The Sword of Aldones, Page 2

  Bradley's first two sales were to a short-lived magazine titled Vortex Science Fiction. (This magazine had a short career in 1953 and is not to be confused with Vertex Science Fiction, published in Los Angeles in the early 1970s, or with another Vortex Science Fiction published in Great Britain beginning in 1977.) Bradley's recollection is that the original Vortex operated on so small a budget that no major literary agent would deal with its editor. That editor, ironically, was Chester Whitehorn, who had served as editor of the pulpwood Planet Stories in 1945-46.

  Whitehorn appealed to a number of minor agents, including Bradley's, to "send us anything you have and we'll put it all in a pile and read everything we get and keep the least worst."4 Whitehorn bought Bradley's story "Keyhole" for $12--her first professional sale. Shortly Whitehorn accepted another story, Bradley's first expressing any form of feminist concern. This story was written as "For Women Only," but was published under the shortened title, "Women Only." Both "Keyhole" and "Women Only" appeared in Vortex's second (and final) issue, October, 1953. "Women Only" dealt with a female android. Androids, although endowed with sexual capacity, were regarded as universally sterile, yet the one in Bradley's story was able to bear a child.

  Her first significant sale, in Bradley's judgement, was the novelette "Centaurus Changeling."5 This story was also sold in 1953 and appeared in the April, 1954 issue of TheMagazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which was by that time Bradley's favorite magazine.

  The history of her first published novel, The Door Through Space (1961), is more complicated. Originally entitled Bird of Prey, it was written at novel-length, revised into a shorter format and then published in Venture Science Fiction in May, 1957. (Venture, now defunct, was a companion publication of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.) It was then sold to a publisher in Europe and appeared in a German translation. Still later, after Bradley had established herself with Wollheim at Ace Books, Ace asked to see the novel. In the interim, Bradley's carbon copy of the manuscript had been lost, and she had to reconstruct the novel by retranslating the German version to English. The book appeared, eventually, under the title in English The Door through Space.

  Another novel, Seven from the Stars, had appeared in Amazing Stories in 1960. This was Bradley's first Ace book and her first book published in the English language.

  Despite the bibliographic citation of Bird of Prey/The Door through Space as Bradley's first published book, and of Seven from the Stars as her first English-language book publication, she herself regards The Sword of Aldones as her first book-- "absolutely first" in her own words.

  She conceived the book, she states, at the age of 15. This would place the event in 1945 or early 1946, seven or eight years before the Vortex sales and eleven or twelve years before any form of Bird of Prey was published. The Sword of Aldones gestated for over three years before the author actually began writing it. She was then age 19. The first complete draft was finished in 1949--this was the version seen by Dorothy Quinn.

  In 1956 Bradley "sold" The Sword of Aldones to Raymond A. Palmer. Palmer had been a pulp science fiction author (and fan) as early as 1930. He had been tapped to become the editor of Amazing Stories when that magazine was taken over by the Ziff-Davis Publishing Company in 1938 and remained with Ziff-Davis until 1949, when he left to found his own publication, Other Worlds Science Stories. Operating on a budget that would make even Vortex look generous, Palmer often failed to pay his authors even token rates. Palmer also had the regrettable habit of holding stories in inventory for very lengthy periods, thus affording the authors not only no payment, but not even the publicity value of publication. Palmer held The Sword of Aldones for fully five years.

  By 1961, Bradley's earliest novels had been well received as "halves" of Ace Doubles. Consequently, when Bradley sold Ace The Planet Savers, editor Wollheim asked her if she had another novel with which he might make up an Ace Double, rather than pairing Bradley with another author. She retrieved The Sword of Aldones from Palmer, revised it for Wollheim, and the double volume of The Planet Savers and The Sword of Aldones was issued in 1962.

  The revisions of 1961 were mainly general polishing, but a major new element was introduced as well: the loss of one hand by the protagonist Lew Alton. In the preceding versions of the novel, Alton's face had been scarred, but Bradley had used the device of facial scarring in other works by 1961, and to provide a newer (and obviously far more powerful) element, she introduced the further injury.

  Although The Sword of Aldones was published as the "back half" of The Planet Savers, it proved the more popular work almost from the outset. It was a finalist in the Hugo nominations the following year. The other nominees were A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke, Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper, The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick, and Sylva by "Vercors" (Jean Bruller).

  Bradley did not expect to win the award, and in fact campaigned for another candidate by asking fans to cast their votes for Little Fuzzy. However, neither Piper's book nor Bradley's gained the award, which was won by The Man in the High Castle.

  Bradley does not consider The Sword of Aldones a particularly good book. In 1972 she wrote a critical article in which she stated some of her own objectives in the writing of the book and attempted to gain an understanding of its great popularity (despite her own feeling that it "was not a very good book"):

  I explored one theme, rare before and since in SF and even rarer in fantasy or sword-and-sorcery; the idea that, as the hero has more capabilities than the average man, he also has more capacity to feel strongly about what happens to him. Lew Alton, in this book, is living with the knowledge that years ago, saving his people from an extra-dimensional horror, his young and much-beloved wife had been killed in the crossfire. The usual "hero," needless to say, usually regarded this sort of catastrophe as just part of the scenery. Conan's various girls get stabbed, eaten by dragons, or strangled by Bems with monotonous frequency; he never seems to remember the litter of bodies in the wake of his sword. The villains seem to care even less. Yet I reflected that one side's evil rebel is the other side's valiant freedom fighter; the villain of any given story would be the hero of his own. If they happened both to genuinely love the girl who died, the seeds of a resolution to their blood-feud lay in that very fact.

  So I seem to have originated the villain who is not evil or wicked, but just the hero of the counter-establishment. I hoped, actually, to provoke comment as to whether the villain was not a better man, fighting for a more worthy cause, than the hero, and the hero simply a good man fighting misdirectedly for a lost cause. Robert E. Lee is a hero, but nevertheless he fought on the side of tyranny and slavery.

  I was also sick and tired of the hero who took all his slashes and scars for granted. In most books the interesting scars on the faces of the heroes are just what the old manuals on how to write fiction used to call "a tag of character"; it never occurred to anyone that a scarred hero might actually suffer self-conscious agonies about how messed-up he looked. And also, Lew Alton had lost a hand, and I went right out of the hero tradition by making him resent it and even have trouble actually handling things.

  To the extent that Bradley achieved these objectives The Sword of Aldones is successful as a novel, from the viewpoint of art. (From the commercial viewpoint, the yardstick is presumably some product of total sales and years in print. The Sword of Aldones has done amazingly well by both of these measurements.)

  As for the failings of the book as seen by its author, Bradley recently characterized these broadly as "puppy fur problems."8 This is completely understandable if it is remembered that The Sword of Aldones is the conception of a 15-year-old mind. The book is full of the romanticism, posturing, and overstated dramatics to which the adolescent mind is subject. Even though the book was not actually written until the author was 19, and revised for publication when she was past 30, it is still the book conceived by the-author-as-15-year-old.

  From a more literary-technical point of view, Bradley
assesses the shortcomings of the book in these words:

  Especially in the beginning of the book, too many episodes are happening. In the first three chapters of the book too many people keep turning up for all the wrong reasons. And disappearing again. And you never really did find out why it was so urgent to get the gun away from Lew. You never found out what all the sound and fury was about.

  It was ill-conceived and not too well thought out. It was a lot of adventure but there wasn't too much behind [it]. It was all busy-work.

  And yet, the book has its appeal. Once more, Bradley assesses this as a function of its urgency. This she attributes in part to the first-person narration (the narrator, Lew Alton, seems to live in a state of uninterrupted crises) and in part to the emotion, unusual if not unique in adventure science fiction at the time of The Sword of Aldones (and not overly common today). "There's the poor man bleeding all over the page," Bradley says, "you have to care."

  Today it is not uncommon for women to write science fiction from the viewpoint of male characters. Bradley does so frequently although not exclusively. The basis for this custom lies in the marketing and readership of science fiction. This has been, traditionally, overwhelmingly male, just as the readership of romances and neo-gothics has been overwhelmingly female. While the proportion of female science fiction readers has increased dramatically in recent years, the audience is still predominantly male, and gender bias in stories continues to reflect this fact. Exceptions have appeared, from Judith Merrill's Shadow on the Hearth (1950) to Joanna Russ's The Female Man (1975). The use of a female protagonist in a science fiction or fantasy novel by a male author is even more unusual, although exceptions are not unknown: The Witches of Karres by James H. Schmitz (1966), Rissa Kerguelen by F. M. Busby (1976), and Lisa Kane (1976) and Sword of the Demon (1977) by the author of this Introduction.

  Bradley recalls her early attempts to break the stricture of male protagonists only, in adventure-oriented science fiction--and the result: "In those days (late 1950s and early 1960s) you couldn't write science fiction from a woman's point of view and have any real chance of getting it published. I tried it once and couldn't get it published. That was a novel called Window on the Night. It's never been published and it never will be. The science became obsolete."

  In regard to the artistic challenge of writing from the viewpoint of the opposite sex, Bradley has stated: "Can a man write from a woman's point of view? Can a woman write from a man's point of view? If anyone still has the nerve to ask that question after reading a story by Hal Clement in which he writes from the viewpoint of a disembodied alien, I think they should be ashamed of themselves."

  Quite aside from its intrinsic values, its virtues and faults as a piece of literature, The Sword of Aldones is of special interest because it was the first novel Bradley wrote. In it she felt constrained to abide by the rules of heroic adventure writing as they stood at the time it was conceived in 1945.

  Thus, the action is carried by Lew Alton and Robert Kadarin, both men. Female characters, in the heroic adventure tradition, existed primarily to be threatened, frightened, captured, rescued--in short, their roles were totally passive. In addition, they might provide emotional support and occasional physical assistance to male characters, and they might offer a small degree of sex appeal for the mild titillation of adolescent male readers (there was almost never any "real" sex in such stories; this had to be supplied by the reader's imagination).

  Bradley maintains that this female passivity is no longer a feature of her works, and cites the transitional novel for this point as Winds of Darkouer (1970). Nonetheless, even in The Sword of Aldones, Bradley chafed under the requirement. She gave her female characters as much freedom and rebelliousness against the traditional submissive role of women in this type of story as she felt able to do in the era and the category in which she worked. Thus, when the Comyn or ruling council of Darkover debates the arrangement of a politically expedient marriage for the young woman Linnell Aillard, her guardian--also a woman--Callina Aillard, hurls defiance at the council. And she does so not on the grounds that the council's prospective direction is unwisely chosen, but on the grounds that the council has not the power to dictate to herself or the younger woman. "Linnell is my ward!" Callina asserts. "This is no matter for council meddling!"

  Further, while there is no explicit "onstage" sex in the novel, Bradley makes it clear that the attractive young woman Dio Ridenow takes lovers of her own selection and without official sanction. This in itself was revolutionary for a science fiction novel of the time of The Sword of Aldones. And to make it even more so, Bradley portrays Dio neither as a slut nor as a scheming adventuress utilizing her wiles to gain unworthy ends, but as a sparkling and thoroughly sympathetic figure who ultimately "gets the leading man" by marrying Lew Alton!

  For these reasons The Sword of Aldones offers valuable insights into the early attitudes and later development of its author, and into the standards and conventions of adventure science fiction during the 17-year period from the novel's conception to its publication.

  Mention was made previously of the long and loyal relationship between Bradley as author and Donald A. Wollheim initially as editor and later as editor and publisher. Bradley has written material other than science fiction for editors other than Wollheim. She mentions having written "a whole lot of gothics," and without providing a bibliography mentions that these appeared from a number of publishers, including Berkley Medallion and the now defunct Lancer Books, under the Marion Zimmer Bradley byline.

  She was also the author of a number of "vaguely risque" volumes for the now long-defunct Monarch Books in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Bradley does not object to mentioning the existence of these books, but declines to reveal their titles or the byline or bylines under which they appeared. She does state that they were not credited to Marion Zimmer Bradley.

  This does leave one anomaly, The Colors of Space, which was also published by Monarch (1963). This book was written by Bradley and sold to Monarch approximately at the time of her temporary falling-out with Wollheim. To the suggestion that the sale of the book to Monarch was connected with a dispute with Wollheim, Bradley responds with a denial: "Not really-- [it was] just that they asked for a book and I needed the cash."

  But a dispute with Wollheim did take place, and its circumstances are worth noting.

  The estrangement resulted from Wollheim's tampering with the conclusion of the American edition of Bird of Prey/The Door through Space. This was published by Ace Books under Wollheim's editorship. What Wollheim had done was to extend the final paragraph of the book by two sentences. While this sounds like a minor, even a trivial, case of tampering, the additional sentences serve to reverse totally the philosophical charge of the novel. It is not surprising that Bradley was furious. For the record, then, and with the enthusiastic concurrence of Marion Zimmer Bradley, the following lines, with which The Door through Space concludes, should be noted as not her work. Further, she disclaims, disowns and denounces them:

  Now, after all my years on Wolf, I understood the desire to keep their women under lock and key that was its ancient custom. I vowed to myself as we went that I should waste no time finding a fetter shop and having forged therein the perfect steel chains that should bind my love's wrists to my key forever.

  Eventually, Bradley and Wollheim became reconciled and she resumed writing for him. In fact, she states that the reconciliation did not take very long, once Wollheim had explained the problems on his part which led to his adding the two sentences. "I didn't stay mad long…" Bradley states, "more upset."14 Nonetheless, she has never become reconciled to those two sentences.

  Richard A. Lupoff Berkeley, California

  * * *

  THE MAN WHO WALKED BETWEEN TWO WORLDS Lew Alton was returning to Darkover--returning at the command of men who had once been all too glad to see him leave. For Lew, a Darkovan on his father's side and a Terran on his mother's side, had always walked between two worlds, accu
sed by each of belonging to the other, and trusted by neither.

  Yet Lew alone had the power to understand both worlds and to save them from each other's unknown forces. That was the reason that caused him to return at last--armed with tihe legendary sword of the Sharra matrix, whose destiny was to cross forces with the equally mystic Sword of Aldones in one mighty battle that would decide Darkoyer's fate.

  * * *

  MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY comments on herself that:

  "I've been writing and selling since 1953, that I am an active science-fiction fan, circus fan and amateur publisher, that in spite of living in dull hot Texas I enjoy such far-out pastimes as doubling for the human target for a carnival knife thrower, and that I am in my early thirties, married to a railroad man, and have one husband, one son and four typewriters…"

  To which may be added that she has had short stories published in a number of magazines, that as a carnival target she was nicked at least once by a thrown knife, and that Ace Books have published her previous books, THE DOOR THROUGH SPACE (F-117), and SEVEN FROM THE STARS (F-127).

  * * *

  * * *

  THE SWORD OF ALDONES by MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY

  CHAPTER ONE

  We were outstripping the night.

  The Southern Cross had made planetfall on Darkover at midnight. There I had embarked on the Terran skyliner that was to take me halfway around a planet; only an hour had passed, but already the thin air was beginning to flush red with a hint of dawn. Under my feet the floor of the big plane tilted slightly as it began to fly aslant down the western ridge of the Hellers. Peak after peak fell away astern, cutting the sparse clouds that capped the snowline; and already my memory was looking for landmarks, although I knew we were too high.