Return to Darkover

[bibliogramma]

The Alton Gift, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Deborah J. Ross

During her lifetime, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover novels attracted a large and faithful fandom, one extensive enough that there continues to be a market for posthumous collaborations nine years after her passing. Working from notes and discussions with MZB conducted before her death, Deborah J. Ross produced a trilogy of novels set in the historical period known as the era of The Hundred Kingdoms, between the original founding of the human colony on Darkover and the rediscovery of the colony.

Prior to her death, MZB had collaborated with Adrienne Martine-Barnes to complete the story of Lew Alton and Regis Hastur, introducing a new generation of Comyn leadership in Lew’s daughter Marguerite and Regis’ nephew Mikhail, and ending the period of Terran involvement in Darkovan affairs due to the outbreak of civil war in the Terran empire. Ross has now taken over the story of modern Darkover.

In this, the first novel of a planned trilogy, Mikhail, Marguerite and their son Domenic as they deal with the consequences of the Terran withdrawal and attempt to renew Darkovan society. The major threats to Darkover as a while are a resurgence of trailman’s fever (last heard of in The Planet Savers) and serious problems with economic depression and massive relocation of refugees from outlying areas of the Domains, brought on by the lingering effects of the attempt to destroy Darkover’s natural ecology and kill of the Comyn whose psychic powers once served the planet in place of technology (detailed in The World Wreckers). Meanwhile, there’s political unrest and a challenger to the leadership of the Comyn, Marguerite and her foster daughter Alanna, both gifted with variations on the gift of foresight, are having premonitions of danger, and the populace, hungry and desperate, are nearing a state of rebellion against the Comyn who appear to be continuing to live their traditional lives of wealth and isolation while the people are driven from their lands by wildfires, bandits and soil exhaustion. And Lew and Marguerite must face the consequences of their use of the Alton gift of forced rapport in saving the remnants of the Comyn from a last ditch attempt to take over the planet just before the Terran exodus (detailed in The Traitor’s Sun).

Ross has written a serviceable novel that begins to bring to a close the story of the last major character from the Age of Rediscovery – Lew Alton – and sets the next generations firmly on their way to coping with a planet and a society almost destroyed by several generations of Terran involvement. However, my overall feeling as I read this novel was a strong sense of déjà vu. There are a great many direct references to previous incidents in both the recent and the distant history of Darkover, and just as many repetitions of themes from earlier works in the Darkover corpus. We’ve seen the heir to the Hasturs setting out on his own before. We’ve seen treacherous Comyn – a good many of them Ridenow – before. We’ve seen potential Keepers psychically neutered before. We’ve seen troubled Comyn lords seeking peace with the Christoforos before. We’ve seen a leader calling for all telepaths to come to the aid of Darkover before. And so it goes.

I’m hoping that Ross has brought all of these tropes together to build a solid platform that will take us into new situations, new arrangements of danger and opportunity, new places and approaches for Darkover and its people, a changing culture that evolves with the changing needs and circumstances of its people. Certainly there’s a hint of that in the references to Domenic’s unusual sense of the planet as a whole.

It was a pleasant read, and I’ll be reading the next books as well, and hoping for that evolution Darkover needs so badly. If I’m lucky, maybe there will be something about the most interesting loose end from Darkovan history – the secret city of women deep in the mountains in the Wall Around the World. Maybe there’s even one or two chieri still living in the heights, as well.