The Heritage of Hastur and Stormqueen! by Marion Zimmer Bradley

[rachelmanija]

This is all coffeeandink's fault. Who would have thought that my hunger for pulp sf with psychic powers and adventures and exotic landscapes and culture shock, which has gone so long denied because most of what's written in the genre is so clunky that I can't read it, would be satisfied by, of all people, Marion Zimmer Badley? True, her prose sometimes clunks, but not so loudly that I can't read it. Although I do wish that she had stopped herself from the over-use of "somehow," which I keep wanting to redline: "Somehow he knew the storm was unnatural," "Somehow, she was able to tap into a surge of power," "He somehow found the strength to go on--" in every case, the sentence would be better without the somehow. And yet somehow, I continue to read.

I liked both of these a lot. The nice thing about re-reading books I last read when I was fifteen is that I don't recall what happened in any of them, but I have very very vague recollections of which I thought sucked, so I can avoid them and just read the ones I recall liking. Stormqueen! is an exception: I didn't actually ever read the whole thing. I had a bad feeling a few chapters in, flipped to the end, and was so disturbed that I never read the rest. So with that one, I went in knowing what happened, but not how or why.

The Heritage of Hastur concerns the sweet true love between two teenage boys, depressed crown prince (sort of) Regis Hastur, who can't use his telepathic powers, and Danilo Syrtis, abused cadet and catalyst telepath. You see how neatly that works? Their story is very reminiscent of oldish coming-out novels, full of fraught moments and silences and memories of the first time a boy knew he was different. Only it's all so much more fun when there's telepathy involved. The villain here, six-fingered Dyan Ardais, is rather more complex and interesting than evil older sadistic gay child-molesting predators usually are.

There is second story going on, involving Regis' childhood pal Lew Alton, now grown-up and suffering from a common affliction of MZB's male protagonists, the tendency to cut off their noses to spite their faces. This is generally expressed in the form of "I am so rebellious that if an authority figure wants me to do something, I'll do the opposite, even if we both really want the same thing." After a fight with his admittedly overbearing father Kennard Alton, Lew takes off for the notorious clan of Aldaran, and there discovers that there's a reason why everyone thinks Aldaran is bad news. (Do we ever learn what exactly was the reason they were banished?) I can't help feeling that a great deal of tragedy and trauma would have been averted if Lew had just given a chance to the perfectly nice woman his father was trying to set him up with, whom he rejected solely because society would have approved of the match.

Stormqueen! takes place way earlier, but also involves crazy Aldarans meddling with powers they can't control, which also leads to disastrous results. It also is the first indication that no one should ever name their girl baby Dorilys.

In the Ages of Chaos before the coming of the Terrans, laran has been enhanced to a fantastic degree by a eugenics program which favors strength over stability, so people are born with incredible powers, but tend to die at birth, drop dead at puberty, go insane, or be unable to control their powers and cause huge amounts of trouble before going insane or dropping dead. Oh, and they've also developed a whole range of nasty laran-powered or laran-created weapons, including napalm. And they can directly manipulate genes, and thus created some non-human sex slaves. It's all very oppressive and decadent.

Dorilys Aldaran is a little girl who can call lightning, but isn't so good with controlling it. Her increasingly nutty father calls in several psychics to teach her to control her powers, but it's a big struggle and the neighboring kingdom is trying to seize his, and everything goes horribly, horribly, horribly wrong. Oh, and there's incest. Why does everything I've read in the last few months involve incest?

Comments

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Do we ever learn what exactly was the reason they were banished?

I have a fuzzy notion that it involved massacring the Maclans at Glen Coe, or, you know, the Darkover equivalent of same. Possibly cohabiting with non-humans as well.

[branna.livejournal.com]

*cracks up* I never thought about it before, but you're right---it _is_ a very bad idea to name your Darkovan baby girl Dorilys.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Not only does Lightning Lass Dorilys have the events of Stormqueen!, but she's named after another Dorilys, her half-sister, who died soon after birth. And then there's Dorilys aka Cleindori, and we all know what happened to her. That name is bad news.

[larryhammer]

Because you've read a lot of manga in the last few months?

---L.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

I happily accept the blame. And hey, I did warn you about the incest.

We never do get a canonical explanation for why the Aldarans left and/or were kicked out.

Reading MZB's notes on Darkover may have been the first time I became aware that sometimes authors had no idea what they were talking about, which I have learned to gussy up as "I don't privilege authorial interpretation," but really it's just that sometimes authors have no sense at all. I mean, she thought *Lew* was the main character of Heritage and that his was the interesting story, and well, I just do not get it at all. Also, Kennard is an awful father. He doesn't seem to have modes but over-involvement (Lew) and neglect (Marius). I don't blame Lew for not wanting to take his advice, although he would have been much better off just going back to the towers, where he clearly wanted to be.

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

...I thought Lew was the main character of Heritage, but admittedly I read this after Sharra's Exile. I fell somewhere between having a crush on Lew and identifying with him.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I'm reading Sharra's Exile right now. I don't think I've ever read it before; it's not seeming at all familiar.

I have just started and love the ultra-creepy bit about how they tried to regenerate his hand but had to amputate the regenerated bit because it was a hideous mutant monster appendage.

[apintrix.livejournal.com]

ooh, I'd forgotten that part!

I think-- based on having read Sword of Aldones (I think? The original that became Sharra's Exile...), in which Regis is a side-character, that Lew is perceived as protagonist because he's the character around which the story was conceived. However, that also means he's an older character, and a character of a less mature writer. Regis is a little more complicated and subtle, and so is his story-- for me, at least, it was the more interesting half-- so he kind of takes over the book in that sense, even if Lew is going to be closer to the writer's heart.

Well, that's my theory anyway.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

No, no, I was half-mocking my continuing preoccupation with Regis. Re-reading, I think she did a good job with the split plotlines, although there are some problems due to the Lew plot being older and therefore the work of a younger writer. But it's not nearly as much of a problem as it is in Sharra's Exile, which incorporates more of the older plotlines.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I apparently felt the same way as you did when I first read it about Lew vs. Regis/Danilo, because all the Regis/Danilo stuff was very familiar, but I'd completely forgotten the entire Lew plot until he looks in the mirror near the end and I thought, "Uh-oh, I seem to recall that this does not end well."

I think I found Lew's story more interesting this go-round. And yeah, Kennard is a terrible father. (So is Dorilys'.)

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Still reading Sharra's Exile. Lew Alton has a brief moment in which he has incestuous fantasies about his father. Lew/Kennard takes the prize for the squickiest pairing I have ever seen referenced-- and, at least on the level that a character fantasized about it, it's canon. Eeeeuuww!

[coffeeem.livejournal.com]

Have you got to The World Wreckers yet? I remember it as being good, but can't recall much else.

I finally got to the point with Darkover of really, really wanting someone with brown or black or blond hair to have mad telepathic skills and mow down a flock of red-haired racist monarchical hysterics. But it took a few books.

[larryhammer]

I rilly wish she'd done to The World Wreckers what she'd done to Sword of Aldones.

---L.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

The aforementioned Lew Alton is dark-haired, but he gets his ass kicked by the Sharra matrix. And the elegant child molester Dyan Ardais is dark-haired, but I'd say his mad telepathic skills are counterbalanced by the fact that he's a child molester.

The red-headed thing is pretty ridiculous. I think it must be an offshoot of MZB having conceived the series when she was fifteen.

Tiresome red-haired superhumans

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

YThere was something in the water in those days. Think of Heinlein.