Reading Darkover in the 21st Century: The Planet Savers

[patrick_morris_miller]

The Planet Savers (novella)

First serial publication in Amazing Science Fiction Stories, November 1958

First book publication in 1962 as Ace Double F-153, tête-bêche with The Sword of Aldones (to be discussed later)

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

Time period: After the Comyn (Agains the Terrans: The Second Age)

To save Darkover from plague, a Terran doctor must be driven out of his mind - and into a more appropriate one.

Every 48 years, when Darkover's four moons come into conjunction, the appropriately named forty-eight-year fever comes down out of the mountains and claims the lives of ninety percent of humans, both Darkovan and Terran - and the next conjunction is coming soon. Terran Headquarters chooses the one person who can save the world, Dr. Jay Allison, to find a serum. Except Jay Allison is not quite the right person for the job.

You see, when Allison was a child he was the only survivor of a flyer crash in the Hellers, Darkover's harshest mountains. He was rescued by the near-human trailmen, who raised him as one of their own until his teens, when they decreed he must return to their own people. And the forty-eight-year fever is a minor endemic to the trailmen. If the trailmen can be convinced to come to the Terran medical establishment, hopefully they can donate the factor that protects them from the fever. And Allison knows both the trailmen's ways and the Hellers. He is the only person who could lead a team to reach the trailmen and beg their help.

A pity that Allison, now a doctor in his thirties, has completely repressed his time among the trailmen.

Allison consents to hypnotherapy that creates an alter ego: Jason Allison. Jason does not have the memory of Jay's medical training, nor his skills, but he is not only a skilled mountaineer who speaks the trailmen's language, it develops he is a natural leader - as well as just a more friendly person than Jay Allison, who is something of a cold fish.

With a team containing both Terrans and Darkovans, including a Free Amazon and a Comyn lord, Jason is flown to the town of Carthon, as close to trailmen country as planes can go, then takes to the Hellers...

Continuity

(Bradley, by her own admission, did not care overly much about continuity in the Darkover works; indeed she never intended to create a future history. One just happened.)

Unsurprisingly, this early Darkover work does not often mesh well with later texts. Most notably, the forty-eight-year fever will not appear again, even in stories set chronologically before The Planet Savers. (Which is a good thing for the Darkovans, as humans do not multiply nearly fast enough to make up for its death toll.) Also, in other stories Darkover's four moons come into conjunction at much different intervals. As Dorothy J. Heydt was later to note, the moons do whatever Bradley wanted to do for any given story.

The worldbuilding of Darkover itself is in a rough state - laran is only referred to as "matrix mechanics", and Towers seem to be much more numerous, many to be found in the countryside past Carthon. And Darkover is never called a lost Terran colony; the story could be read as saying humans have evolved on many worlds. But some of the basic foundations of Darkover are here already: we meet our first Free Amazon and our first Comyn, and Varzil's Compact is not named but the Darkovan abhorrence for ranged weapons is already here.

We will meet some of these characters again; notably, the Comyn lord on the expedition is Regis Hastur, who will be a very important character in the post-recontact stories to come.

Consent issues

(This is Darkover, and this is Bradley. There will be consent issues.)

The story of Jay/Jason Allison is laden with consent: Jay Allison agrees for the Jason persona to be created. And, when injuries on the journey cause Jay to reemerge of his own, as Jason does not have the medical skills needed, he consents for Regis to use his mind-magic to bring Jay to the foreground again.

But Jason is keenly aware that 'he' will become Jay again at the mission's end. This is wrenching to him when a Darkovan mountaineer invites him to return next season to attempt the tallest mountain they pass - or as he and Kyla, the Free Amazon, become closer. (Inevitable, for an adventure story from 1958.) So the real Happy Ending comes, not when the serum is developed, but when Jason and Jay integrate themselves by sheer force of will.

Kyla sets the pattern for Free Amazons early in the story: when Jason raises early on that she will be a woman alone among men, clearly intending to gallantly promise to keep her safe, she interrupts him to reassure him, and the other men, that she will not expect them to share a bedroll with her. And when Jason tells the party how female trailmen are driven out of their cities at adulthood, to fend for themselves until caught by a male, Kyla is emphatic that they are no victims; they live by their own skills in the forest and many choose to stay, driving away any male who nears them - a power, she points out, often not afforded human women on Darkover.

Collected miscellanea

(Because I keep giving subsections titles starting with "co-".)

While The Planet Savers is very nearly Bradley's first professionally published work, she was a writer from before school age and active in fanzines and APAs for perhaps a decade before hitting the pro market. So the text here does have some dysfelicities that her later growing skills - and, likely, experience with editors more demanding than Ray Palmer - would remedy. Two characters often speak in the same paragraph (eighth grade English cured me of that), and sometimes narrative is used when dialogue would feel more natural. But the story is never painful to read and is often better than workmanlike.

Concluding thoughts

In isolation, this is readable pulp planetary fantasy of its era; the themes characteristic of Darkover that led to fanzines and clubs (and formally adopting Free Amazon names) are here in seed form or not at all. If an author wrote such stories for a few years then vanished (many do), few would remember them today. But it is competently (if somewhat workmanly) executed, and something in it - known to her or not - led Bradley to return to the setting and make a world of it.

Comments

Late addition

[patrick_morris_miller]

Is it just me or is there some erotic energy between Jason and Regis?