Rereading Darkover in the 21st Century: overture

[patrick_morris_miller]

So. Like it says up there, I've decided to (re)read Darkover.

Why would I do such a horrible thing to myself?

There's plenty of reasons not to, and let me state the biggest one right off the bat: Marion Zimmer Bradley, creator of Darkover, was a horrible person. Really horrible. I respect people who will not read Lovecraft or listen to Leslie Fish, who were common or garden bigots; Bradley was worse.

I'm not going to go into details; if you want to lose your appetite, you know where your favorite search engine is.

As for the works themselves, there are unpleasant deeds done in them - some that resonate unpleasantly with MZB's deeds - and unpleasant setting details. You probably know some of them. I'll touch on them when they arise.

So why, why am I doing this?

I'll be frank, part of it is because I'm curious how much it's going to hurt. And, overlapping that, because I'm not who I was in high school and college, when I read the existing Darkover books for the first time, and I will certainly read things in them now that I didn't before.

And because Darkover at one time was influential. I don't intend to analyze that influence, and much of it occurred in places beyond my view. But Darkover had a long reach through fanzine culture, even leaving its traces in the Star Trek canon. And one of my favorite songs is a Darkover fanfic.

(And because I'm not going to pay James Davis Nicoll to do an unpleasant thing that I should really do for myself.)

So what am I not going to do?

For a start, I'm not going to claim to be reviewing the Darkover works. I'm not going to tell you whether I enjoyed any given work. (I don't even consider that to be part of what a review should do.) I'm not going to try to let you know whether you would enjoy any given work. (I don't know how to do that. That's why I'm not calling these reviews.) I'm not going to attempt any sort of literary formalism, or even write something that would have satisfied my English 1113 instructor. (I did that a quarter of a century ago. I no longer remember how.)

I'm not going to reread The Heirs of Hammerfell. I found it a lesser work at the time, and by my understanding, it's not really even a Darkover novel; rumor has it that Bradley had a hole in her publishing cadence, so she pulled an unsold Gothic novel out of her trunk, sprinkled a little laran over it, and submitted it.

I'm not going to reread Rediscovery. I found it a much lesser work at the time, and it doesn't seem like I was the only one.

I intend to read the post-Bradley novels but I won't commit myself to posting about them. May, may not. They're the works of different minds, no matter how much in the way of notes Bradley left for their authors.

I won't commit myself to reading the short story anthologies, nor to write about them if I do. (I will probably reread one short-short that I found chillingly effective, and the stories by an author I particularly like. But, once again, the works of different minds.)

And I do not plan on saying anything at all about any person still alive.

Weird, but they're your brain cells. What's the plan?

I am going to read novels first, by publication order. If Bradley rewrote a novel, I'm going to skip the earlier version; hence I'll read The Bloody Sun after Stormqueen! rather than after The Planet Savers, and Sharra's Exile instead of The Sword of Aldones. I do own the pre-rewrite editions, but have no special plans to refer to them (unless you tell me I should, and where to look). I'll read ancillary materials like "A Darkover Retrospective" or the short story "The Waterfall" when and if it seems to make sense to, but I almost certainly won't post about them.

I'll continue until I decide to stop, or my friends stage an intervention.

Lēctūrus te sālūto.