"A fever that lasted 48 years would be quite a fever": a review of MZB's The Planet Savers.
This last week I finished the 16th book, chronologically, in Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series (and the first one published, in the December 1958 issue of Amazing Stories), The Planet Savers (published in book form by Ace Books -- which still apparently holds the copyright -- in 1962; the edition I have is a DAW Books [NY] omnibus edition, first printed in April 1995, which also includes The Winds of Darkover [the 13th book, chronologically, which I reviewed here] and a short story called "The Waterfall," copyright 1976; DAW Book #982 or #983 [the cover says "982," but the publication information page says "983"...]). The Planet Savers is, properly speaking, a novella, since it clocks in at 99 pages; it is also the most conventional science fiction book in the series that I've read thus far (even more than Star of Danger).
An epidemic coincident with the once-every-48-years conjunction of Darkover's (Cottman IV, to the Terrans) four moons -- the Terrans call it the 48-year fever, the Darkovans call it Trailmen's fever -- is ravaging Darkover, threatening the lives of the representatives of the far-flung Terran empire stationed there and the descended-from-Terrans humans on Darkover alike. Terran doctor Jay Allison (no relation to radio producer and host Jay Allison of the This I Believe segments on National Public Radio) -- who spent eight years of years of his life with the Fuzzyesque Trailmen (who call themselves "People of the Sky") after his father, who worked for the Terran Empire's Mapping and Exploring section, crash-landed in the mountain range called The Hellers and was killed -- undergoes hypnosis by his superior, Dr. Forth, to have his long-submerged, Darkover-acclimated persona Jason Allison brought forth, as the Terrans need Jason's mountaineering skills and knowledge of the Trailmen to lead an expedition to the arboreal city he grew up in, to persuade the Trailmen to send fifty or sixty of their people back to the Terran base so that a serum against the fever can be synthesized from their blood. (The fever is a childhood disease to the Trailmen, much like the bubonic plague was a childhood disease among the rodents of Central Asia that hosted the fleas that brought it to Europe.) Neither persona knew of each other's existence; upon being introduced to each other by the relatively crude Terran psychiatric hypnotherapy, they find that they don't much like each other, and Jay/Jason struggle for dominance throughout much of the rest of the novella.
Regis Hastur and Rafe Scott of The Heritage of Hastur appear here (although Rafe's Terran origins and upbringing are emphasized here, in contrast to his appearance in THoH; admittedly, The Planet Savers appears to occur at least ten years after the events in THoH: Regis's grandfather, Lord Danvan Hastur, is still alive and well, and Regis has managed to father "five sons, three legitimate, born in the last two years'" [p. 239]), as do redhead Lerrys Ridenow and Kyla Rainéach, a Free Amazon and licensed mountain guide. While The Planet Savers is engaging enough on its own merits, it fits rather uneasily into the tapestry of the Darkover series as MZB subsequently wove it.
While continuity concerns are unavoidable (one of the more troubling ones: all of Darkover is said to revere the Hasturs as demigods, in contrast to what MZB would write in the chronologically earlier The Bloody Sun, among others), what was even more frustrating to me were the bursts of highly effective writing that MZB would only intermittently display through the course of the series; a stand-out is the love scene between Jason and Kyla in Chapter 7, after she's learned of his split personality (pps. 287-89):
"And I knew then how men feel when they love in the shadow of death -- worse than death because I would live, a cold ghost of myself, through cold days and colder nights. It was fierce and savage and desperate; we were both trying to crowd a lifetime we could never have into a few stolen hours. But as I looked down at Kyla's wet face in the fading dawn, my bitterness had gone.
"I might be swept away forever, a ghost, a nothing, blown away in the winds of one man's memory. But to that last fading spark of memory, I would be forever grateful, and in my limbo I would be grateful, if ghosts know gratitude, to those who had called me from my nowhere to know this: these days of struggle and the love of comrades, the clean wind of the mountains in my face again, a last adventure, the warm lips of a woman in my arms.
"I had lived more, in my scant week of life, than Jay Allison would live in all his white and sterile years. I had had my lifetime. I didn't grudge him his, anymore."
-- p. 289
This passage is a nice take on mono no aware ("the pathos of things"), the awareness of the transience of things and the quiet melancholy that accompanies their passing that informs so much of Japanese literature and the Japanese weltanschauung. (It also shares something of the tone of the movie Blade Runner.)
The Planet Savers is also undercut by a too-pat ending, but this is a problem from which MZB never entirely escaped.
The 13-paged story "The Waterfall" (originally published in Ace Books' 1976 edition of The Planet Savers) is the story of "the delicate and queenly little sister of the Lord Ludovic," Sybil-Mhari Aillard, awakening to her laran, or psychic talent, and her sexuality (the two seem to be intertwined); Sybil would make an excellent villainess for James Bond, if the parapsychological stuff was deemphasized in favor of good old fashioned sex appeal. The story is fraught with sexual symbolism (pay attention to that thar waterfall, kids...), as well as an overuse of the word "breast" or "breasts." (I couldn't help but imagine a slight tweaking of this story, fit for a Troma movie: "Chesty McBreasty and the Breastal Avengers.") "The Waterfall" never rises above the level of a serviceable superhero/fantasy comic book, and its place within the Darkover chronology is unclear to me; that it was included with the reissue of The Planet Savers suggests that it occurs more or less contemporaneously with the events of that novella.