banner ads splashed top and bottom in a kind of frame, so it's a good idea to turn on the ad-blocker or disable javascript before visiting.
(ETA: Found a better
mirror of the site hosted on a non-ad-serving server. French and English only. Original linkage left up for anyone who wants info in Portuguese and Japanese.)
They've a list of all the anthologies (with contents) so you can read the stories in published order (some of the authors made mini series with recurring characters), all the stories in alphabetical order and by author (with link to the corresponding antho it could be found in), and also the list of the fan-stories MZB considered to be quasi-"official" because they were written by close friends and reflected how she saw Darkover and she would sometimes incorporate characters and ideas from those stories into the canon stuff she wrote.
For example, the rewrite of the original Darkover novel
Sword of Aldones into the vastly improved
Sharra's Exile incorporated some character relationships that were established in Patricia Floss'
The Other Side of the Mirror fan-novelette.
And they've got similar info and reading guide on the actual MZB novels, as well.
Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to have been updated since the late 90s in any language, but it's still an excellent resource for all the MZB-written and sanctioned stuff pretty much up until she died and the series was taken over by ghost-writing friends "working on her notes" on books that were "in progress when she died"*.
* Which I personally think they're really kind of making up as they go along, but they wouldn't be the first sfnal literary franchise** to do the same.
** coughcoughDUNEcoughcoughChristopherTolkiencoughcou ghVCAndrews***coughcough
*** What, you mean those crazy characters and plotlines that I've heard so much about
don't exist in a parallel fantasy universe that's absolutely detached from Reality As We Know It?