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Loading... The Sword of Aldones (1962)by Marion Zimmer Bradley, Diana L. Paxson
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. First book of Darkover, written when MZB was very young. Was rewritten twenty years later as Sharra's Exile with a number of changes. Still an interesting read, especially if read after Sharra. 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 into a medieval society. Ruled by a psychic aristocracy it is later rediscovered by a star-spanning high-tech 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 and were written out of sequence. Part of the difficulty of knowing what to read, and in what order to read comes from that. The Sword of Aldones (1958) is one of the earliest novels MZB ever published, the first published in the Darkover series, even though chronologically it falls late in the series. The Sword of Aldones was first conceived in MZB's teens in fact, and feeling the story deserved a more mature treatment, she rewrote it and it was published as Sharra's Exile. That's a much better book, and you should read it instead (after reading at least Heritage of Hastur). As a Darkover fan, I'm happy to have The Sword of Aldones but by no means is this the place to start reading the series and it's among MZB's weakest books and not representative of the series at its best. no reviews | add a review
Belongs to SeriesDarkover: Chronological order (21 [Original]) Belongs to Publisher SeriesMoewig Science Fiction (3670) Is contained inIs expanded inAwards
Lew Alton was returning to Darkover - returning at the command of men who had once been all too glad to see him leave. For Lew, a Darkovan on his father's side, and a Terran on his mother's, had always walked between two worlds, accused by each of belonging to the other, and trusted by neither. Yet Lew alone had the power to understand both worlds and to save them from each other's unknown forces. That was the reason he had returned at last - armed with the legendary sword of the Sharra matrix, whose destiny was to cross forces with the equally mystic Sword of Aldones in one mighty battle that would decide Darkover's fate . . . No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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