Reading Darkover in the 21st Century: The World Wreckers

[patrick_morris_miller]

The World Wreckers

First published by Ace Books in 1971

Read from DAW omnibus To Save a World (DAW Collectors #1312), published 2004

Offworld interests hire a fixer to pull a United Fruit Company on Darkover, while Regis Hastur realizes the danger the Darkovan telepath class is in.

In the Terran Empire, two men of carefully constructed anonymity visit the offices of a company registered as Planetary Investments Unlimited and known in some circles as Worldwreckers, Inc. Their objective is the reclassification of a world from the highly protected Class D to the open Class B, permitting their interests to conduct mining and export operations. Worldwreckers' representative - the oddly gray eyed Andrea Closson, whose memories hint at secrets and unusual abilities - accepts the contract and ships off to the target world, a world she hasn't been to in longer than she wants to think about, as she mentally swears by Evarra and Avanda. A world called Darkover.

On Darkover, Regis Hastur attends the funeral of a fellow Comyn telepath, dead at an assassin's hands. He reflects on how the Comyn have fallen: Valdir Alton long gone, his son Kennard dead on another world; friends in exile or dead in the Sharra affair, every House a shadow of its former self. He himself has survived seven assassins; many Comyn have not - including Regis' two children. And the Comyn have become so inbred and infertile that young telepaths are hoped to be promiscuous.

And without the Comyn telepaths, both Darkover itself and its program of training Terrans in matrix mechanics are doomed.

Regis, and his half-Terran friend Dr. Jason Allison, reason that the Terran Empire must have its own telepaths, and the Department of Alien Anthropology sends out a call: telepaths and psis, preferably latents, are sought to come to Darkover. The ones who answer are:

• Rondo, a telekinetic and a bitter compulsive gambler, barred from casinos all over space on suspicion of cheating
• David Conner (hence Conner), whose latent telepathy was triggered in a harrowing space accident which left him suicidal - and who now hears a call from space: "Come to Darkover; maybe we can help".
• David Hamilton (hence David), a surgeon whose uncontrolled empathy has left him unable to practice
• Melissa Gentry, who goes by Missy, who is clearly lying about her age and origin, and who has been surviving by telepathically seducing men for as long as she can remember

Joining the project are a number of Darkovan telepaths:

• Desideria Storn, last seen as a young Keeper in The Winds of Darkover, now aged but no less powerful
• Linnea Storn-Lanart, Desideria's granddaugher and Keeper at Arilinn; at their first meeting, she and Regis form such a bond that she immediately offers to bear him children
• Keral, one of the last living chieri, drawn out of the forests in hope of an answer for his people's infertility.

Regis and Jason are quickly astonished when Missy's physical reveals that she is clearly a chieri herself. And both chieri in the project quickly form attachments, Missy to Conner and Keral to Jason.

Meanwhile, the resin tree forests of Darkover are ravaged by fires, promising catastrophic erosion when the spring rains come. And Andrea Closson is planting a devastating virus in the soil of the hills...

Continuity

We have met many of the characters here before, most notably Regis and Jason from The Planet Savers and a no longer young Desideria Storn from The Winds of Darkover; also we learn that Valdir and Kennard Alton from Star of Danger have died, Valdir long since.

And something awful has happened in the time since The Planet Savers, presumably during the skipped-over The Sword of Aldones (a Sword we are told Regis once wielded). Regis is still young, but his hair, Comyn-red in The Planet Savers, has gone white; similarly, Desideria says her own hair became white after the Sharra affair.

Another event skipped over is the weakening of the Comyn Council and the abandoning of Comyn Castle. By the book's end Regis proposes a reformed, egalitarian governance for Darkover; what becomes of it will presumably be a topic of the books written after Bradley's death.

As for the events of The Planet Savers, here Jason refers to the "bad epidemic" he worked during. The implausible dynamics of the forty eight year fever from the first book are not mentioned; presumably Bradley was told (or realized on her own, but I suspect not) that such a disease would make civilization impossible on Darkover.

And Jason told us that he and Kyla were together for three years; then she tired of city life while Jason stayed for his work.

According to David, the Darkovans have never thought of deliberately breeding for telepathy. This gets contradicted with an absolute vengeance in later stories. And the concept of telepathy being of limited use crossing barriers of language and species is explicitly contradicted.

It is bluntly stated that Keepers, including Linnea, must remain celibate, despite her earlier offering to bear Regis children - but also stated, by Linnea, that that is a myth, and it is now known that Keepers need not be virgins, simply "some care is needed". This will be revisited in considerable detail in other novels.

Desideria's invocation of Sharra from The Winds of Darkover is stated as being "long before [the Sharra] rebellions", and we're told she had no part of those, otherwise she would have died when the Sharra matrix was broken. Much more on that subject elsewhere.

Desideria greatly amplifies on Narad-zinie's tale from Star of Danger, of how the Comyn came to have chieri ancestors; her version calls to mind the tale of Beren and Lúthien - and, as a grace note, refers to "the wells of Reuel".

Consent issues

During her long, hardscrabble life in the Terran Empire, the only way to survive Missy has known is to use the telepathy she barely realizes she has to dominate men. And midway through the story - when her difficulty accepting true emotional connection with Conner and her inability to seduce David both makes her flee the project and triggers her chieri body to begin shifting from outwardly female to outwardly male - she attempts to seduce a starship officer. He reacts with violence - and a specifically Darkovan homophobic slur - when he discovers her new anatomy, and in a telekinetic rage she strikes back.

Now, this I am unsure about. At the end, when Regis calls together all of Darkover's telepaths who can come, their mental congress develops into an orgy, in which at least some characters wake up in the arms of those they had previously not even thought of romantically or sexually. Now, nobody responds with even a hint of displeasure; if anything they are amused by what odd pairings mass telepathy can bring. But was it truly consensual?

Collected miscellanea

More than once, characters who are doctors say the correlation of red hair to telepathic abilities may involve adrenal function. Now, mutations of a certain gene can cause both adrenal insufficiency and red hair, but it is not the most common genetic basis for that hair color, and it usually presents with other medical problems not common among the Comyn. (Nor does the medical literature show increased psionic abilities among affected people.)

This story comes the closest of this reread so far to same sex romance; as the emotions between David and Keral trigger the latter's body to shift its gender, they consummate their affection - in a very nearly explicit fashion - while the Change is still ongoing (and while David is still using 'he' to refer to Keral).

Keral muses on how the plight of Darkover's chieri is in some ways opposite to Missy's. His people's numbers are dwindling both because their sex drives are low, and because their great telepathic sensitivity makes it difficult for them to come together with suitable partners. But to survive, Missy - child of the chieri who long ago built ships and sought hope for their people in the stars - has been forced to ensnare partners promiscuously and with no regard to either their desires nor her own.

After Missy's flight and breakdown, the only answer David can find to her adrenal and thyroid failure is to use hormones that reverse her Change and bring her body back to female; when Keral asks if that could be done for him, David states that even after three thousand years of study, hormone therapy is still uncertain and even dangerous. Maybe Bradley had Issues on the subject. Or maybe she just didn't read newspapers.

Concluding thoughts

Bradley is truly stretching her muscles now, writing a story much more concerned with interpersonal dynamics and stepping outside social conventions than the straight up adventures of earlier novels.

And now she's squarely addressing sexuality, not only in the sense of a scene that is borderline erotica, but beginning to set up Darkovan sexual attitudes sharply in contrast to the Terran Empire's - and to the ambient culture of her audience.

No work from Bradley's living pen is set later in the history of Darkover, though allegedly she left behind notes that became the first few novels published after her death. From here out she turned to Darkover's history, beginning with the novel that rose Joanna Russ' ire enough to write We Who Are About To....

Comments

[patrick_morris_miller]

You're reading in pretty much the exact spirit that I'm writing. I won't exactly call Darkover formative for me, and I was a few years older when I started reading them, but something about them has stuck with me even after the gut wrenching things we've learned about MZB since then.

(I suppose it's like Pern, which I did start reading around 12, and which I think was somewhat formative for me (not difficult when your first girlfriend is also a Pern fan), and it was much later when I realized how icky parts of it were. But as far as I know the worst McCaffrey ever did was say some rather unenlightened things.)

I'm glad you're reading these.