Who's a Barbarian Now? -- A Review of the 13th and 14th Darkover novels.
I recently read the 13th and 14th books (chronologically speaking; not in order of publication) in Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series: The Winds of Darkover (1970; collected in a mass market paperback, double novel edition from DAW Books, Inc. [The Winds of Darkover and The Planet Savers; this edition also includes the short story "The Waterfall"] of NY, April 1995; ISBN: 0-88677-630-9; 315 pps. [The Winds of Darkover runs from p. 13 to p. 197, which makes it 184 pps. long]; cover art by Martin Andrews; border design by Richard Hescox; DAW Book Collector's #983); and The Bloody Sun (NY: Ace Books; 1964 [undated reprint; however, judging by the cover price -- U.S. $1.25 -- and by the fact that a color ad for cigarettes was included about a third of the way through the book, I'd say that this edition was published in the early- to mid-1970s]; 191 pps.; cover artist unknown).
The premise of the Darkover series, which gradually shifted over the years as MZB churned out books, is that a spaceship of colonists from Earth crash-lands on an often bitterly cold planet that the Terrans have named Cottman IV, but which the colonists eventually christen Darkover, which has a red giant star for a sun and four moons; faced with limited supplies and technological resources -- metal is scarce and difficult to come by on Darkover -- and a plant (kireseth) whose pollen has psychotropic and psi-awakening effects, as well as a handful of humanoid. sentient species, at least one of whom (the elf-like chieri) has very highly developed psi-powers, thank you very much -- the colonists' Terran technology drops away rather quickly, as they and their offspring recreate various medieval-level societies with red-haired leroni whose wild talents -- laran -- provide the technological oomph needed to lift said societies out of the doldrums of Earth's Dark Ages. (Think of Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries with magic, and you'll not go far wrong.) When the feudal kingdoms of Darkover get a little too laran-happy and nearly annihilate each other in a series of psionic equivalents of nuclear wars, they form something called the Compact, which prohibits any weapons with a range further than a man's reach, so that a would-be killer nominally faces the same chance of being maimed or killed as his intended victim. (The Compact naturally reigns in more than just laran: you can also kiss any and all missile weapons, from slings and bullets to siege engines, goodbye.) Terra eventually makes contact with Cottman IV after a couple of thousand years, give or take, and gradually the Terrans realize that the planet is peopled by the descendants of the long-lost colonizing ship from back at the dawn of Earth's space-faring history. One of the Seven Domains -- consisting of aristocratic, laran-strong families, called the Comyn, who supply the lion's share of the matrix workers and Keepers of the various Tower Circles that serve as elite universities/teaching hospitals and a combination of our think tanks, research labs, communications satellite networks, and DEW Line -- the Aldarans, makes an agreement with the Terrans and allows them to construct a spaceport and a trade city within their domain (as depicted more fully in the 9th book, Rediscovery, which MZB co-wrote with Mercedes Lackey), provided that the Terrans confine themselves to these facilities and do not free-range across Darkover. Despite these restrictions, the other six Domains view the Aldarans as quislings and eager lap-dogs of the Terran Empire; and some factions on Darkover would like to do more than spout heated rhetoric to drive the Terrans off their world....
Since Bradley wrote the Darkover books as story ideas popped into her head and apparently didn't work from some master plan, and because she wrote the Darkover books so that each book would be complete in and of itself and that the series could be read in any order whatever (an idea whose execution didn't quite match its conception), there are many internal inconsistencies, only some of which can be waved aside using MZB's mid-series conceit that the leroni altered the memories and perceptions of various characters for various reasons. While one can come up with reasonable work-arounds to some of the inconsistencies in The Bloody Sun (notably, that the Terrans and Darkovans don't recognize each other as being the same species, much less that the Darkovans are descendants of Earthmen, even though events in The Bloody Sun take place at least five generations after the Terrans officially reëstablish contact with the Darkovans; at one point a Darkovan character claims that Darkovan society is far older than Terran) -- the simplest one being that everybody's emotions are running high -- a more troubling problem that The Winds of Darkover and The Bloody Sun raise is: Just how many friggin' sentient humanoids are native to Darkover anyway? Chronologically earlier books have given us the elfin chieri, catmen, the electrical kyrii, and the Fuzzy-esque Trailmen (who refer to themselves as People of the Sky); now we have to contend with the cralmacs (who are present in some of the earlier books but not always named: they are shortish, hairy, thumbless beings who function as servants -- along with the kyrii -- of the Comyn, and are at times described as bearing roughly the same relation to humans, intelligence-wise, as chimpanzees), the Ya-men (eight-foot-tall savage and apparently flightless bird-men; they seem to be a distant relation to the dreaded banshee birds, which are also flightless), and the Forge-folk, who are represented as a cross between dwarves and gnomes -- they tend to be smiths and miners -- but who apparently are indigenous to Darkover and not merely atavistic throwbacks descended from Terran colonists.
The Winds of Darkover features a Terran air traffic controller named Dave Barron who damn near gets cashiered for zoning out on the job thanks to blind-from-birth Loran Rakhal (variant of "rakehell"..?) Storn, Lord of Storn (usually called "Storn of Storn;" his sisters even call him "Storn," even though they all have the last name of Storn) using his laran to possess Barron's body and suppress his consciousness in an attempt to evict the bandit chieftain Brynat Scarface (who is pictured on the cover) from his castle, High Windward, in the Hellers mountain range; Barron, naturally, thinks he's just having a nervous breakdown, and says nothing to his Terran superiors. He gets shipped off to Armida, the domain of Valdir Alton, to teach Valdir, his foster son Lerrys (originally Larry Montray, a half-Terran/half-Darkovan, and one of the leads from Star of Danger [1965], the 12th book in the series) and one or two other men the art of lens grinding, so that they may make primitive telescopes to augment the ability of their watch towers to spot fire or bandits. Melitta, the Storn sister with spunk (as opposed to the Ophelia-like Allira, whom Brynat has bedded in the hope of breeding his own dynasty of leroni), is the female lead: she manages to escape Storn Keep in the hopes of rendezvousing with her brother's agent at Carthon (which is where Barron is drawn to go).
In the LibraryThing rating scheme (one to five stars, in increments of half-stars, with five being the highest), I'd give Winds 2¾ stars, if possible: the extra ¼-star is for the totally comic book-y ending (the teenaged Keeper Desideria Leynier channels/impersonates/embodies the forbidden goddess Sharra -- a flame-haired woman with her wrists chained lest she destroy the universe, standing within flames -- to retake High Windward from Brynat Scarface who, after the first couple of chapters, ceases to play a part as a character) that made me smile despite the amateurish writing that was in full flower during this sequence (to give just one instance, the fact that Brynat is described as "brave against even the magic he did not believe in to the very end" [p. 191] when for the previous run of the book he was shown to be plotting to sire his own dynasty of leroni by raping one of Storn's sisters). The book ends with Storn falling under the judgment of Valdir Alton, the current Lord Alton (no mention of Andrew Carr or Valdir's older sister Callista, who was a Keeper, from The Spell Sword and The Forbidden Tower), but also apparently pledged to marry Desideria; Valdir's foster son Lerrys (Larry Montray) resuming his friendship with the hapless Barron; and Barron apparently pledged to marry Storn's youngest (?) sister, Melitta. (Barron, Melitta and Storn all are to be trained in the use of their laran by Desideria, since Storn's autodidactic studies in his own laran enabled him to awaken the latent abilities of Barron and Melitta.) The Forge folk -- it's never made clear whether they're human -- play a significant role in the book's finale. The Winds of Darkover ends on a mostly happy (or at least on a hopeful) note, as many of MZB's Darkover books do.
The Bloody Sun features a half-Terran/half-Darkovan (through his mother, the Keeper Cleindori Aillard, The Golden Bell; her nickname doesn't appear to be sexually-based, but is probably a reference to the kireseth flower whose pollen produces the effects of the dreaded Ghost Wind), Jeffrey Kerwin, Jr. (by Darkovan custom, Jeffrey Kerwin-Aillard), whose laran is empathy -- unusual for a male -- even though his telepathic barriers are daunting even to the Tower Circle (Arilinn Tower) that takes him up: the Keeper Elorie; Kennard Alton (from Star of Danger; here he's in late middle age and "thickset" [p. 68]); Taniquel, also an empath; the adolescent Corus; the matrix mechanic Rannirl; the belligerent Auster Ridenow; and the middle-aged woman Mesyr, who no longer participates in the Circle, but stays on to supervise the non-human servants of the tower (kyrii) and help "keep house" for them. The current Hastur lord is Danvan Hastur, "Regent of the Council, lord of Thendara and Carcosa" (p. 108); at this point in Darkover's history, the Comyn (rendered here as "Com'yn," and sometimes italicized) have all but died out, and while the common people mostly still fear and revere them, more than a few hate them enough to attack or even lynch them if they think they can get away with it. Cleindori, Jeff's mother (he's called either "Jeff" or "Kerwin" with nearly equal frequency), is somewhat controversial among the Comyn (particularly Auster, who reviles her) due to the fact that she broke a centuries-long taboo and abandoned her role as Keeper, married an Earthman, and went with him back to Earth. (That Auster is the progeny of a Darkovan male and a Terran female makes his resentment of and hostility towards Jeff all the more poignantly intractable.) Danvan Hastur supports the idea of reviving the Comyn by inter-marrying with Terrans -- who have a lot more redheads and, presumably, a lot more people who can potentially use laran than the Darkovans do -- in a last-ditch attempt to stave off Darkover's incorporation into the Terran Empire. Carthon here is a viable, inhabited city; in The Winds of Darkover it was a ghost town in the process of being repopulated by Bedouin-like Dry-towners. There's no hint that Carthon is still a Dry-town enclave.
While The Bloody Sun, as with most of MZB's Darkover books, bites off a bit more than the author can chew, the main theme is stated two-thirds of the way through the book: "Who's a barbarian now?" (p. 126). This question is asked in various ways by various people and factions: the Terrans and the Darkovans ask it of each other, of course, and they use various benchmarks to make their determination (level of technological development, willingness to accept the other's technology and/or social and sexual customs, what kinds of force or violence either side is willing to use), but if the Terrans are presented as having a mostly uniform, unquestioning point of view (the Terran Empire comes off rather like the British Empire in some histories and works of fiction: benignly arrogant and paternalistic), with the occasional oddball who "goes native" (like Jeff Kerwin, Sr.), the Darkovans are anything but, with the rising middle class of merchants and artisans able to successfully challenge the Comyn by threatening to sign a treaty with the Terran legation for development aid in exchange for becoming part of the Terran Empire. Arilinn Tower agrees to a John Henry-like competition with the machines of Terra: they promise to locate and mine the metals that the coalition of merchants and artisans desire in six weeks versus Terra's pledge to do the same in six months, in return for the Pan-Darkovan Syndicate's promise to not conclude any agreements with Terra without the Comyn's approval. How this challenge is met, and the revelation of the final secret of Kerwin (and a few of the other characters), takes up the last third of the book.
The initial points of interest of The Bloody Sun are the second person prologue written in a nearly hard-boiled style (Marion Zimmer Bradley writing hard-boiled: the mind boggles...), and the fact that the first five chapters and four of the last five chapters are written as a fairly effective mystery; one wonders what the Darkover series would've been like if MZB had varied her style a bit more from novel to novel (i.e., western, mystery, hard-boiled, espionage thriller, political thriller, comedy of manners, etc.), and if she'd been more experimental in her plotting and choice of narrative (a narrative structure along the lines of Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things would've worked pretty well in a Darkover context, methinks). The other attraction of The Bloody Sun, however, is how much MZB thematically crams into just under 200 pages, and how much more relevant her book seems today than it probably did when it was first published: fanatical religious terrorists, repressed memories, a muted "war of civilizations," the struggle for a balanced male-female romantic relationship, the search for a sensible way to introduce new technologies into everyday life without causing massive upheavals or eroding the native culture, all in an unassuming sci-fi work that begins in nearly a hard-boiled style: one wonders what sort of Darkover books MZB would've written had she lived to see "9/11" and the amazing, infuriating responses of the U.S. to it. What drags The Bloody Sun down is, as always, MZB's uneven prose and the indifferent copy editing she was afforded. Thematically she was consistently one of the most interesting sci-fi and fantasy writers of her generation; it's a shame that she usually didn't write up to the level of her concepts. I give The Bloody Sun 2½ stars out of 5; it could've -- it should've -- been at least one star higher.
As a footnote, there's a possible cameo by the Terran Dave Barron from The Winds of Darkover on pps. 163-66 -- he's an elderly man running the Spaceman's Orphanage on Darkover -- but his first name is never used, so it could possibly be someone else; judging by the age of Kennard Alton, it could be Dave Barron, although nothing is mentioned of his laran, latent, developed or imaginary.
Rating on a scale of 5 stars, with 5 being the highest:
The Winds of Darkover: 2¾ stars
The Bloody Sun: 2½ stars