Book review: The Bloody Sun

More Darkover tosh, but reasonably entertaining. Towards the end though as the complicated plot extricates itself from the confusion it has created there are so many names of people I don't really care about that I lost the will to remember who was the son, daughter, kin or foster relation of whom. Wiki will tell you stuff; and the Marion Zimmer Bradley article will tell you things you don't want to know.

At one point, struck by the heavily male-centric story and the way the female characters lack any independent agency, I went to check that MZB was actually female - "Marion" can be a male name, though rarely. But no, she really is female, so I don't think we can directly blame the patriacrchy.

So skipping all that, the main item of interest to a disinterested observer is the interaction of the Earth-tech society with the Darkover-psi society. This is weighted about as heavily in favour of Darkover as you could: Earth just maintains a toehold, doesn't attempt to coerce Darkover, is happy to take in Darkover refugees (there's a plaintive bit towards the end where one of the characters notices that whenever people are likely to get killed, their refuge is Earth), and so on. And yet Darkover is still losing: their psi is, for whatever reason, in retreat; and their Towers are failing because of their ridiculous tribal rules. When they discuss why they want to keep their funny little ways instead of being just another boring Earth colony about the best they can come up with is not liking pollution; even I could do better than that. In this book, somewhat implausibly, the hereditary psi-lords justify their lordship by how much they help the populace, which is in awe of them. And yet even that isn't good enough. One of the services they provide is "relay screens" for the transmission of messages, but - well, obviously - that's a pretty poor second to a mobile phone.

Turning to the social side, notice how completely stuck in the mud Our Hero - who thinks he is an Earthman, and who has actually been brought up on Earth - is. Every social situation that differs in any way from middle class America of the '60s brings out in him rage, confusion, and a total inability to cope. Oh, and the other amusing point: he has fallen into the society of telepaths¹ but again and again, a hapless victim of the needs of the plot, he comes out of a situation realising - duh - that they've been reading his mind all along.

Notes

1. Oddly, they have no convention of not reading the minds of  non-telepaths without consent, which seems rude to me. Also, despite presumably reading each other's minds, they have perfectly normal conversations, and there's not even a gesture - as Asimov was good enough to put into Second Foundation - to "this is what it would have been, had they been speaking".