Customer Reviews

The Planet Savers/The Sword of Aldones

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This is a review of one of the two novels in this book: "The Sword of Aldones." It is Bradley's second Darkover novel -- at least in terms of when it was published. Darkover is not really a "series," in that the story did not continue chronologically as the books came out.

It took me a couple of weeks to get through this short (164 page) novel. I just wasn't motivated to pick it up! Especially during the first half of the book, there were just too many characters, peoples and concepts introduced all at once. When you create a fictional world, you have to bring the reader into it, not just throw made-up terms around without enough context to give them meaning. That's what happened here -- lots of "stuff" and not enough plot to move all that baggage along. Even some additional exposition would have helped, as I often didn't understand what role certain prominent characters were supposed to be playing when I was clearly supposed to know.

After I read the book, I took a look at the user reviews here on Amazon. It was interesting to learn that Bradley herself may not have been pleased with this early effort; regardless of her motive, though, she later rewrote this under another title, Sharra's Exile (Darkover: Against the Terrans: The Second Age). For now, I'll continue reading the Darkover novels in the order they were written, and hope that they get better as they go along.

The planet savers is magical novel, in it al the elements of darkover novels are present, but it reaches deeper into the conflict of the non-human and human relation with the aded confusion the telepatic contact brings into it. This novel brings back darkover known caracters such as Regis Hastur in contact with the non human habitants of their world, an with terrans, who are trying to place themselves in one world or the other, and finding it imposible.