Hugo Award, to Bradley's astonishment. She agrees with critics who say it is "juvenile". She also says that later, when Don Wollheim wanted another science fiction book, she wrote a juvenile novel purposely: Star of Danger. Bradley, on demand from publishers and fans, later created a backstory, amounting to an entire history of Darkover. As noted below, this history was not always self-consistent. Origins of the Chieri Bradley says that "Yeats’ Irish Fairy and Folk Tales [sic, perhaps Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry] and books by James Stephens" probably suggested to her a race of non-humans like the "Irish faery folk of Gaelic legend". After she read Tolkien, the chieri became more like Tolkien's elves, but Bradley conceived of them as ambiguously sexed. She says this idea may have derived from Theodore Sturgeon, who wrote stories about legendary people who "could appear as men to a woman, or as women to a man". Another influence was Maeterlink’s Pelleas and Melisande: she thought of Melisande as a lost fairy who could not find her way home. After she wrote Star of Danger, Bradley began a science fiction novel about colonists who encountered these faery people, the chieri, one of which she had included in Star of Danger. This novel chronicled "the attempts of this lost and alien race to interbreed with humans." She says it was not dissimilar to a novel by Vercors. She also says it was garbage and threw it all into the wastebasket before it had a good working title. Bradley then realized that the chieri were a unisex race, sometimes male and sometimes female. She decided that the issue of sexuality was too difficult to handle in the current milieu of science fiction. She says, "I had no desire to write the kind of story which would have to be published as pornography". In "1970 or so" she went to a science fiction convention (Boskone) and discussed writing with Anne McCaffrey. Bradley told McCaffrey that she was tired of science fiction and wanted to write Gothics. She did not like the avant-garde novels she had lately read. In response to a question from McCaffrey, she answered that no, she had not read Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness and she did not intend to. McCaffrey gave Bradley her own copy of that book, and Bradley read it and was "spellbound". Walter