Marion Zimmer Bradley worked on books set on Darkover pretty much her whole life. They vary tremendously in quality, they also cover a huge range of styles and subjects. Some of them contradict each other, and some of the early ones were rewritten to agree with later ones. She opened the universe up to her friends and published anthologies of multi-author stories. After she died she left plans for future books, which are still being written. Her web page lists them in publication and internal chronological order and with their various different titles.
Darkover is a cold, dark planet that was settled by a lost colony ship of Spanish and Scots Gaelic speakers who interbred with the psionic natives to produce a red-haired psychic aristocracy called Comyn who began a breeding program for psychic talents while the planet regressed to medieval technology. (I’m simplifying.) After the Terran Empire came back into contact with Darkover, things got interestingly complicated. Most of the best Darkover books are about culture clashes between Terrans and Darkovans who each have something to learn from the other. They’re science fiction—they have space ships and a galactic empire. They’re fantasy—they have people doing out and out magic. But the magic is always talked about in scientific (or, at worst, pseudo-scientific) terms, and while it certainly impossible it is rigorously worked out and deeply integrated into the culture.
Because Bradley started thinking about the world when she was fifteen, it has some absurdities and some things that someone older might have thought better of. But because she worked on the world so long it developed something like an actual organic history. It started from adventure stories and sprouted realistic stories in the corners, sometimes with an adventure plot grafted on in the last couple of chapters. She lived through second phase feminism and started to re-examine gender relationships in Darkover, she met gay people and started to re-examine same sex relationships there. She wrote about rebels and conformists, people re-examining the world, aristocrats, peasants, people of early eras and late ones, and most of all she wrote about families and culture clashes. What they’re like is a family saga—I can’t think of anything else in SF or Fantasy that’s quite like this, covering generations in a way where you could write the family tree.
These books are not really what I would call good, but they have a compulsive quality that makes it hard for me to read just one of them. I can ignore them for years at a time, and I’m not reading the new ones. But when I do pick up one of the old ones I get sucked into the world and want to read more and more of them in that cookie-grabbing way.
I’m going to do a typical rambling re-read. I have read them all in order of internal chronology, and I have read them all in publication order, but I’m not doing either of those sensible things this time. I picked up The Shattered Chain because I was was thinking about heroine’s journeys, and I’m going on from there. I’m not going to read the ones I don’t like, and I’m going to stop when I’ve had enough.
Jo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She’s published eight novels, most recently Half a Crown and Lifelode, and two poetry collections. She reads a lot, and blogs about it here regularly. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal where the food and books are more varied.
Marion Zimmer Bradley has always been one of those authors that I really want to like. I respect her as one of the great female pioneers in the sci-fi/fantasy genre. I think her writings on the roles of women in fantasy are some of the best I’ve seen: she manages to get at the problems without ever sounding preachy or like a man-hating feminazi.
And yet every time I try to read something of hers, it falls flat. Mists of Avalon was about 700 pages too long. I couldn’t get past the first few pages of Firebrand. And Darkover Landfall produced a reaction of “Who cares?”
I’m a bit short of reading material, so I may try again. Do you have any suggestions of good ones to start with?
Yay! The Darkover books are quite possibly my primary writing influence. I love that sort of sprawling worldbuilding. I’ve also been afraid to go back and re-read them, for fear that they’ll actually suck, since I haven’t read them since I was a teenager.
I had a couple of people really enthusiastically pitch the Darkover books to me and as I was dating one of them, I did give them a try. I kind of like them, but it feels like they should be better. (I do have a bias for books with psychic powers in them, which is why I kept on.) Not sure exactly how far I got, I definitely read several of the novels (although I swear two of them were the same story with a different title) and some of the short story anthologies.
Lsana: I hate Mists of Avalon myself. I’ll have a post on The Shattered Chain probably tomorrow, that’s a good place to start. Or Hawkmistress, which is a standalone early example of girl-disguised-as-boy.
Chuk @@@@@ 3 – It’s entirely possible that you read the same story under different titles. “Sword of Aldones” was one of her earliest Darkover stories, and she later revised/rewrote it as “Sharra’s Exile”.
I love the Darkover series, but the writing varies. The world building is not as complex as LOTR or WoT, but it’s not the same kind of world. Her people are colonists stranded on a world they were not intended for and the culture that grows up from an advanced civilization forced back to primitive survival methods, with psychic powers enhanced by local flora. The best of her stories deal with interactions between the descendants of the original colonists, who had their own brutal past involving psychic weapons and their rediscovery by the Terran empire. Their main thrust is not to allow the Terrans to discover their abilities and exploit them. Add into that all the lost knowledge, hidebound traditions and class separation of a semi-feudal society. The Comyn are both privileged and trapped by their abilities. A small gene pool at the time of the initial landing forced women to become breeding stock, whether they wanted to or not. She addresses many different social issues from the perspective of the era she was writing them in – women’s rights, homosexuality, parenting, surrogates, etc. Most of the short story anthologies are written by fans of the series, and selected by MZB. They don’t have to be read in order, so I recommend starting with “Heritage of Hastur” or “The Bloody Sun”. Two of my personal favorites are “The Forbidden Tower” and “The Shattered Chain”.
I didn’t like Mists of Avalon much, either. I actually seem to remember seeing MZB say somewhere that she was surprised at Mists of Avalon’s success, since she didn’t think it was one of her better written works.
The Darkover books exist mainly as a big melty soup in my brain, so I don’t remember individual books too well. But I do remember Heritage of Hastur, and recommend it as a first time read.
I initially liked the Darkover series tremendously. As time went on I liked it less. Then the books got to the point where something seriously creepy seemed to be going on, and it had to do with females as victims of some sort. But I never parsed it out because I stopped reading. Why read what makes you feel kinda unclean?
Now that may well have just been a phase of my own, and have nothing to do with the books at all. But as I’d outgrown them anyway, I’ll never know for sure because I cannot get myself to re-read these books.
I only wish it were summer, so I had time to reread these along with you!
I reread The Mists of Avalon a couple years ago and was surprised at how much I liked it. I think I liked it better than I did at 15, but maybe that was just low expectations.
But Darkover — Darkover was a huge influence on me as a teen. They are so different than most of what you find today, so thorny and dark and really weird. But taken as a whole, so richly imagined. Some books defy quality and just live in their own space.
I think Jo’s post really sums up what I feel about the Darkover books. I first read them in my early teens, and as I’ve grown up, the inconsistent writing (not to mention the incredibly painful writing in some of the books that were completed after Bradley’s death) has become much more noticeable – but I still find something about the world and (many of) the characters really compelling.
(The Renunciates trilogy, along with Hawkmistress, are the Darkover books I most enjoyed as a kid and still re-read occasionally!)
I really enjoyed The Heritage of Hastur. I liked The Shattered Chain pretty well, but Thendara House even more. Others I never really got into. They’re downstairs on the “I liked this enough that I’m not going to get rid of it even if I haven’t reread it for years” shelf; I’ll have to pull them out again some time.
BTW, anyone notice that in Season 4 of The Sopranos (2002), Tony Soprano’s wife, Carmela, throws The Mists of Avalon across the bedroom?
I haven’t read any of MZB’s books in many years, but I remember that I stopped reading them because of, what I perceived, as freaky gender relations. Like other commenters have stated Darkover (and really all of Bradley’s books) seem like the sorts of things I should like: melding of fantasy and sf, cool psionic powers, etc; however when I would read them I was really turned off. This is how I remember the gender relations: All of Bradley’s books that I read featured really strong female protagonists who were way to willful for their milieu; then an even stronger and more willful man would show up who the woman would inevitable fall in love with, and thus be calmed down.
Am I completely misremembering?
I look forward to your posts about Darkover books!
I read most (if not all) of the ones by MZB herself, and some of the anthologies, starting with the SFBC omnibus that combined The Heritage of Hastur and Sharra’s Exile. As a then-closeted bi guy, it was great to read F/SF books with sympathetic (and not-so-sympathetic) GLBT characters (though this was far from the only reason I liked the books).
So, yeah–an old favorite I haven’t read in eons; I should re-read them, too. I’m one of the few (it seems) who still loves old favorites, even if they “don’t hold up.” Once enjoyable, always enjoyable to me.
MusicalColin: Some of them are like that, and some of them are very much not. And you have to remember when they were written.
I read some Darkover novels over 20 years ago, and quite enjoyed them. I passed some along to my grandma, and she liked them too. I didn’t continue with them because my interests are more in fiction with military themes, and I only had so much time available. But I still have a dozen or so Darkover volumes in a box here somewhere.
In the late 1980s, Ace issued a combined edition of The Planet Savers (a very early-written adventure tale) and The Sword of Aldones (a more ambitious story, conceived early, and rewritten for publication somewhat later, and as mentioned above, eventually revised into Sharra’s Exile). This included a fascinating essay by Bradley, circa 1979, on how the books unintentionally became a series. She explains how the pulpy early stories were gradually succeeded by the deeper ones, starting with The Heritage of Hastur.
Around the time of that double edition, Ace also released a revised text of The Bloody Sun. That revision was later reissued by Daw, and used copies are around from both publishers. I think that version of The Bloody Sun is a good starting place for those new to Darkover. The book has more depth than other early stories of that world, but can easily be read with no prior knowledge of the setting.
I too look forward to following along this reread of parts of tje series, thanks Jo!
[raises hand]
Would a discussion of the books entail a discussion of Zimmer Bradley’s idiosyncratic personal life?
Because a discussion without it would be kinda incomplete. To give just one example, Darkover Landfall reads very differently if you know the author was married to Walter Breen.
On the other hand, discussions involving Walter Breen have been problematic for (checks calendar) going on 50 years now. So maybe not.
Doug M.
Doug M: I generally prefer to avoid biographical criticism, even with dead authors, unless it really illuminates the books.
It’s a judgment call.
That said, there’s a lot to work with. She had a complicated life, and she put a fair amount of it into her fiction.
I haven’t reread these books since forever, though, so I won’t have much to say about it anyhow.
Doug M.
I never made it through a Darkover book. I think I tried Heritage of Hastur a couple of times. I enjoyed Mists of Avalon enough to write my honors thesis comparing it to the Morte D’Arthur, examining how it attempts to view the legend through a contemporary feminist lens with interesting although maybe not entirely successful results. I haven’t picked it up since because I fear it won’t age well. I enjoyed some of MZB’s work on Thieves World, too.
I will say that she wrote some of the sweetest rejection notes. I still have one.
It’s been a while since I read them; I wonder if they would seem as interesting now as when I collected the whole set (at least up to about 1990; I haven’t collected most of the others). Some of them are definitely lightweight, even to a teenager; others are fairly heavy-duty novels — Forbidden Tower and Heritage of Hastur being perhaps the best of them, IMO.
Lsana: Bad luck in the novels you chose. I could barely get started in Mists of Avalon, and Darkover Landfall is an origin story that doesn’t share the feudal society of the main sequence of Darkover stories.
A friend got me started with The Spell Sword and The Forbidden Tower. The first is an outsider slowly understanding Darkover, a classic way to get into a world. The Forbidden Tower is one of the best of the Darkover books.
If that doesn’t do it for you, then maybe Darkover isn’t for you.
I enjoyed the Darkover novels around the Heritage of Hastur period (making me in my 20s). I don’t think I’ve touched them since, though, and I never branched out to any other Bradley stories (perhaps it’s just as well, since from everything I heard from people, Mists of Avalon was truly horrid).
Definitely fantasy, despite the StFnal trappings in some of the books.
The Darkover books are my guilty pleasure. The writing is indifferent, but she told such ripping good tales, she created memorable and likable characters, and I loved the world. Just as I wanted to visit Barsoom I would love to go to Darkover. And I’m a redhead of Scottish descent so they speak to me. :) One of my favorites is The Forbidden Tower.
Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover is, I think, the only series I recommend people read in publication order rather than by internal chronology.
This is because if the reader can appreciate the early written books they’ll cruise through the rest with pleasure. Introduced to the later work the others could come as a deep dispoaintment.
In addition although there are some clear links very few of the books rely on sequential reading, it’s a realtively small world and you can build your picture of it from almost any point.
A postive advantage of that reading order is that you can clearly see the development of the writer: and as to that I would contest JW’s opinion about whether they are “good”. No, perhaps not as a whole but the later works have their own literary merits.
Oh, and Darkover is definitely one of the worlds I had a deep wish to visit, prefereably if endowed with some suitably awsome laran powers. :)
MZB will always be remembered as a pioneer of ChoMo Lit.
i discovered the Darkover novels in the late 1970s and fell in love with the bloody sun and it’s world. Marion and Bradley was a fine woman, and encouraged new authors. I enjoyed the magic of her Comyn aristocrats and the independence of her free Amazons.
Then in later years, she began re-writing her novels, emphasizing homosexuality. I realize it was always there… but it was intensified. I’m a little old-fashioned — if a man wears an earring, he better be a pirate. She rewrote Heritage of Hastur, making the sadistic sexual predator villain into a misunderstood victim.
That’s when I quit reading Darkover. It’s a shame, I miss the original world that I loved.
Personally I went off both Magda and Jaelle completely in their final book City of Sorcery.
@26, I must have missed that edition. Unlike many readers I had a problem with the Renunciates from the beginning. They seemed take an oath to treat men exactly the way the worst of men treat women. And I was really bothered by the notion of giving up my name, not my father’s name, MINE!
28: “They seemed take an oath to treat men exactly the way the worst of men treat women. “
I must have missed the bit in the Renunciates where they take oath to kidnap, rape, beat, mutilate, and murder men. Where did you find that part?
26: Weird to read this comment, because of course for me – as for many other queer teenagers – the Darkover books were the one place in science-fiction where we found ourselves. The homosexuality was always there. That straights might object to finding a world not wholly heterosexual doesn’t really bother me, to be clear: you have all the other worlds where everyone is straight to roam on, we had Darkover, where queer people exist, as major and minor and protagonist characters. (There are other places now, but there really weren’t, not in the mainstream SF one could buy at ordinary bookshops, when I was a queer teenage SF fan.)
My source of discomfort was rooted in the real world, not on Darkover: my discovery after MZB’s death of specific and rather horrible facts about MZB herself as a mother, and about her husband, and about what MZB knew about her husband’s proclivities. I can’t deny I loved Darkover: I can’t deny knowing what I know now.
I mean the oath requires them to disregard the feelings and desirs of their male partner and consider only their own feelings and wishes. It wasn’t homosexuality that bothered me but the odd ideas about the inherent difference between men and women, the latter being clearly the superior. Especially the risible notion that only men are possessive.
30: With regard to the children a Renunciate may decide to bear, it does quite explicitly say that she will “bear no child to any man for house or heritage, clan or inheritance, pride or prosperity; I swear that I alone will determine the rearing and fosterage of any child I bear, without regard to any man’s place, position or pride”.
But the attitude in our present culture (and much more so in 1976 when The Shattered Chain was published) that a woman bears a child to a man’s house and inheritance, that he alone will determine the rearing – and naming – of any child she bears, without regard to the woman’s place, position, and pride – is not held by “the worst” men: it’s held by too many men to describe them all sweepingly as “the worst”.
It’s still considered a matter for debate in much of the English-speaking world, that a woman when she marries should keep her own name: and still more so, that all of a woman’s children should have her surname, not their father’s surname.
The Renunciate’s Oath is explicitly a gender-flip of How Things Are On Darkover – and How Things Are On Darkover is not too dissimilar to How Things Are On Earth.
“It wasn’t homosexuality that bothered me but the odd ideas about the inherent difference between men and women, the latter being clearly the superior. “
I first read The Shattered Chain within ten years of first-publication, and besides being a lovely reminder of a world in science-fiction which wasn’t the usual Everyone Is Straight, the Renunciates were a familiar culture in 20th-century UK/North America, lesbian-feminists who believed in solidarity, sisterhood, and the superiority of women. Sex was optional (“lesbian-feminist” often self-described straight or bi women who’d committed themselves emotionally/politicaly to women without necessarily being 100% sexually attracted to women only) and the culture was then a conscious decision to create a women’s culture that would be superior to and kinder than men. In a work of fiction, arguing that these women were wrong or right is pointless: they are, and on Darkover, one can see why they are.
(As others have noted, the theory that if women ran the country there would be no war was explosively shattered by Margaret Thatcher.)
I don’t think even Darkover claimed “only men are possessive”. We have examples in The Shattered Chain trilogy of a possessive and controlling man, Peter Haldane, who loves both Magda and Jaelle but only if he can own/control them: and Magda and Jaelle, and Magda and Camilla, who love each other unpossessively. Rafaella loves Jaelle and her own foster-daughter Doria possessively. In Thendara House, many of the women get vindictive towards Magda because of a mistake she makes early in her traiing. It’s not an ideal society, any more than the convents described by Rumer Godden in In This House of Brede or Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy – it’s just a different one, built (as Godden’s convents are) on women living together and acting towards each other in sisterhood.
Camilla was way to good for Magda. I think it was said somewhere in so many words that women were less possessive but it’s been a long time I could be remembering wrong. I just was never captivatd by the Renunciates the way so many women are. I don’t quite like their attitudes towards men, though they aren’t all misandrists, and it is a very interesting culture.
32: I love the Renunciate attitude towards men: I can’t see why any woman should have a problem with it. We see in the Free Amazon novels far more examples of men who do not have a problem with the Renunciate attitude towards men than otherwise – right down to the mercenary wounded by Magda after he tried to surrender in Thendara House, who clearly has no issue at all with fighting women nor Renunciates, and no difficulty accepting Camilla as his equal. The kind of man who clearly would – who clearly does have a problem with the Renunciate attitude towards men is Peter Haldane: he can’t even cope with a woman as his equal, let alone with a woman as his superior.
My only issue with the Renunciate Houses is that no boy can live there after the age of 5: I quite see the in-story justification for the rule, that they can’t have men living in Renunciate Houses even if they are the sons of Renunciates, and that it would be unfair to a boy to exile him from his home at the age of 15 (I think that’s when traditional-Darkover regards a boy as having become a man) without having any connection with any family outside the Renunciates. But the choice, which MZB doesn’t shrink from pointing out, means either grief for the mother, giving up her son at or soon after birth to be fostered by his father’s family or another male relative, or grief for both, for a five-year-old boy going to live among strangers.
I liked a short story in one of the Darkover approved-fanfic anthologies, about a small Renunciate House in a small mountain town which had adopted a different custom, allowing boys to live there til adulthood, and with strong links between the House and businesses in the town, as far as I remember, so that the boys had somewhere to go when they left.
I seem to remember a passionate discussion of the little boy issue including a statement that boys would try to own the women.
The truth seems to be that most Renunciates are badly traumatized and likely to be triggered by living with males. It always seemed to a lost opportunity to rear men who accept women as equals.
,Somebody tells Magda that every Renunciate has a tragic backstory. Magda protests that surely some women join just because they are attracted to the life. The others just stare at her incredulously. As an anthropologist Magda should know people in a traditional society are most unlikely to step out of their accustomed norms unless things have gone horribly wrong for them and not always then.
I recall one of the Renunciate , Rafaella?, Has several sons being raised by their fathers but she seems to have a relationship with them, one comes to visit her at Thendara House. Since fosterage is a norm on Darkover a boy sent to live away from his mother won’t take it as a rejection like a child in our culture might. ‘I live with my uncle because he had no sons.’ ‘My mother is a Renunciate so I live with my father’s family.’ no big deal.
There is absolutely a discussion in one of the consiousness-raising sessions about the policy of no-boys-in-the-House-after-5, which does include a young Renunciate declaring passionately that all men try to own women, which is countered by a Renunciate who has just lost her five-year-old son with the point that her son didn’t want to own anyone, which is countered again by a Renunciate even more passionately crying out that they would still be men, and men don’t belong in a Guild House! I think Rafaella, with five sons and a foster-daughter, has something to say, and so does Camilla, with her long history of living and working with men.
If the discussion proves anything, it’s not that “Renunciates believe men, even little boys, will try to own women” but that the sons-of-Renunciates issue is a vexed one and there are many passionate disagreements within the Guild about how this should be worked out – which is why I liked that fanfic story so much: it showed an alternate way of working out how to deal with women having sons who can’t, as adults, live with them.
Because obviously, the focus of the Guild of Renunciates is, as it should be, on how the women are to deal with having a son who cannot live with them past the age of five in a conventional Guild House, or past the age of 15 even in the unconventional Guild House proposed by that fanfic story: as they acknowledge, it’s easier for the baby if he is taken as an infant to the woman who will be his foster and milk-mother: it’s harder for the mother. But wait til five, and the mother is going to miss her son as an active person in her life,a and even in cultures where removing a young boy from his parents’ home before he’s eight years old is traditional, it’s still a big deal for each child when it happens. (QV: British boarding-schools for sons of gentlemen, start at age 7.)
As is made clear in Thendara House and The Shattered Chain, the right of the Guild of Renunciates to keep their Guild Houses women-only except under very specific circumstances and at extremely specific times and with definite limitations, has been defended lethally and at swordpoint. They set their own boundaries, and quite evidently – given that they also function as refuges for women leaving abusive relationships -they need to keep those boundaries firm and well-defined – and guarded.
As we know from our own culture: just because a man has been reared by feminists, doesn’t necessarily make him not an abuser. Most Renunciates’ sons, reared to adulthood (age 15) in a Guild House, would probably be fine men. Some wouldn’t be.
Absolutely agree with your last point. It’s not just how people are raised it’s what and who they are inside. As I said most if not all Renunciates have very bad experiences behind them. I’m not surprised that many demand a safe, male free space.
Rafaella has no hesitation letting her sons go to their fathers. Her lovers are neither possessive or controlling and she trusts them to raise their sons to be men like themselves. Rafaella and Camilla have the healthiest attitude towards men. IE: they take them as individuals not a monolith.
Camilla kills a man for trying to get into Thendara Guild House.
I don’t doubt Rafaella would too.
If that makes their attitude to men “healthy”, well… not for the men at the pointy end!
As Magda realises during the consciousness-raising evenings, the reason a woman who wants to become a Renunciate has to stay for six months inside the Guild House unless ordered to leave it by a senior in the Guild or if there’s some immediate emergency, is because the Guild of Renunciates trains new Renunciates out of their previous habits of reacting and interacting with men – as well as teaching them self-defence and self-reliance skills within the House. Renunciates learn they have a right to their feelings of hate and anger towards men (Camilla admits at some point she doesn’t know what she’d have done if someone had handed her a sword and told her to fight men after her first three months in a Guild house) and then how to control those feelings – to make their feelings serve them, not rule them.
Six months isn’t long to break the habits of a lifetime: but the fully-professed Renunciates we see out in the world, reacting and interacting with men, all seem to be fully capable of dealing with men in an ordinary day-to-day way – whether they have sex with men or not. I imagine a lot of that may have to with their complete confidence that they can and will kill a man who attacks them – and thus handle deftly the entitlement of men: as well as their confidence that behind them they have a guild of armed sisters.
Towards the end of Thendara House, at the midsummer dance, Magda deftly slaps up a boundary for the benefit of a male acquaintance who was all set to argue that as he had got turned on by dancing with her, she owed him sex. Magda was physically capable of killing him, but she just shoves him off and points out she doesn’t owe him anything for what was going through his head: a perfect Renunciate solution to a common problem when interacting with straight men who think their desires are what matters. Camilla is evidently quite confident that Magda can handle herself among men now, after nearly six months Guild training, though she can and does step in if a man gets really pushy – as Peter Haldane did.
A healthy attitude towards men doesn’t include being pushed around by them. Far from it.
I kind of feel sorry for Peter Haldane, jerk or no. Given his socialization his best bet is probably a conventional Darkovan woman. Obviously Free Amazons are right out. Jaelle was never a favorite of mine but I liked Magda a lot – until City of Sorcery.
She and Jaelle carefully arranged that their daughters’ fathers would have no right to them, they were their only legal parents and they abandoned them. Well Jaelle died but she was as ready to run off to the City of Sorcery abandoning Cleindori and Shaya as Magda. Who spent most of the book worrying about her long separations from her daughters. Until suddenly she didn’t care anymore. That’s when I suddenly noticed Magda’s habit of dropping commitments in order to run after the new shiny. First the Terran Civil Service for the Renunciates, then the Renunciates for the Forbidden Tower, and finally the Forbidden Tower, Renunciates and her daughters for the wonderful city of women.
Er, Cleindori’s father is Damon Ridenow. I don’t think we ever find out in canon who Shaya’s father is, but Magda says that her having entire responsibility for her own child was something that had been agreed-upon between them. In any case, it’s clear that when Jaelle and Magda “abandon”, as you put it, their daughters to the Forbidden Tower polyfamily, they are leaving Jaelle’s daughter with her biological father, and both daughters surrounded by multiple parents – Ellemir and Andrew in particular.
True, we know that adult-Cleindori meets a terrible fate, from The Bloody Sun – but it’s far from clear that anything could have been done by either Magda or Jaelle to save their daughters if they’d been there in Armida instead of going away to have adventures in the mountains of Darkover in City of Sorcery. Indeed, one of my issues with CoS is that I think MZB wrote it partly to get Jaelle and Magda offstage before the Darkovan traditionalists attack.
If one reads The Shattered Chain, Thendara House, and City of Sorcery, one after another as if they all happened in the same short timespan, Magda does spend each book learning to be part of a new life – but it’s clear from the internal timing that Magda spent years in each part of her life, as Terran anthropologist/agent doing undercover work for the Terran Empire, as a Renunciate in the Guild creating ways for Terran and Darkovan women to work together, as a telepath in the Forbidden Tower. Far from “running after the new shiny”, she’s clearly a solid and committed worker: she’s just not someone who can devote her entire life to one thing. (Which is one of the themes of Thendara House and The Forbidden Tower: how people have to get used to doing the next thing, not get stuck in their old life.)
I don’t see how anyone can feel sorry for Peter Haldane after he started complaining that Jaelle had “let” him run out of depilation-cream for his face or hadn’t sent his clothes to the laundry. He’s an adult acting like a lazy spoiled brat who has acquired a servant: Jaelle should have dumped him right then and let him do his own shopping and laundry.
I have a habit of feeling sorry for unlikeable characters. And I’ve never understood what Jaelle saw in Peter. Magda had the excuse of growing up with him and no attractive alternatives.
Do you remember the scene where Cleindori uses her laran to bring Shaya into he overworld and into contact with their mothers? Cleindori makes it very clear that while she loves her foster mothers she wants attention from Jaelle badly. Jaelle isn’t interested. Her death may have been a blessing in disguise for Cleindori. She can idealize her memory of Jaelle instead of spending years fighting for crumbs of attention from her.
Well, that habit does explain your readings of Jaelle and Magda and Peter: Peter’s unlikeable, so you feel sorry for him: Jaelle and Magda are likeable, so you dislike them. Which clarifies things for me, because I had been wondering why you kept coming up with reasons to dislike Jaelle and Magda, right down to being glad she got killed.
(I wasn’t. I was furious with MZB.)
Thanks, it’s been an interesting discussion!
I do have a habit of disliking or at least being very critical of characters other readers love. Just contrary I guess.
But I do like and admire Camilla enormously.
@40 Was that in City of Sorcery? I may have to read it again…
You mean little Cleindori? Yes. In her narration Magda recognizes Jaelle’s disinterest in spending time with her daughter. Magda on the other hand worries about even short separations from Shaya, only to abandon both girls without, as far as I can recall, so much as a backwards glance to go the the City of Sorcery.