TODAY I AM A DARKOVER BOOK

[snarp]

COMYN LORD: I am so angry and celibate! It has something to do with my psychic powers.

HIS DAD: Cry moar. You are going to be a warrior and awesome and give me millions of awesome grandchildren because I have inadequacy issues.

COMYN LORD: I hate you, father! I fantasize about killing you with such eerie vividness that I must flee the room to rest my burning forehead against the cool stones of the corridor wall, terrified by how near I have come to patricide this day.

HIS DAD: (That is normal on Darkover.)

COMYN LADY: HI I’M HERE FOR THE ARRANGED MARRIAGE

COMYN LORD: You are so impossibly beautiful and innocent that I cannot bear even to look at you with my impure, lustful eyes.

COMYN LADY: (That is normal on Darkover.)

COMYN LORD: Women in your family tend to die in childbirth, and children in my family tend to go mad when their psychic powers develop at adolescence, and you’re a the Keeper of a Tower and psychologically conditioned to kill men who lust after you.

COMYN LADY: I am also your first cousin.

COMYN LORD: Alas, though we are madly in love already, we cannot possibly consummate our marriage.

COMYN LADY: Even though we’re telepaths, and that will eventually drive us mad?

COMYN LORD: Yup. It’s pretty crazy how often this exact situation arises on Darkover, isn’t it?

COMYN LADY: Yeah, I don’t even know.

SLIGHTLY OLDER COMYN LORD WHO LOOKS JUST LIKE THE HERO EXCEPT MEANER: I just did something! Something wicked and unnatural!

COMYN LORD AND LADY: *accidentally have sex due to wicked-and-unnatural-related stress*

COMYN LADY: I’m pregnant with your baby! It may be a monster. It may also be the promise of a better future, depends on the book.

SLIGHTLY YOUNGER COMYN LORD/LADY WHO HAS SUCH POTENTIAL: I just did something! Something selfish and ignorant!

HIS DAD AGAIN: It’s my fault because I raised him/her wrong, but I don’t realize it.

COMYN LORD: I dare not raise my voice to my father - his heart is weak, and it would kill him.

COMYN LADY: *miscarries due to selfish-and-ignorant-related stress*

COMYN LORD: DADDY I AM REPLACING YOU WITH AN AUNT FROM A GEORGETTE HEYER NOVEL

HIS DAD AGAIN: *is killed by his weak heart*

SLIGHTLY OLDER COMYN LORD: Say, have I mentioned that I am a sexual deviant in some manner? Maybe I’m a pedophile, or I keep nonhuman sex slaves. I could be into wife-swapping? Definitely bondage. Probbbably not a furry.

COMYN LADY: There was a furry one time, but I don’t think that ever actually got explained.

SLIGHTLY OLDER COMYN LORD: Oh, yeah. That was weird.

COMYN LORD: He was like, a cat, right? Was Bradley already hanging around with Mercedes Lackey then?

COMYN LADY: No, too early. Lackey must have gotten the idea from her.

SLIGHTLY OLDER COMYN LORD: It is not inconceivable that both arrived at the evil catman idea independently. Anyway, my point was that you can tell I’m evil because of the sex stuff. Let’s have a final battle now.

COMYN LORD AND LADY JOIN FORCES AND FORM A BAND THE LIKES OF WHICH HAS NEVER BEEN SEEN, AND THEY CALL THEMSELVES SOMETHING TOTALLY DUMBSHIT, LIKE “THE FORBIDDEN TOWER.”

SLIGHTLY OLDER COMYN LORD: I see the error of my sexy ways. It is notable that I have already produced many more children than the two of you ever will, so ensuring a robust population of villains and men with inadequacy issues with which to populate later books. *dies*

SLIGHTLY YOUNGER COMYN LORD/LADY: *is maybe also dead*

COMYN LORD: …so, my psychic powers tell me we will have a baby someday, so we had better get on that. Even though tragedy lays in our child’s future!

COMYN LADY: We will live happily ever after until we are slaughtered in the events of a later book.

SPACESHIPS: (There were also spaceships in this book.)

-

Possibly Also Relevant To Your Interests: Anne Bishop.

(Crossposted to SarahPin.com, Dreamwidth, and LiveJournal. You can leave comments at whichever.)

Comments

[meganbmoore]

Nope! I'm sure I read a few MZBs in my teens, but the only thing of hers that I remember reading is a later Avalon book that was an origins thing in which it was made clear that Guenevere incarnations would always be weak and whiny and Morgan incarnations would be pure and virtuous and awesome, with an ever so subtle "Of course! Which is pagan, and which is Christian, after all?" undertone.

[telophase]

I think you should And should report on them. XD Start with Hawkmistress! or Stormqueen! - some of the others may be truly terrifying.

Also, while the handling of GLBTQ and people and issues can be pretty rough, it was the first set of books that I encountered that acknowledged the existence of said people and issues and (attempted to) explore some of it in a meaningful way. Not saying they were always successful, but from a lit-crit standpoint, interesting in what it was doing at the time. ETA: Same with feminism, and acknowledging that the society was patriarchal and what that often meant for a woman who couldn't fit in it and what her options might be.

[meganbmoore]

Yeah, from what I hear, MZB can back up the feminism claim pretty well for the times, usually.

I may read and report! But there are so many others that I WANT to read!

[sara]

It was groundbreaking for a lot of folks at the time, myself included, who were not able for whatever reasons to approach feminism and gender stuff in some of the other texts available (most thirteen-year-olds will bounce real hard off nonfiction second wave feminism, just like I did, because, hey, thirteen, whereas a fantasy world where women can swear sisterhood and get into swordfights and hold jobs and wield huge psychic powers is more accessible). That said, by current standards, there is fail along many axes in MZB's writing.

[meganbmoore]

Oh, I was the same at 13, though it was early 90s (even if a lot of what I read was 70s/80s) and I somehow mostly missed MZB, though I did get Lackey and McCaffrey (though all I particularly remember is a particularly scarring part of Damia). I was also transitioning from Nancy Drew to Victoria Holt, which may explain a lot about me...

[holyschist]

Darkover is about fifty zillion times more awesome than the Avalon books! And, um, sort of cracktastic.

Also, what telophase said, more seriously.