This is the first article in the first issue of APAPLEXY, published at Yule 1984.
Our reaction, our enjoyment of stories depends on a variety of factors: our background, our present physical and mental well-being, the attunement of our thoughtsounds to the rhythm of the writer's words, the images and word associations received somewhat differently by each individual.
I open the pages of one of my several finds in a day of hunting for second hand books. I am drousy, having hardly slept in the previous 36 hours. There was work, followed by a night long bus ride, the hectic day, the harsh reality that finds me far from Ottawa. Then as my eyes move across those lines with evocative and rhythmic prose, a master of fantasy describes, induces a dreamy drousiness and a hazy transferral of the hero to another dimension. I doubt if I could have enjoyed the first chapters of that story more.
Is it only because I've had a night's sleep that the impact of succeeding chapters is less? What does it matter? There is the wonder of a new world to view, the action and plot to follow and something else. Awake, alert I love to see origins, history, associations. So story aside, how fascinating to encounter here the probable father of all the towers of Darkover. Here is a psychic circle and how moving to this son of Celts the identity of an old man. Yet inspite of him, this is a corrupt and oppressive oligarchy, though its necessary overthrough foreshadows the more lamentable decline and demise of the more imaginatively conceived towers of Marion Zimmer Bradley. But there is more -- more even than the thought the very name Darkover may owe something to the title of this book.
There is something in that story of another earth, in that other world that suggests to me an even earlier story. Is this earlier story the first to describe an alternate world? Certainly the authors seem more indebted to scientific and philosophical speculation than to any previous story. Indeed only the sequel published in 1932 suggests the possibility of not one but several alternate earths. And you know MZB may just happen to have read that suspense filled original, for would you believe it, a red headed Celt slips from our world to be mistaken for a noble. It's the red hair. "Ye see, 'tis th' mark av th' royal Bars themselves; no ithers have it."
Speaking of red and leaping back to that drousy night in Sudbury, for even before the morning I had noticed a seed perhaps from which grew a phrase from Darkover and the title of a book. The seed? A sentence -- a single sentence about the bloody light of a crimson sun.
For those interested, the books referred to here, if you haven't recognized them, are: THE BLIND SPOT (1921) by Homer Eon Flint and Austin Hall, its sequel THE SPOT OF LIFE (1932) by Austin Hall, and THE DARK WORLD (1946) by Henry Kuttner. An Ace edition of the last, published twenty years ago, contains a blurb on the front cover claiming Kuttner's work is ..."The finest science fantasy ever written." The assessment of Marion Zimmer Bradley, as you may have guessed.
Michael McKenny studies Latin, reads ancient and medieval history, devours SF and Fantasy (especially that written before he was born), writes some Fantasy and is an incurable optimist concerning the destiny of the human race.