First book of Darkover, written when MZB was very young. Was rewritten twenty years later as Sharra's Exile with a number of changes. Still an interesting read, especially if read after Sharra.

First book of Darkover, written when MZB was very young. Was rewritten twenty years later as Sharra's Exile with a number of changes. Still an interesting read, especially if read after Sharra. ( )

This wonderful hot mess of a book nevertheless overwhelms with it's intensity. The cleaned up [Sharra's Exile] is a tea party to the Bacchanal. ( )

I'm a fan of Marion Zimmer Bradley, but my affection for her rests not on the Avalon books, which I didn't care for, but her Darkover series. Darkover is a "lost colony" of Earth that falls into a medieval society. Ruled by a psychic aristocracy it is later rediscovered by a star-spanning high-tech human federation after centuries, giving the series a feel of both science fiction and fantasy. The series as a whole features strong female characters, but it has enough swashbuckling adventure to draw the male of the species, and indeed this series was recommended to me by a guy (when we were in high school!)

Although some books are loosely connected, having characters in common, they were written to be read independently and were written out of sequence. Part of the difficulty of knowing what to read, and in what order to read comes from that. The Sword of Aldones (1958) is one of the earliest novels MZB ever published, the first published in the Darkover series, even though chronologically it falls late in the series. The Sword of Aldones was first conceived in MZB's teens in fact, and feeling the story deserved a more mature treatment, she rewrote it and it was published as Sharra's Exile. That's a much better book, and you should read it instead (after reading at least Heritage of Hastur). As a Darkover fan, I'm happy to have The Sword of Aldones but by no means is this the place to start reading the series and it's among MZB's weakest books and not representative of the series at its best. ( )