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 […]

Read More Short story interlude: “The Waterfall” (1976)

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 […]

Read More The Planet Savers (1958)

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, […]

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