The Shadow Matrix
After spending her youth in the Terran Empire, Margaret Alton returns to Darkover, the planet of her birth. There she discovers she has the Alton Gift--forced rapport and compulsion--one of the strongest and most dangerous of the inherited "Laran" gifts of the telepathic Comyn--the ruling families of Darkover. And even as she struggles to control her newfound powers, Margaret finds herself falling in love with the Regent to the royal Elhalyn Domain, a man she has been forbidden to marry, for their alliance would irrevocably alter the power balance of their planet!
Fiction, Darkover (Imaginary place), Life on other planets, Science Fiction, Darkover (imaginary place), fiction
Marion Zimmer Bradley
Marion Zimmer was born on a farm in Albany, New York, during the Great Depression.  As a child, she enjoyed reading adventure fantasy stories.  She began writing them herself in 1949 and sold her first story to Vortex in 1952.  She also married Robert Alden Bradley in 1949.  Early in her career, she used pseudonyms for stories she wrote outside the speculative fiction genre, including some gay and lesbian pulp fiction novels such as I Am a Lesbian (1962).  In 1964 she divorced her first husband and married numismatist Walter H. Breen.  In 1965 she received her B.A. degree from Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Texas.  She then moved to Berkeley, California, to pursue graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley.  In 1966, she co-founded the Society for Creative Anachronism.  In 1967 she moved to Staten Island, New York.  She separated from her second husband in 1979 but remained married and continued a business relationship, until 1990 when he was arrested on child molestation charges and they divorced.  After suffering declining health for years, she died in Berkeley in 1999.  In 2000, she was awarded the World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement.