The Heritage of Hastur (1975)

Re-read. Just as involving as I remember, though the alternating narratives breaks the story up a lot. Mostly this time I just read the Regis/Danilo story and skimmed Lew's. The perfect book to read on the train to jury duty & back. It's my Harlequin equivalent. ( )

I recently finished yet another re-read of the Darkover books. There are mixed feelings about Bradley in the sf community: most people agree that "Mists of Avalon" is a good book, but opinions are pretty divided about the rest of her work. Literary fantasy fans in particular tend to turn their noses up at Darkover, with its clumsy moralizing, soap-opera style plots, and occasionally sloppy writing ("Two to Conquer", for instance, is actually unreadable).

These criticisms are accurate, but detractors are, I think, missing a more important point. Darkover maintains a devoted fan base. The books are constantly being brought back into print, and continue to find new generations of fans. I believe the enduring appeal lies in the completeness of the vision of Darkover. It's one of the best-developed fantasy worlds in the history of fantasy worlds - I know that's a tall claim, especially from a Dune fan, but bear with me. Reading any Darkover book gives you the feeling of looking in on a real world, with a concrete sense of history, geography, climate, and culture. Language, social mores, slang, crafts, industries, dress - these vary from place to place and from time to time throughout the novels, giving you the sense of a complex society in slow but constant motion, adding to the sense of realism. As an example of world-building, Darkover is hard to top.

I think that Darkover achieved this level of complexity and detail because it is, in a sense, a collectively built world. Fan fic, hated by writers though it may be, is and always has been an intrinsic part of sf nerd culture. Bradley took the unlikely step of embracing her fan fic and declaring it canonical. She accepted stories and published them in anthologies with her seal of approval, cartographically inclined fans drew her maps, musical fans composed songs, linguist fans mapped out the evolution of the languages spoken by her characters, and fans into handcrafts contributed their expertise. In a way, Darkover was the first open-source fantasy project, and the diversity of talents and perspectives that converged on the narrative gave it a richness and depth of detail that a single author would find hard to match.

( )

Marion Zimmer Bradley is best known for The Mists of Avalon, which spawned a number of sequels, mostly (if not entirely) by other hands. I don't care for them. Then comes The Fall of Atlantis, two enjoyable if fairly forgettable books posthumously marked as backdrop for the Avalon books. Inexplicably, if I go by Goodreads, her next most popular book is The Firebrand, about the Trojan War, which I found absolutely unreadable. Yet I do consider myself a fan of MZB's but that rests almost entire on her Darkover books, of which she wrote 18 in her lifetime, although there were some further (some posthumous) collaborations. Darkover is a "lost colony" of Earth that falls into a medieval society ruled by a psychic aristocracy and is later rediscovered by a star-spanning advanced human federation after centuries, giving the series a feel of both science fiction and fantasy. The series as a whole features strong female characters, but it has enough swashbuckling adventure to draw the male of the species, and indeed this series was recommended to me by a guy (when we were in high school!)

Although some books are loosely connected, having characters in common, they were written to be read independently. They were written out of sequence too, and I don't actually recommend you read them chronologically. The first chronologically, for instance, Darkover Landfall, is more fun if you read other in the series first, then this origins novel to see oh, so that's where that came from! Also, some books early chronologically were early in Bradley's career, when she was still learning her craft, and it shows.

This particular book is a good entry into MZB's beguiling world. The science fiction magazine Locus called it her best novel, and the consensus among fans is that this was her best book in the series, and certainly Lew Alton, Regis Hastur and Danilo Syrtis are among her most compelling characters. ( )

We see Kennard as an adult, and met young Regis Hastur, a monarch-in-training who really doesn't want to.
We follow Regis' adventure as he learns how to associate with the people of his own caste - and how to get them to accept him.
Most everyone will recognize the teenage angst he is going through - but will be hard-pressed to put the book down for long periods.
We also watch the Terrans come to a very visceral understanding of what the Darkovan Compact is all about. ( )