Marion Zimmer Bradley (1930–1999)

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One of those classic works of fantasy which I must have first read soon after it was published in 1983, and which is now tarnished by association with its author's personal history of child abuse.

The novel has some merits, but it has deeper flaws than may be initially apparent. It's great to take a traditionally male story - King Arthur, Lancelot, Galahad, etc etc - and tell it mainly from the point of view of the women in the story, in particular show more Morgaine who is very much the villain of the original legendarium - Arthur's half-sister, mother of their incestuously conceived son Mordred who eventually kills his own father. The book is a thousand pages long, but doesn't drag; we know what the ending is going to be, but the journey there is exciting and somewhat magical, with three different versions of Glastonbury coexisting in parallel strands of the same geography, two of them accessible only by the adept.

But. A lot of readers took to the portrayal of lovely paganism in contrast with rigid and blinkered Christianity, and sighed when at the end the Christians largely won. But the portrayal of Christianity is much darker than the reality of the time. The sexually repressive arm of recent Christianity has been transplanted by Bradley to the Dark Ages. Actual research on medieval Celtic Christianity shows that it was much more relaxed, including saints who actually performed abortions. The key baddie, the puritanical bigot bishop Patricius, is obviously meant to be St Patrick, who is supposedly buried at Glastonbury (though Downpatrick will disagree). But the real St Patrick seems to have been relatively relaxed about sex; he was much more upset about theft and murder. One of his two surviving works is a letter pleading for the freedom of enslaved kidnap victims. (You can read what you want into his autobiography's allusion to an otherwise unidentified sin committed when he was fifteen). Even in my teens, I felt that Bradley's portrayal of him was rather unfair.

On top of that, the paganism espoused by most of the key characters is actually rather repressive too. Arthur and Morgaine conceive Mordred in a drug-fuelled pagan ritual which they are given no choice about participating in. Avalon's women have no more choice about which men they are given to than Camelot's women do; the only difference is that the Lady of the Lake personally determines the fate of her subjects in Avalon, whereas patriarchal Camelot is more diffuse. (And, gulp, a mother figure deciding who the young people in her care will have sex with, some of them well below what we'd consider the age of consent today, is very creepy given what we now know about the writer.) Avalon also fetishises virginity more than the Christianity portrayed here. (See this really good analysis by Alexandra Lindstrom, from 2005, on these and other points.) I hope that those readers who developed an interest in paganism based on this book were alert to the negative nuances as well.

So, yes, interesting to return to it after many years, but its flaws have become more obvious with time. show less

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 show more 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. show less

Marion Zimmer Bradley is famous for her Avalon books, but I'm a fan of her Darkover stories, set in an original world and a blend of science fiction and fantasy. I was impressed on reread of the first Darkover short story anthology, The Keeper's Price--basically a collection of "fan fiction" by other authors based on MZB's world. Enough I ranked it just below five stars, and was tempted to give it full marks. Not that I would argue it's deathless literature, but as a Darkover fan I loved it, show more and was surprised how memorable the various stories were even decades after I first read it--there were some I remembered just from the title, and no story I didn't completely enjoy.

The second collection, The Sword of Chaos, though still enjoyable, didn't impress me as much. I'm afraid I feel the same about Free Amazons of Darkover. The first collection seemed mostly taken from a contest, and perhaps that pushed the quality up. So many in the contents page of the next two anthologies seem the usual suspects. Besides two stories from MZB, Diana L. Paxson, Susan M. Shwartz, Elizabeth Waters and Patricia Matthews all appeared in the first two volumes. I think I also found myself rather irritated with the whole concept of the Free Amazons on reread. My first Darkover book as a teen was The Shattered Chain, which heavily features them--a "sisterhood" of woman who take oath to become family to each other, renouncing their own, and among other things--no son can be kept in the guildhouses beyond five years old. I just recently read Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel about the plight of contemporary Muslim women, and I think that influenced how I read this. It no longer seems heroic to me that women would seclude themselves together to escape forced marriages, rape, incest and battery. Why aren't they fighting instead to make that every women's right? And how can they expect to change their society if they send their sons away? So I feel out of sorts with the theme. But it's also that I just can't pick out any story here as outstanding--even if all were enjoyable. I'd still recommend this to a Darkover fan, but with less enthusiasm than the first anthology. show less

I'm a fan of Marion Zimmer Bradley, but my affection for her rests not on the Avalon books, which I didn't care for, but her Darkover series. Darkover is a "lost colony" of Earth that falls back into a medieval society. Ruled by a psychically gifted aristocracy, after centuries it's rediscovered by a star-spanning high-tech human federation, giving the series a feel of both science fiction and fantasy. Most books in the series examine this culture clash and this book is no exception. This is show more a sequel to The Spell Sword, which focused on a Terran, Andrew Carr, who at the end of that book married Callista, a member of the Comyn aristocracy. The Darkover 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 and were written out of sequence. This makes it difficult without a guide to know what story to start with. The Spell Sword should probably be read before this book, but that short novel was written just as MZB was coming into her own as a writer, and The Forbidden Tower, which received a Hugo nomination for best novel, is a much stronger and complex book. Andrew, Callista, Ellemir, and especially Damon, are my favorite characters in the entire series. This also is the most credible book involving polyamory I've read in science fiction, dealing with many of the problems I'd see in such a relationship fairly realistically--more so to my mind than say, Robert Heinlein who also explored the subject. And this is one of the few books in the Darkover series, along with The Shattered Chain and Stormqueen!, where I can still really recall specific scenes and conversations in the book to mind even decades after my read. So this stands as one of the best books in the series. show less