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Marion Zimmer was born in Albany, NY, on June 3, 1930, and married Robert Alden Bradley in 1949. Mrs. Bradley received her B.A. in 1964 from Hardin Simmons University in Abilene, Texas, then did graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1965-67. She was a science fiction/fantasy fan from her middle teens, and made her first sale as an adjunct to an amateur fiction contest in Fantastic/Amazing Stories in 1949. She had written as long as she could remember, but wrote only for school magazines and fanzines until 1952, when she sold her first professional short story to Vortex Science Fiction. She wrote everything from science fiction to Gothics, but is probably best known for her Darkover novels. In addition to her novels, Mrs. Bradley edited many magazines, amateur and professional, including Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine, which she started in 1988. She also edited an annual anthology called Sword and Sorceress for DAW Books. Over the years she turned more to fantasy; The House Between the Worlds, although a selection of the Science Fiction Book Club, was "fantasy undiluted". She wrote a novel of the women in the Arthurian legends -- Morgan Le Fay, the Lady of the Lake, and others -- entitled Mists of Avalon, which made the NY Times best seller list both in hardcover and trade paperback, and she also wrote The Firebrand, a novel about the women of the Trojan War. Her historical fantasy novels, The Forest House, Lady of Avalon, Mists of Avalon are prequels to Priestess of Avalon She died in Berkeley, California on September 25, 1999, four days after suffering a major heart attack. She was survived by her brother, Leslie Zimmer; her sons, David Bradley and Patrick Breen; her daughter, Moira Stern; and her grandchildren.… (more)
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We follow Regis' adventure as he learns how to associate with the people of his own caste - and how to get them to accept him.
Most everyone will recognize the teenage angst he is going through -
We also watch the Terrans come to a very visceral understanding of what the Darkovan Compact is all about.
Although some books are loosely connected, having characters in common, they were written to be read independently. They were written out of sequence too, and I don't actually recommend you read them chronologically. The first chronologically, for instance, Darkover Landfall, is more fun if you read other in the series first, then this origins novel to see oh, so that's where that came from! Also, some books early chronologically were early in Bradley's career, when she was still learning her craft, and it shows.
This particular book is a good entry into MZB's beguiling world. The science fiction magazine Locus called it her best novel, and the consensus among fans is that this was her best book in the series, and certainly Lew Alton, Regis Hastur and Danilo Syrtis are among her most compelling characters.
These criticisms are accurate, but detractors are, I think, missing a more important point. Darkover maintains a devoted fan base. The books are constantly being brought back into print, and continue to find new generations of fans. I believe the enduring appeal lies in the completeness of the vision of Darkover. It's one of the best-developed fantasy worlds in the history of fantasy worlds - I know that's a tall claim, especially from a Dune fan, but bear with me. Reading any Darkover book gives you the feeling of looking in on a real world, with a concrete sense of history, geography, climate, and culture. Language, social mores, slang, crafts, industries, dress - these vary from place to place and from time to time throughout the novels, giving you the sense of a complex society in slow but constant motion, adding to the sense of realism. As an example of world-building, Darkover is hard to top.
I think that Darkover achieved this level of complexity and detail because it is, in a sense, a collectively built world. Fan fic, hated by writers though it may be, is and always has been an intrinsic part of sf nerd culture. Bradley took the unlikely step of embracing her fan fic and declaring it canonical. She accepted stories and published them in anthologies with her seal of approval, cartographically inclined fans drew her maps, musical fans composed songs, linguist fans mapped out the evolution of the languages spoken by her characters, and fans into handcrafts contributed their expertise. In a way, Darkover was the first open-source fantasy project, and the diversity of talents and perspectives that converged on the narrative gave it a richness and depth of detail that a single author would find hard to match.
And yet... somehow, for me, this version lacks the energy of the original.
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Fic SF Bradley |