Free (Kindle) Hunters of the Red Moon by Marion Zimmer Bradley [Science Fiction]

[ATDrake]

Okay, I can't explain this one with the KDP-select-exclusive-or-else-but-5-free-days-out-of-90 program, unless the new DTP settings are auto-set to dump new releases into it until the unwary submitters go back and fix things.

Hunters of the Red Moon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley and her brother Paul Edwin Zimmer, is old-school science fiction by someone whose name you certainly should recognize if you have any familiarity with the field at all. This is offered courtesy of the Marion Zimmer Bradley Literary Works Trust, presumably by some choice of theirs (or maybe just Amazon being randomly wonky).

I was planning to buy this using Fictionwise's 55% off coupon this week, and I'm still going to, as I want a DRM-free MultiFormat copy and it's a new release with the extra 15% discount so will only cost me $1.14 USD and presumably the infinitesimal royalties will go to supporting her non-dead brother and her kids.

Mind you, I'm still picking up this freebie version to boost their "sales" ranking and get a backup copy.

Anyway, for anyone who just wants to try her non-US-public-domain work for free for who knows how long @ Amazon main, UK, DE, ES, FR, IT (DRMed).

Description
For the Hunters, the Hunt was a religion. The Sacred Prey, sentient beings collected from all over the galaxy, were literally given a fighting chance--they were allowed to choose weapons from an armory with every imaginable weapon and given time to train.

Then they were taken to the place of the Hunt, where death awaited them. Those who survived until the eclipse of the red moon, however, were honored by the Hunters and rewarded with all the wealth they could desire. The trick, of course, was surviving.

[Apache]

Thank you, again.
I enjoyed this book and have read it three or four times over the years. I will be getting this one and reading it again.
Apache

[Dr. Drib]

Got it.

Thanks!



Don

[pdurrant]

Well, I've just spent $0.97 on it at Fictionwise! (Extra 15% club membership discount.)

Still, boosting the rank at Amazon seems worthy too. Got it.

[koland]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Well, I've just spent $0.97 on it at Fictionwise! (Extra 15% club membership discount.)

Still, boosting the rank at Amazon seems worthy too. Got it.

Me too! on Both.

[Kiwimick]

Looks the kind of premise that I tend to enjoy so picked it up as well.
many thanks and Karma to you

[koland]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

....only cost me $1.14 USD and presumably the infinitesimal royalties will go to supporting her non-dead brother and her kids.

Didn't Paul die two years before Marion? It appears all the proceeds to to a trust, from what I can see (presumably for the heirs and to maximize the copyright possibilities).

[ATDrake]

Huh. /looks at Wikipedia.

For some reason I'd gotten the impression that he was still alive, since MZB was supposed to have been in pretty poor health when she died, so I assumed she naturally predeceased anyone else in her circle by quite some time because of illness and all. Of course, it turns out she died over a decade ago and was fairly old and I suppose the time adds up.

Oh well, I know that the trust is managed by Elisabeth Waters, who used to be MZB's secretary and now edits the Sword & Sorceress anthologies. And they seem to be doing a pretty decent job of not only putting MZB's work into e-book format at reasonable terms and prices, but also stuff from "related" authors like those contributors to the old Darkover anthologies and the fantasy magazine, so hopefully everything is being run okay and the money goes where it's supposed to.

[koland]

There was an older brother when Paul died, but not sure when he passed (but suspect he has, at this point, anyway)....

[ATDrake]

Oh hey, it turns out this actually is a deliberate promo from the MZB Literary Works Trust, according to their website.

This "holiday gift" will only be available through the 27th, which means that if you missed it and you want it, you can still get it for the next 8 hours or so until the Amazon servers switch over to "midnight" Pacific time.

And the 55% off coupon you can use on MZB's Fictionwise books will still be good through tomorrow, most likely.

Avoid getting her individual Darkover short stories there. They're nearly all collected in her Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover collection (which reprints the old DAW paperback anthology, and is a very good intro to the setting, featuring some of her best writing work) for a much lower price, and there's only one of them "missing" out of the lot, which you should be able to easily figure out once you see the table of contents in the ebook.

Same caveat with her other sf/fantasy short stories, many of which are collected inside anthology bundles.

ETA: Also, bonus KDP Selectively-freebied short story by Elisabeth Waters, manager of the MZBLWT: Truth in the Inward Parts, part of her "Treasures" series of shorts available on FW, and should be free across all the Amazons.

[koland]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

Avoid getting her individual Darkover short stories there. They're nearly all collected in her Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover collection (which reprints the old DAW paperback anthology, and is a very good intro to the setting, featuring some of her best writing work) for a much lower price, and there's only one of them "missing" out of the lot, which you should be able to easily figure out once you see the table of contents in the ebook.

I actually have that collection (#11, it says; don't know where the other 10 might be found). Which one is missing?

The same collection at Amazon is $3.19 - not as good as with the coupon, but not a bad price.

[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by koland

I actually have that collection (#11, it says; don't know where the other 10 might be found). Which one is missing?

The other 10 were multi-author authorized fanfic anthologies that MZB would read and select herself. You can find a lot of the individual stories by those other authors under the MZBLWT aegis on Fictionwise. Some of them were actually pretty good, and I recommend the ones by Mercedes Lackey, Patricia Duffy Novak, Dorothy J. Heydt, Diana L. Paxson, and Elisabeth Waters, if you're interested.

I'm pretty sure that the MZB-only collection is missing the "Word of a Hastur" retro-gap-filling story because that was printed in an anthology released after the paper version of the collection.

And I think the e-version probably also lacks the Dyan Ardais story "Ten Minutes or So" and was an AU spinoff What If that didn't really go with the rest of the "canon" stories so they didn't put in into the print collection.

[koland]

Thanks. 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). And, as you say, there's a lot of fanfic included.

[ATDrake]

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).

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?

[koland]

wow, thanks... off to listen to Fuzzy Nation ....