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The Heritage of Hastur
The Heritage of Hastur
The Heritage of Hastur
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The Heritage of Hastur

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

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Described as "Bradley's best novel" by Locus, THE HERITAGE OF HASTUR, longest and most intricate of the Darkover books, is a brilliant epic of the pivotal event in the strange love-hate relationship between the Terran worlds and the semi-alien offspring of forgotten peoples. This is the novel of the Hastur tradition and of the showdown between those who would bargain away their world for the glories of star-borne science and those who would preserve the special "matrix" power that was at once the prize and the burden of ruddy-sunned Darkover. A Note From the Author: To the faithful followers of the chronicles of Darkover, whose greatest delight seems to be discovering even the most minute inconsistencies from book to book: This book tells a story which a great many of the friends of Darkover have asked me to tell - the story of the early life of Regis Hastur, and of the Sharra rising, and of Lew Alton's first encounter with Marjorie Scott and the man who called himself Kadarin. The faithful followers mentioned above will discover a very few minute inconsistencies between the account herein, and the story as Lew Alton told it later. I make no apologies for these. The only explanation I can make is that in the years which elapsed between the events in this book, and the later novel dealing with the final destruction of the Sharra matrix, Lew's memories of these events may have altered his perceptions. Or, as I myself believe, the telepaths of the Arilinn Tower may have mercifully blurred his memories, to save his reason. MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJun 15, 2018
ISBN9781501970894
The Heritage of Hastur
Author

Marion Zimmer Bradley

Marion Zimmer was born in Albany, New York, on June 3, 1930, and married Robert Alden Bradley in 1949. Mrs. Bradley received her B.A. in 1964 from Hardin Simmons University in Abilene, Texas, then did graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1965-1967. She wrote everything from science fiction to Gothics, but is probably best known for her Darkover novels and her Arthurian  fantasy novel THE MISTS OF AVALON. In addition to her novels, Mrs. Bradley edited many magazines, amateur and professional, including Marion Zimmer Bradley's FANTASY Magazine, which she started in 1988. She also edited an annual anthology called SWORD AND SORCERESS. She died in Berkeley, California on September 25, 1999, four days after suffering a major heart attack.

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Reviews for The Heritage of Hastur

Rating: 3.888324974619289 out of 5 stars
4/5

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This was the first Darkover book I ever read. Love this book and it shows how dual PoV can be done, and very well. Long live Darkover!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is the re-written Sword of Aldones; it's better written, with more polish, more characterization, and fits better into the shared Darkover universe than the original. Regis, Lew, and Kennard come alive as characters.And yet... somehow, for me, this version lacks the energy of the original.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Re-read. Just as involving as I remember, though the alternating narratives breaks the story up a lot. Mostly this time I just read the Regis/Danilo story and skimmed Lew's. The perfect book to read on the train to jury duty & back. It's my Harlequin equivalent.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I recently finished yet another re-read of the Darkover books. There are mixed feelings about Bradley in the sf community: most people agree that "Mists of Avalon" is a good book, but opinions are pretty divided about the rest of her work. Literary fantasy fans in particular tend to turn their noses up at Darkover, with its clumsy moralizing, soap-opera style plots, and occasionally sloppy writing ("Two to Conquer", for instance, is actually unreadable).

    These criticisms are accurate, but detractors are, I think, missing a more important point. Darkover maintains a devoted fan base. The books are constantly being brought back into print, and continue to find new generations of fans. I believe the enduring appeal lies in the completeness of the vision of Darkover. It's one of the best-developed fantasy worlds in the history of fantasy worlds - I know that's a tall claim, especially from a Dune fan, but bear with me. Reading any Darkover book gives you the feeling of looking in on a real world, with a concrete sense of history, geography, climate, and culture. Language, social mores, slang, crafts, industries, dress - these vary from place to place and from time to time throughout the novels, giving you the sense of a complex society in slow but constant motion, adding to the sense of realism. As an example of world-building, Darkover is hard to top.

    I think that Darkover achieved this level of complexity and detail because it is, in a sense, a collectively built world. Fan fic, hated by writers though it may be, is and always has been an intrinsic part of sf nerd culture. Bradley took the unlikely step of embracing her fan fic and declaring it canonical. She accepted stories and published them in anthologies with her seal of approval, cartographically inclined fans drew her maps, musical fans composed songs, linguist fans mapped out the evolution of the languages spoken by her characters, and fans into handcrafts contributed their expertise. In a way, Darkover was the first open-source fantasy project, and the diversity of talents and perspectives that converged on the narrative gave it a richness and depth of detail that a single author would find hard to match.

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Marion Zimmer Bradley is best known for The Mists of Avalon, which spawned a number of sequels, mostly (if not entirely) by other hands. I don't care for them. Then comes The Fall of Atlantis, two enjoyable if fairly forgettable books posthumously marked as backdrop for the Avalon books. Inexplicably, if I go by Goodreads, her next most popular book is The Firebrand, about the Trojan War, which I found absolutely unreadable. Yet I do consider myself a fan of MZB's but that rests almost entire on her Darkover books, of which she wrote 18 in her lifetime, although there were some further (some posthumous) collaborations. Darkover is a "lost colony" of Earth that falls into a medieval society ruled by a psychic aristocracy and is later rediscovered by a star-spanning advanced 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. They were written out of sequence too, and I don't actually recommend you read them chronologically. The first chronologically, for instance, Darkover Landfall, is more fun if you read other in the series first, then this origins novel to see oh, so that's where that came from! Also, some books early chronologically were early in Bradley's career, when she was still learning her craft, and it shows.This particular book is a good entry into MZB's beguiling world. The science fiction magazine Locus called it her best novel, and the consensus among fans is that this was her best book in the series, and certainly Lew Alton, Regis Hastur and Danilo Syrtis are among her most compelling characters.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    We see Kennard as an adult, and met young Regis Hastur, a monarch-in-training who really doesn't want to.We follow Regis' adventure as he learns how to associate with the people of his own caste - and how to get them to accept him.Most everyone will recognize the teenage angst he is going through - but will be hard-pressed to put the book down for long periods.We also watch the Terrans come to a very visceral understanding of what the Darkovan Compact is all about.