A Twofer

I haven’t been able to sleep. So, with nothing better to do, I read another book, this time a Marion Zimmer Bradley twofer: The Planet Savers and The Sword of Aldones. I guess even the two together were not enough to fill a whole book, so the publisher also included a short story (“The Waterfall”) and “A Darkover Retrospective.”

The Planet Savers and The Sword of Aldones, by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Grades: C+ and B, respectively

The Planet Savers is readable but the basic premise, that a repressed person is likely to have an alternate personality that can, though hypnosis, be brought to the surface as the dominant personality for an indefinitely long period of time, is as hard to swallow as it is to say succinctly. The story doesn’t go into much detail about Darkovan society and it just doesn’t have the “magic” that I expect from a Darkover story. The Sword of Aldones is a muddled version of a story that is told, as I recall, much better in a later novel, but it has some real life to it, which is why it got the slightly better grade.

The short story was OK, by the way, and the retrospective was so dull that I just skimmed through it.

I probably won’t keep this book, but I’ll wait to see how I feel after reading the whole series.