Darkover series
The Darkover series is a collection of science fiction-fantasy novels and short stories written by Marion Zimmer Bradley. The series is set on the planet of Darkover, where a group of humans have been stranded and have developed their own unique culture and society. The books focus on the conflicts between the human settlers and the native population of Darkover, as well as the struggles of the various factions on the planet. The series is known for its complex world-building and exploration of themes such as gender, sexuality, and mental illness.
Occasionally, Bradley collaborated with other authors, and she also edited and published Darkover stories by other authors in a series of anthologies. After Bradley's death, the series was continued, mostly by Deborah J. Ross with the permission of the Marion Zimmer Bradley Literary Works Trust.
Commenting on the significance of the Darkover series, the science fiction critic and author Baird Searles said that the books were "destined to be The Foundation of the 1970s".
Origins
The Origin of Darkover
In the introduction to "The Ballad of Hastur and Cassilda" by Bradley in the anthology Red Sun of Darkover, Bradley wrote that the literary antecedents of this ballad are "obscure" and arose "before Darkover was Darkover". The antecedents are The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers and perhaps J. R. R. Tolkien's poem "The Lay of Beren and Lúthien", found in the first book of The Lord of the Rings. Bradley adapted many names from The King in Yellow into her books and stories, often using them differently, e. g. the name of a city might become the name of a person. Chambers borrowed some terms in The King in Yellow from the writings of Ambrose Bierce.In her essay called "A Darkover Retrospective", Bradley mentioned reading the works of H. Rider Haggard, Talbot Mundy, Robert W. Chambers, and Sax Rohmer, but that she did not begin writing fantasy until she became acquainted with the science-fiction/fantasy of C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner, apparently when she was in her middle teens and realized that she would never be an opera singer. She wrote, among other things, "about a ruling caste of telepaths which I named Seveners". By the time she was in college this had turned into an "hugely sprawling novel" called "The King and the Sword".
In that book, the Comyn were much the same as in later novels, with specific telepathic gifts. The seven families were the same, except the Altons were called the Leyniers and the Aillards were called the "Marceau of Valeron", a name that Bradley changed after hearing of the book Skylark of Valeron by E. E. Smith, whom she admired.
Bradley was unable to sell "The King and the Sword", even after she cut it down to "500 manuscript pages" and "located the whole thing on an imaginary planet with a red sun" in a "Galactic Empire", but she kept writing and eventually sold "a shameless pastiche of a Kuttner story", Falcons of Narabedla, to Ray Palmer, who had revived a magazine called Other Worlds. Palmer then accepted The Sword of Aldones for publication, but it was the version that had previously been called The King and the Sword. It is not the version published by Ace Books in "1961 or thereabouts".
The first Darkover novel to be published was The Planet Savers in 1958, originally, Bradley thinks, in Amazing Stories. Bradley wrote it when she was exploring the idea of multiple personalities, after reading The Three Faces of Eve and some other stories that dealt with the concept. She said: "So that a deeply repressed Terran Medic, Jay Allison, discovered himself in the personality of his repressed alternate who calls himself Jason". She placed the story on the planet she had created for The King and the Sword a.k.a. The Sword of Aldones.
Bradley then published Seven from the Stars and The Door Through Space, also published as Birds of Prey. The latter is expressly said by Bradley to draw on the material that might be called "Darkovan": "The Door Through Space was a kind of replay of the old The King and the Sword". About the former, she does not say, but here is the number seven again.
Don Wollheim, who edited Ace Books, bought The Planet Savers for a reprint, through Bradley's agent, Scott Meredith. Wollheim wanted another novel to print with it. Since Ray Palmer had never printed The Sword of Aldones, or paid Bradley for it, Bradley demanded that he either do that or return the manuscript to her. He returned it. Bradley rewrote it and sent it to Wollheim, who accepted it and the two novels became an Ace Double.
The Sword of Aldones was nominated for a Hugo Award, to Bradley's astonishment. She agreed with critics who said it is "juvenile". She also said that later, when Don Wollheim wanted another science fiction book, she wrote a juvenile novel purposely: Star of Danger.
Bradley, on demand from publishers and fans, later created a backstory, amounting to an entire history of Darkover. As noted [|below], this history was not always self-consistent.
Origins of the Chieri
Bradley said that "Yeats' Irish Fairy and Folk Tales and books by James Stephens" probably suggested to her a race of non-humans like the "Irish faery folk of Gaelic legend". After she read Tolkien, the chieri became more like Tolkien's elves, but Bradley conceived of them as ambiguously sexed. She said this idea may have derived from Theodore Sturgeon, who wrote stories about legendary people who "could appear as men to a woman, or as women to a man". Another influence was Maeterlink's Pelleas and Melisande: she thought of Melisande as a lost fairy who could not find her way home.After she wrote Star of Danger, Bradley began a science fiction novel about colonists who encountered these faery people, the chieri, one of which she had included in Star of Danger. This novel chronicled "the attempts of this lost and alien race to interbreed with humans". She said it was not dissimilar to a novel by Vercors. She also said it was a garbage and threw it all into the wastebasket before it had a good working title.
Bradley then realized that the chieri were a unisex race, sometimes male and sometimes female. She decided that the issue of sexuality was too difficult to handle in the current milieu of science fiction. She said, "I had no desire to write the kind of story which would have to be published as pornography". In "1970 or so" she went to a science fiction convention and discussed writing with Anne McCaffrey.
Bradley told McCaffrey that she was tired of science fiction and wanted to write Gothics. She did not like the avant-garde novels she had lately read. In response to a question from McCaffrey, she answered "no", she had not read Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness and she did not intend to. McCaffrey gave Bradley her own copy of that book, and Bradley read it and was "spellbound". Walter Breen, after reading it himself, told Bradley: "Now you can write that story about the chieri that you thought you couldn't write".
Bradley then had the idea to write The World Wreckers. Edmond Hamilton had been called "The ol' world wrecker" because he destroyed planets, galaxies and even universes in his books. Norman Spinrad had written The Doomsday Machine, but Bradley thought there must be more subtle ways to wreck a world, such as interfering with a fragile ecology. She also saw this book as the end of the Darkover series; a way to end it, like "tossing Sherlock Holmes off the cliff at the Reichenbach Falls".
Bradley, however, realized that she needed one fairly explicit sex scene to make the human-chieri interaction work. Don Wollheim reluctantly told her to go ahead, although he demanded that she use no profanity, and she demanded in return that he would not change it without consulting her. Bradley claimed that the scene, which "shocked some people and pleased others", was the first time the issue of homosexuality had been dealt with directly in science fiction, and said, "I managed to become something like science fiction's token homosexual!"
After the success of The World Wreckers, Don Wollheim was more willing to publish material that would have been considered controversial before. In particular, Bradley mentioned How Are the Mighty Fallen by Thomas Burnett Swann, but every time Bradley said that the Darkover series was ended, friends, fans and casual readers objected, "Oh, don't do that!"
Themes
Several themes are explored by Bradley at length within the books of the series. Psychic powers, treated as a science, are a theme that places the books firmly within the category of science fiction, even in the books that do not have "Terrans", spaceships, or the "Galactic Empire". They can also be called fantasy, because psychic powers appear to be "out and out magic". Other themes are feminism, sexism, the roles of women in society, the roles of men in society, racism, social division, xenophobia and the clash of cultures, sexual taboos, fate and the horrors of war.Feminism
According to Nasrullah Mambrol, "though Bradley did not call herself a feminist, she was both criticized and applauded by those who have".Bradley received much criticism for her book Darkover Landfall because of the way the women of the incipient colony were treated. When the colonists realized that their spaceship would never fly again, the scientists said that for any colony to survive with a founding population of only a few hundred and no real hope of immigration, the greatest amount of genetic diversity must be maintained. That meant that women must have as many children as possible, by as many men as possible, and every child that survives is needed. The experts believed that miscarriages and infant deaths would be greater on a planet unlike Earth, although of course, this idea is unproven. Bradley was particularly criticized for the scene in which Camilla Del Rey is forbidden to have an abortion, although she wants one, because the child is needed for the colony's survival.
In Bradley's comment for the book: "Darkover Landfall stirred up a furor because some outraged feminists objected to the stand I took in the book, that the survival of the human race on Darkover could, and should, be allowed to supersede the personal convenience of any single woman in the group. I have debated this subject ad nauseam in the fanzines, and I absolutely refuse to debate it again, but to those who refuse to accept the tenet that "Biology is Destiny", I have begun to ask them to show me a vegetarian lion or tiger before they debate the issue further".
The notion of women as "brood mares" pervades the novels. Women have few rights, even at the time that the colony is found by the Terran Empire some thousands of years later, because they are still perceived as the bearers of children. The Comyn women are supposed to have children at least until they produce a male heir; the exception to this is in the Aillard Domain, where the head of the Domain runs in the female line. Most males who are not Comyn have similar ideas about the need for a male heir.
In the fictional Darkover world, the Renunciates may be the author's reaction to this sexism. The Renunciates call themselves by that name because they renounce all loyalty to their clan or family and swear never to have a child because a man wants one. Bradley's first novel in the Renunciates series, The Shattered Chain, describes the Renunciates and their principles, and begins with the rescue of a woman who is held against her will by a chieftain of the Dry Towns. Thus Bradley answered the criticisms that arose after the publication of Darkover Landfall. Critics of the earlier work called The Shattered Chain a feminist novel; Joanna Russ placed it on a list of feminist utopias.