| Article: 411
From: dani@netcom.com (Dani Zweig)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews
Subject: REPOST: Belated Reviews PS#17: Marion Zimmer Bradley
Organization: Netcom Online Communications Services (408-241-9760 login: guest)
Date: 26 Oct 93 02:54:34 GMT
Belated Reviews PS#17: Marion Zimmer Bradley
I suppose it's fair to ask why I'm reviewing Bradley's writing. It fits
the target time-frame, if sloppily -- she's been writing for over thirty
years, though her best work is relatively recent -- but the review scores
poorly on the criterion of usefulness: Even readers who are relatively
new to sf tend to be familiar with her writing. The truth is that I'm
doing it for my own satisfaction; Bradley's writing has given me
considerable pleasure and considerable aggravation in the past, and I
welcome an excuse to try to put it into a perspective of sorts. But, for
the record, since this is a review series, let's pretend that I'm doing it
for the few readers who have not read Marion Zimmer Bradley's work.
It is probably worth making my usual practice explicit: This is a guide,
not a comprehensive study. I will be leaving out many of Bradley's books --
and it won't be because I inexplicably forgot -- and giving others less
attention than they may deserve. If readers feel that the result is
unjust or unbalanced, I welcome their followups.
"The Mists of Avalon" (****-) is Bradley's most ambitious novel, and
probably her best. It's that exceedingly rare thing, a retelling of the
Arthurian legend which is original enough and skillful enough to be
interesting. The tale is told from the perspective of the women in the
story -- in particular that of Morgan le Fay. (In this telling, Morgan is
the protagonist. Arthur remains offstage, mostly.) It's a thoroughly
contemporary interpretation, with the events of Britain's fifth century
recast as a struggle between the old order -- matriarchal and Pagan
(Neopagan, in substance) -- and the encroaching, patriarchal, Christian
one. Arthur is the king who vowed to honor the old order, and betrayed it.
It works. It works because the Arthurian legend is so rich to start with.
It works because, for all that Bradley turns Mallory's world upside down,
she treats it with skill, control, and respect. Arthurian purists shouldn't
go near this book; neither should historical purists. It's a fantasy, a
morality play with a twentieth-century agenda, a book that squeezes some
heroes of the Legend into a mould that often leaves them unrecognizable.
And, if that doesn't bother you too much (and there's no particular reason
it should), it's a first-rate work of fiction.
(Bradley attempted to duplicate this success in "The Firebrand" (*), a
reinterpretation of the Illiad from the viewpoint of Cassandra, and failed
badly. If I had to give a single explanation for the failure, it would be
that she does *not* treat that source Legend with respect.)
"Survey Ship" (***+) is a relatively minor work, but one of my favorites.
It is best classified as soft science fiction. (It's not fantasy-in-disguise:
The science-fictional elements are essential to the story, though not much
attention has gone into them.)
How do you make a spaceman?
You start the same way that you start to make a chess master,
a ballet dancer, a trapeze performer, or any other difficult and
complex task demanding highly trained and complex skills, physical
or mental; you start when the future professionals are too young
to know whether that is what they want out of life, or not. Six
is not too young.
The time is the not-too-distant future (probably twenty-first century),
and the UN is sending out one STL star-probe each year -- crewed by about
half a dozen trained-from-early-childhood teenagers, chosen from a class
of fifty. "Survey Ship" covers a few critical days in the lives of one
such crew -- the selection of the lucky few, and their initial efforts to
form a team that will live and work together for years or decades.
"Endless Voyage" (***) looks at a somewhat different kind of starship
crew. The time is the more distant future, and the civilized galaxy is
linked by matter-transmitters. To be made *part* of the civilized galaxy,
however, a planet must first be visited by a STL Exploration ship. (Simple
math will make it clear that it'll be a long, long time before the network
spans much of the galaxy.) The crew of an Explorer is a family, serving
planet-bound society, but cut off from it by time-dilation and the effects
of space. One of those effects is sterility, and since adaption to STL
travel requires surgical procedures that only work on infants, new members
must come from the planets. The unfortunate effect is that the only
picture of Explorers which most of the planet-bound have is of people
(physically distinctive) who show up every few decades and make off
(adopt, buy, whatever) with babies. It's the stuff of which prejudice is
born, and Explorers are finding it harder and harder to continue -- and
too few of the planet-bound appreciate how important the expanding
frontier is to their own well-being. (This book was reprinted as "Endless
Universe", with a chunk added that was obviously edited out of "Endless
Voyage." I prefered the edited version.)
Marion Zimmer Bradley is best known for her Darkover series. In a time
over two millenia in the future, Earth is the center of a growing Terran
Empire which is essentially a caricature of contemporary American society,
with a few high-tech props -- ftl travel and communication, blasters,
improved medicine -- thrown in when the plot requires and not otherwise.
On the recently contacted planet Darkover, this culture clashes with what
is effectively a sword-and-sorcery culture -- a low-tech society of high
sophistication, ruled by telepaths whose psi-based technology which has
seen better days.
(The Darkover novels have an extensive fan following. One might guess
from this that they provide numerous niches for wish-fulfillment
identification, and such a guess would be correct. As a world of
telepaths, aristocrats, swords and psionic sorcery, women who are chattel
and women have created their own society, and half a dozen or so nonhuman
intelligent species at various levels of sophistication -- the most
attractive of which is humanoid and hermaphroditic -- Darkover turned out
to be tailor-made for fandom.)
Darkover has evolved through four 'generations' of writing. In the early
sixties, Bradley published three novels which could be viewed as alternative
rough drafts for Darkover. "Falcons of Narabedla" (*+) was a clone of
Kuttner's "The Dark World", with a few elements added, and little of it
has carried over. "The Door Through Space" (*+) was a novel of the
Drytowns -- notable in the Darkover mythos as the culture in which women
are chattel, and go chained -- written before Bradley decided to set the
Drytowns on Darkover. "The Sword of Aldones" (**+) presented the first
version of Darkover proper -- one which owed a debt of names and atmosphere
to earlier writers such as Chambers and Moore.
The early Darkover is a science-fictionalization of the traditional sword-
and-sorcery milieu. 'Sword', not because Darkover is incapable of deadlier
weapons, but because they were outlawed by planet-wide Compact. 'Sorcery'
in the form of powers bred into the ruling families. The families guard
the remains of the old psi abilities and technologies, and some of their
members provide services such as a telepathic communications network, small-
scale telekinetic mining, and occasional weather control. The Terrans don't
more than half-believe in these powers, but their cultural impact of the
Terran presence upsets the old status quo, and makes it easier for old
genies to slip their bottles: In "The Sword of Aldones", a telepathic
aristocracy in disarray must combat what is functionally a once-banished
demon working through a once-lost artifact.
The later sixties saw the publication of several sequels -- "The Planet
Savers" (**) (in which the later-prominent Free Amazons were introduced),
"Star of Danger" (**), "The Bloody Sun" (**) (the 1964 version), and "The
Winds of Darkover" (**) (the last novel in which the notion that a man's
desire constitute's a woman's responsibility is presented with a straight
face). This chronology ended in "The World Wreckers" (**+), with the final
destruction of the old Darkovan regime, and the possible establishment of a
new one. "The World Wreckers" is probably more significant as the first
Darkover novel whose target audience was not the traditional one of teenaged
boys.
The seventies and early eighties were spent essentially (and sometimes
literally) rewriting Darkover. Swords and sorcery took a back seat to
women's issues, and fantasy-cliche customs which were throwaways in earlier
books came in for more serious examination. (Not surprisingly, the
transition was accompanied by some lamentation on the part of the outgoing
target audience. The newer books represented much better writing than the
earlier ones, but a book about women who have renounced the authority of
men is obviously going to appeal to different needs and readers than a
book about rival powers beyond this reality, manifesting themselves
through dueling telepaths.) Among the key books of this period were:
"The Heritage of Hastur" (***). This initiated the revision of previously
established Darkover continuity, and is a good entry point for new readers.
"Sharra's Exile" (***) is the revision of "The Sword of Aldones". It and
"The Heritage of Hastur" constitute the core of the revised 'continuity'.
"The Shattered Chain" (***) is the book that brought the Free Amazons into
the prominent position they were to occupy in the mythos. The Free Amazons
are women who have formally forsworn both the rights and the obligation of
Darkovan women's second-class status.
"Stormqueen!" (***) and "Hawkmistress" (***) fill in parts of Darkover's
backhistory, focusing on a period when the telepathic powers were more
widely used and misused.
"Thendara House" (***) and "City of Sorcery" (***) are novels of the Free
Amazons, and 'modern' Darkover. They represent some of Bradley's stronger
writing, but they are also novels that could be transplanted to a non-
Darkovan milieu with little or no loss.
(Why don't I give these books ratings of ***+ or better if they represent
the better works? I probably would, if they stood in isolation, but I
find it harder to recommend a book that has a couple of dozen companions.)
I would suggest ignoring Darkover books written after "City of Sorcery"
(1984). The Darkover of the last decade has been a playground for
uninspired rehashes and for fan fiction -- much of it bad. The most
recent Darkover novel, "Rediscovery" (*+), actually represents the handing
over of this playground to new management.
If you are new to the Darkover novels, you might give them a try, starting
with books I listed above. If reading some of those inspires you to seek
out the other Darkover books, you'll find them easy to locate in used book
stores. A perennial question of people who *do* wish to read on is in what
order to read them. The most common answer -- and the best, to my mind --
is that people who wish to read systematically should read them in order
of publication. Attempts to read the books in chronological order will be
confounded by the multiple versions of some stories, by the evolution of
the milieu, and by the evolution of the author's political stance.
There have been three Marion Zimmer Bradleys. First came the early
Bradley, the writer of bad but promising adventure fiction, drawing upon a
number of earlier writers (and her own reworkings thereof) for inspiration.
I'd generally describe the early writing as being for completists only.
Dishonorable mentions go to "The Brass Dragon" (with its amusing-at-the-time,
funnier-in-retrospect Galactic Slide Rule), "The Parting of Arwen" (don't
ask me where you can find a reprint, because I don't know) -- a short piece
of bad Tolkien, and "The Colors of Space", juvenile sf originally published
with blackmail-grade bad cover art.
Second, and peaking in the early eighties, came the mature author, with
her own distinctive voice, generally choosing to write of and for women.
Much of this writing tends -- for those to whom this matters -- not to
work well as *sf/f*: Contemporary social debates are acted out with
little regard for whether the milieu is supposed to be placed millenia in
the past or millenia in the future. Both the skill and the content have
appealed to a large fandom, however, so if you are unfamiliar with Marion
Zimmer Bradley's writing, give some of these books a try. They may appeal
to you, as well.
The Bradley of the past decade has been an editor and a mentor, more than
an author. Her writing from this period is also of interest primarily to
fans and completists.
%A Bradley, Marion Zimmer
%T The Mists of Avalon
%T Survey Ship
%T Endless Voyage
%S The Darkover series
=============================================================================
The postscripts to Belated Reviews cover authors of earlier decades who
didn't fit into the original format -- whether because the author seemed
an inappropriate subject, or because I was unfamiliar with too much of the
author's work, or whatever -- or sometimes just isolated works of such
authors. The emphasis will continue to be on guiding newer readers
towards books or authors worth trying out, rather than on discussing them
comprehensively or in depth. I'll retain the rating scheme of ****
(recommended), *** (an old favorite that hasn't aged well), ** (a solid
lesser work), and * (nothing special).
-----
Dani Zweig
dani@netcom.com
And there is more to it than this, for dancing is practised to
reveal whether lovers are in good health and sound of limb, and
after which they are permitted to kiss their mistresses in order that
they may touch and savour one another, thus to ascertain if they
are shapely or emit an unpleasant odour as of bad meat. Therefore,
from this standpoint, quite apart from the many other advantages to
be derived from dancing, it becomes an essential in a well-ordered
society. -- Thoinot Arbeau (1588)
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