Customer Reviews

Planet Savers \ The Sword of Aldones

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"The Planet Savers" is the very first Darkover novel written by Marion Zimmer Bradley. It is a rather slim volume, my copy only had 91 pages, but it tells a fairly complete story. While this novel doesn't seem to fit in with the other Darkover novels, it does help to explain a little bit about who the Trailmen are, which is never explained in any depth in other Darkover novels. Bradley also explains why this novel doesn't quite fit with the other Darkover novels and how this novel came to be in the forward to the book. It is fairly interesting to understand how Bradley conceptualized Darkover.

This short novel tells the story of the 48 year Trailmen Fever. This is a nasty plague like sickness that seems to crop up every 48 years in Darkover's history, and Darkover is about to enter into a plague year. Now that the Terrans are back on Darkover, they are determined to end the plague. But the only way to do that is to get the cooperation of the Trailmen who are immune (and might in some way be a carrier). The Trailmen are fiercely territorial and violent to trespassers. But as a young child the human (the Trailmen aren't considered completely human, I'd imagine more like Neanderthal Man) Dr Jason Allison was raised by the Trailmen and is being recruited to lead the expedition to ask for the help of the Trailment. But Dr Allison seems to suffer from multiple personalities. One is a doctor Jay Allison who is a talented Doctor, but doesn't remember the language of the Trailmen and is something of a wuss. The other is Jason, a rougher man who is fully at ease in physical situations and is still fluent in the language and culture of the Trailment. Somehow a Terran doctor is able to revert Jay to Jason and the adventure begins.

It is a decent enough novel, and it involves other characters familiar to the Darkover reader, in particular Regis Hastur, who is a major player in other novels. As a standalone Darkover novel, "The Planet Savers" isn't anything special and I would not recommend it to anyone who wasn't trying to read all of the Darkover novels (as I am).

-Joe Sherry

Yes, I knew Marion. After helping me sell my first novel, House of Zeor, she became my writing mentor for many years, and I can safely say she taught me maybe 80% of what I know and today teach about writing -- maybe more -- in workshops such as the one at Westercon.

Sword of Aldones was my absolute all time favorite Darkover novel, and that's still true today -- which was a disappointment to MZB.

You see SoA was her first actual forray into attempting to take the embarrassingly juvenile "Sevener" series she wrote for personal amusement (as we today write Star Trek and Buffy stories)and turn it into a professional product.

It's sale was a milestone in her life and professional career -- but she always knew and felt that it had technical and structural flaws. She felt the characters did a lot of running around, and people, issues and things popped out of nowhere, and the whole thing lacked a central motivational backbone.

But you see - that is what I love about it.

I just made up all the missing parts and never missed them.

Thus while the rewrite of this part of Darkovan history is now the actual basis of the series, and SoA is ignored -- I found the rewrite less enjoyable because it told me the answers to all the unanswerable questions posed in SoA (which I had so much fun answering for myself).

Because MZB and I are so very - VERY - different people, of course what I made up to explain the inexplicable is very different from what she eventually supplied.

However, if you are as much of a Darkover fan as I am (I found Darkover when I was a Freshman at the U. of Calif at Berkeley - which is when I also discovered Theodore Bikel -- these two having literally changed my life) -- then you need to read and compare these two books and decide for yourself which is the actual foundation of the Darkover series.

At the same time you will discover one of the foundations of my own Sime Gen Universe, now available on amazon.com. Sime Gen: The Unity Trilogy is much more like Sword of Aldones than it is like Sharra's Exile.

Live Long and Prosper,
Jacqueline Lichtenberg

I can't believe I'm the first to review this book. Where are all you loyal "freinds of darkover" hiding. Anyway I never read "Sharra's Exile" but I am well aware that this is the original story of Lew Alton and his dealings with the Sharra Matrix. Which is why I never bothered with Sharra's Exile, shoot read The heratige of hastur and this one and your all caught up. I like this one because it doesn't go to far into the characters, cause they always have the same problems no matter what family they come from, which actually makes me read more to actually find out what is going on. The ending is anti-climactic but who cares, Sharra's dead right? NOT!