MZB: Intro

INTRODUCTION TO MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY

 

Marion Zimmer Bradley and Darkover

Marion Zimmer Bradley was a writer of fantasy and SF with a medieval flavor.  (She is credited with helping to start and providing the name for The Society for Creative Anachronism.) Her most famous work is the series of feminist revisionings of the Arthur story that began with Mists of Avalon (1983), but before that, starting in 1958 and extending past her death in 1999, she published a good deal of science fiction set on a rather gothic planet called Darkover, which has a red sun and four moons, much of which is bitterly cold for most of the year.  A lost colony established after the crash of a generation starship full of colonists from Celtic backgrounds (see Darkover Landfall), some of the isolated inhabitants interbreed with telepathic natives; their subsistence society evolves into a feudal set of kingdoms ruled by sword and telepathic sorcery, which is rediscovered by and comes in conflict with a scientifically based galactic empire. Although Darkover is a fundamentally patriarchal society, elements of its social structure, including especially a guild of Free Amazons, have much in common with contemporaneous feminist utopias (and dystopias).

 The development of these tales over time marks a process of evolving engagement in feminist issues paradigmatic of many early women SF writers (such as Andre Norton).  While her first stories were centered on the coming of age of male heroes, Bradley became increasingly interested in gender roles in her invented culture.   In the early 70’s she began to introduce female protagonists (see Winds of Darkover 1970), made the alien Chieri androgynous (see Star of Danger (1965)cand World Wreckers), and was the first writer to deal sympathetically with homosexuality in science fiction (see World Wreckers, 1971). In the mid-70’s she began to explore alternatives to the patriarchal nuclear family, inventing a new aspect of Darkovian culture, the Free Amazons, who take a vow never to marry men (see The Shattered Chain 1976) and describing the difficult emotional and sexual balances of group marriage (see The Forbidden Tower 1977).

These ground-breaking experiments caused some unanticipated controversy on the more liberal side of cultural politics. When Bradley explained the patriarchal nature of old Darkovian culture as a function of the stress and scarcity of life on a metal-poor planet covered in snow more than half the year, feminists were annoyed at the reactionary nature of Darkovian sexual politics and the biological essentialism underlying them.  The “compulsory heterosexism” of having the female hero of her first Free Amazon novel fall in love with a man felt like a particular betrayal.  Some gay activists were similarly outraged by her stereotypical presentation of a homosexual villain as a sadistic child molester in Heritage of Hastur (1975).

Despite these minor objections, Darkover proved to be a very popular world.  Heritage of Hastur was nominated for a Nebula and The Forbidden Tower for a Hugo. In addition, Bradely permitted, indeed actually encouraged young writers to work within her world.  There was/is a strong Darkover fan group, many of who chose to write stories set in Darkover.  Some notable SF/ F writers such as Diana Paxson, Laurell K. Hamilton, Charles de Lint, , Emma Bull, and Jennifer Roberson got their start in Darkover fanzines, in the series of nineteen Darkover Anthologies published from 1980-2019, and in the series of thirty Sword and Sorceress Anthologies Bradley began editing in 1984.   As Bradely’s health began to fail in the early 1990's, she began co-authoring new Darkover books with a number of writers educated in the Darkovian canon such as Mercedes Lackey, , Elizabeth Waters , Adrienne Martine-Barnes, and Deborah J. Ross, whocontinues to publish new Darkover books based on plot-lines planned out with Bradley.

Bradley’s reputation as a pioneering woman science fiction writer and creator of one of the most extensive and elaborate alternate worlds in the genre has been seriously undercut in recent years with the revelation by her daughter Moira Greyland of Bradley’s sadistic sexual abuse of her and her brother Mark.  Walter Breen, Bradley’s husband for twenty-eight years, was arrested and jailed for child abuse in 1990, and Greyland’s accusations fit in with her mother’s acceptance of her husband’s love affairs with under-aged boys.

I myself only became aware of these accusations in the last year or two and have struggled a good deal with how to react to them.  I am of course horrified and repulsed by Bradley’s actions. However, while I find myself unable to watch Woody Allen movies with any of the affectionate pleasure I used to feel, I do not find that condoning unequal power relationships is the core or even a peripheral theme of Bradley’s world creation.  I have yet to re-read all of the Darkover books, but those I have returned to seem to protest against entrenched patterns of dominance and subordination. Perhaps Darkover was a utopian world for Bradley -- a world where she could set out and espouse the egalitarian values she wanted to believe in but was unable to practice.   

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