Awesome used bookstores are awesome

Scored a bunch of Darkover books at the inestimable Twice Sold Tales in Capitol Hill, one of my favorite used bookshops from when I lived in Seattle. (In the years since I left they have relocated to, I kid you not, directly across the street from my old apartment. That would’ve been so dangerous during grad school.) […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]