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I was paging idly through my collection of ebooks looking for something to read, when my eye was caught by Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Falcons of Narabedla, which I had never actually read but have sometimes heard mentioned as loosely connected to the Darkover books.
Setting aside all considerations of Bradley’s quite reprehensible personal actions, which I’ve discussed here before, I’m not al that fond of her early writing at a technical level. It contained too many of what I find to be the least interesting elements of the “pulp” style - overblown writing, limited background and characterisation, and the sense of getting thrown into situations without any context or incluing, such that, if the character is confused or taken by surprise, the reader is not just equally so, but not given much information about what is happening to the character right now, from which some notions of what’s happening can be drawn.
The Falcons of Narabedla is like that. The lead character, Mike Kenscott, is a man of the mid-twentieth century, a scientist what has been somehow strangely affected by a lab accident. He disrupts energy flows, shorts out electrical devices, things like that. He goes to spend some time in the wilderness with his brother, and his consciousness is somehow transported across time to what may be a far future.
He finds himself in the body of a man named Adric, Lord of the Crimson Tower, with only the faintest and most fragmentary access to Adric’s conscious memories, although he seems to function well enough in matters if habitual action, such as dressing in unusual clothing or getting around the Tower. He tries to tell those around him - a Dreamer named Rhys, a veiled woman named Gamine, Adric’s brother Evarin - that he’s not Adric, that he doesn’t known anything about where he is, or about Adric’s life, no one gives him any really useful information and so he’s left to figure things out on his own. Among the few things he does learn is that he has a controversial relationship with a powerful and not particularly liked woman named Kameny, and that unlike the others of his class, who each have properly bound and exploited the telepathic abilities of one of a group of people known as the Dreamers, his Dreamer is unbound and free to move.
Kenscott comes to understand what’s happened to him in this passage, which I quote rather than try to paraphrase:
“Once before, for a little while, Adric and I had touched lives on—what had Gamine called it? The Time Ellipse. That day they thought the lab was struck by lightning. For eighteen hours, while I lay crushed under a laboratory beam, and later under drugs in the hospital) he and I had shared a fragment of life somehow. But the escape had not been complete. Something had driven him, or drawn him, back to his own world.
And he had tried again, or had been sent back And this time he seemed to have succeeded. Was he in my hunting cabin in the mountains, cleaning fish for supper, curiously rummaging through my electrical equipment? Viciously I hoped he'd give himself some damned good shocks on it.”
But it seems that more than Adric’s memories remain, or perhaps Kameny’s “magic” is affecting him, for he finds himself taking actions that he doesn’t understand, that he, Mike Kenscott, would never do. At times Kenscott gains ascendancy, but the Adric personality seems to be more in control, a circumstance that becomes potentially disastrous as Kenscott/Adric finds himself caught up in a rebellion of commoners and Dreamers, hoping to end the rule of the Tower dwellers. Kenscott himself is in sympathy with the aims of their leader, Narayan - the Dreamer he is incompletely bound to - but Adric seeks to use Narayan’s power to avenge himself on Kameny, who challenged his power as leader of the Rainbow Towers.
And then, somehow, Adric returns, in Kenscott’s body, and forces Kenscott back, retaking his own body - now both Adric and Kenscott are in the same time and place, in their own bodies. Can Kenscott warn Narayan in time, and be believed?
It’s a decent pulp portal fantasy, but having read it, I have no idea why it’s sometimes associated with the Darkover books. Oh, there are telepaths and towers, but those are common tropes. The only actual textual link is that the characters sometimes swear by Zandru, but that’s hardly enough to build a link on. So, now I’ve read it, and need no longer wonder about it.
Setting aside all considerations of Bradley’s quite reprehensible personal actions, which I’ve discussed here before, I’m not al that fond of her early writing at a technical level. It contained too many of what I find to be the least interesting elements of the “pulp” style - overblown writing, limited background and characterisation, and the sense of getting thrown into situations without any context or incluing, such that, if the character is confused or taken by surprise, the reader is not just equally so, but not given much information about what is happening to the character right now, from which some notions of what’s happening can be drawn.
The Falcons of Narabedla is like that. The lead character, Mike Kenscott, is a man of the mid-twentieth century, a scientist what has been somehow strangely affected by a lab accident. He disrupts energy flows, shorts out electrical devices, things like that. He goes to spend some time in the wilderness with his brother, and his consciousness is somehow transported across time to what may be a far future.
He finds himself in the body of a man named Adric, Lord of the Crimson Tower, with only the faintest and most fragmentary access to Adric’s conscious memories, although he seems to function well enough in matters if habitual action, such as dressing in unusual clothing or getting around the Tower. He tries to tell those around him - a Dreamer named Rhys, a veiled woman named Gamine, Adric’s brother Evarin - that he’s not Adric, that he doesn’t known anything about where he is, or about Adric’s life, no one gives him any really useful information and so he’s left to figure things out on his own. Among the few things he does learn is that he has a controversial relationship with a powerful and not particularly liked woman named Kameny, and that unlike the others of his class, who each have properly bound and exploited the telepathic abilities of one of a group of people known as the Dreamers, his Dreamer is unbound and free to move.
Kenscott comes to understand what’s happened to him in this passage, which I quote rather than try to paraphrase:
“Once before, for a little while, Adric and I had touched lives on—what had Gamine called it? The Time Ellipse. That day they thought the lab was struck by lightning. For eighteen hours, while I lay crushed under a laboratory beam, and later under drugs in the hospital) he and I had shared a fragment of life somehow. But the escape had not been complete. Something had driven him, or drawn him, back to his own world.
And he had tried again, or had been sent back And this time he seemed to have succeeded. Was he in my hunting cabin in the mountains, cleaning fish for supper, curiously rummaging through my electrical equipment? Viciously I hoped he'd give himself some damned good shocks on it.”
But it seems that more than Adric’s memories remain, or perhaps Kameny’s “magic” is affecting him, for he finds himself taking actions that he doesn’t understand, that he, Mike Kenscott, would never do. At times Kenscott gains ascendancy, but the Adric personality seems to be more in control, a circumstance that becomes potentially disastrous as Kenscott/Adric finds himself caught up in a rebellion of commoners and Dreamers, hoping to end the rule of the Tower dwellers. Kenscott himself is in sympathy with the aims of their leader, Narayan - the Dreamer he is incompletely bound to - but Adric seeks to use Narayan’s power to avenge himself on Kameny, who challenged his power as leader of the Rainbow Towers.
And then, somehow, Adric returns, in Kenscott’s body, and forces Kenscott back, retaking his own body - now both Adric and Kenscott are in the same time and place, in their own bodies. Can Kenscott warn Narayan in time, and be believed?
It’s a decent pulp portal fantasy, but having read it, I have no idea why it’s sometimes associated with the Darkover books. Oh, there are telepaths and towers, but those are common tropes. The only actual textual link is that the characters sometimes swear by Zandru, but that’s hardly enough to build a link on. So, now I’ve read it, and need no longer wonder about it.