The Darkover series is a collection of science fiction-fantasy novels and short stories written by Marion Zimmer Bradley.
The antecedents are The King in Yellow (1895) 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.
In her essay (perhaps a transcribed interview)[note 1] called "A Darkover Retrospective", Bradley mentions 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.
[2] 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".
However, she kept writing and eventually sold "a shameless pastiche of a [Henry] Kuttner story", Falcons of Narabedla, to Ray Palmer, who had revived a magazine called Other Worlds.
Don Wollheim, who edited Ace Books, bought The Planet Savers for a reprint, through Bradley's agent, Scott Meredith.
She says 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".
In response to a question from McCaffrey, she answered that no, she had not read Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness and she did not intend to.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[6] In City of Sorcery, Cholayna Ares, a dark-skinned Terran woman (actually from Alpha Centauri), is asked more than once if her dark skin is the result of a disease.
Bradley handles this issue with sensitivity and at times, wry and ironic humor, having Cholayna's Darkovan friends (who are Renunciates) become outraged at the question.
Bradley says that the clash of cultures, Darkovan v. Terran, that she strengthened when rewriting The Sword of Aldones, was a "theme of all the early Darkover novels".
Neither society is presented as a utopia, Bradley seems confused about the value of each, and she "is unable to make up her mind whether it is desirable for Terran influence to triumph once and for all".
The rational, scientific, and utilitarian Terran society, aimed at efficiency and practicality, placed on Darkover, which lacks these qualities, creates tension.
In other books, Bradley creates more characters capable of crossing the gap between cultures, some of whom have mixed Terran-Darkovan parentage, or were removed from Darkover at a young age (Jeff Kerwin in The Bloody Sun), or Terrans who are able to join Darkovan society.
{The dedication of the ebook edition of Exile's Song say "For Adrienne Martine-Barnes, who created the character Margaret Alton, and worked on this book with me."
Further, the copyright page of the ebook editions of "The Shadow Matrix" and "Traitor's Sun" both list Adrienne Martine-Barnes as co-copyright holder, along with Ms.
[10] Commenting on this problem, Bradley wrote, "I have fiercely resisted any attempt to impose absolute consistency, straightforward chronology, or anything but the most superficial order on the chronicles of Darkover".
[11] Furthermore, in the introduction to the "Between the Ages" section of Sword of Chaos, Bradley concedes, "chronology in the Darkover novels was never my strong point anyway", after humorously quoting an old rhyme about a centipede who did not know "which leg moved after which".
Bradley is silent about the developments that followed the first generation of the colony, and does not make clear how many years intervene between the founding and the Ages of Chaos.
This period is marked by incredible creativity, the development of laran-based technology and weaponry, and the creation of the system of Towers, where those with exceptional laran abilities are housed and trained.
The Guild of Oath-Bound Renunciates, called Free Amazons and com’hi letzii in earlier books, were women who had opted out of Darkover’s traditional gender-based roles, including marriage, obligations to clan, and the expectation of male protection.
Bradley acknowledged a Patricia Matthews fan story as the origin of the Sisterhood of the Sword, and described the Priesthood of Avarra as a counterforce.
[20] Books in the world of the Renunciates: In addition to novels, Bradley edited and published twelve short story anthologies in collaboration with other authors, known as the Friends of Darkover.
The period of cooperative collaboration, which started in 1970, ended abruptly in 1992, when Bradley's interaction with a fan rendered the novel Contraband legally unpublishable.
[23] A TV series based on the Darkover books was announced in 2012,[25][26] and was to be produced by Ilene Kahn Power and Elizabeth Stanley.
[27][28] According to Deborah J. Ross, co-writer with Marion Zimmer Bradley on several Darkover novels and editor of related anthologies, the proposed series has been scrapped.