The Pale Senche is dead

Ahab had his whale, Hemingway his rhino; in Greenshade we have a Great White Lion.

The Bloody Sun (1964 original)

Right off the bat, from the very first pages, there’s a noticeable jump in the writing style and improvement to the quality of the storytelling. MZB’s choice to use the second person point-of-view in the prologue is striking and drew me in immediately; then, just when it might have become too much, become too arch and awkward […]

Replaying the Pact with a friend

We pulled our friend Nat into ESO; she’s not only an MMO newbie but also pretty new to video games in general. Maybe this was throwing her into the deep end a bit, but hey, she’s a good swimmer. So potemathewolfqueen and I rolled new toons, and she’s playing a Breton templar healer. I’m playing a Bosmer (yes […]

Die, already, die die! Veteran Banished Cells pledge

What with our success against pirates et al, why not take on an arrogant Altmer Lord-turned-Lich and do the vet pledge as well? Mouser would continue in his Nightblade bloodmage Healer role, with the difficulty ramped up—it being a veteran group dungeon. Here we see Mouser taking his portrait with various spectral manifestations: So that was […]

The Sword of Aldones (1962)

Reading the Darkover books in the pre-Internet era of my teens, I couldn’t just ask Wikipedia to help me figure out confusing details; so there were aspects of the series that tripped me up now and then. I remember very clearly my confused feeling of déjà vu as I started reading The Sword of Aldones (it had taken me years […]

Avast! A Blackheart Haven pledge!

This was from a few months ago, when we spent a nice lovely Saturday afternoon touring a few of the local dungeon-y sights of Tamriel with our guildies.

Short story interlude: “The Waterfall” (1976)

I am in the middle of reading The Sword of Aldones, having read The Planet Savers followed by MZB’s short story “The Waterfall.” It does occur to me, however, that I have already broken my stated plan of reading in publication sequence, since “The Waterfall” was included as “a new Darkover short story” in the 1976 reissue of […]

Sinking into Oblivion

This one will be a very accomplished bard, has very sweet voice. This one sings the song if her people all over Cyrodiil, yes? Yes.

The Planet Savers (1958)

It’s interesting, The Planet Savers feels, first and foremost, like a story about a man torn between two worlds—with Darkover being a setting created to have the necessary a priori conditions for the struggle between the two aspects of Jay/Jason Allison to take place and achieve resolution. This is not a criticism of the book, merely a surprised […]

Darkover Redux: re-reading teenage-me’s favorite F&SF series

I can’t even remember how I first encountered Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover books. Unlike many of the other epic fantasy series that I consumed at such an ungodly rate as a teenager, it did not come from the Science Fiction Book Club. Instead of those cheaply-bound hardback omnibuses collecting three or four books into a single, […]