The Sword of Aldones (2 page)

Born June 3,1930, Marion Zimmer was raised on a farm just outside Albany, New York. Bradley was her married name for some years. Although that marriage ended in divorce and she is presently married to Walter Breen, she retains the name Marion Zimmer Bradley for professional purposes.

As a schoolgirl she found little of interest in the usual round of dates, dances and football games that preoccupied her contemporaries. Consequently she sought friendships through correspondence with people outside the usual circle of schoolmates. She presently recalls her closest friends of this period as being Steve Weber, Thyril Ladd, Dorothy Quinn, and Rick Sneary. Through Weber in particular she became an admirer of Mary Gnaedinger, one of the first women to edit a pulp magazine in the field of science fiction and fantasy. Gnaedinger was the editor of Famous Fantastic Mysteries and its spin-off publication Fantastic Novels. Famous Fantastic Mysteries, despite its name, was not a mystery magazine in the usual sense, but a magazine of science fiction and fantasy, with emphasis on the latter. The bulk of its contents consisted of reprinted (and often condensed) novels of fantastic adventure. Through a corporate succession, most of the files of the old Frank A. Munsey pulps were available to Gnaedinger for reprinting. These pulps-Argosy, All-Story and Cavalier being the most prominent—featured material by many significant fantasy writers, including Abraham Merritt, Max Brand, George Allan England, Austin Hall, Homer Eon Flint, Murray Leinster, Otis Adelbert Kline, Francis Stevens, Charles B. Stilson, J. U.

Giesy, and Ray Cummings. In addition, Gnadinger reprinted outside material by authors ranging from Ayn Rand to Franz Kafka to H. Rider Haggard.

Steve Weber was a sometime science fiction fan and a fantasy book collector who provided much source material for Gnaedinger’s use in Famous Fantastic Mysteries. Thyril Ladd, Dorothy Quinn and Rick Sneary were all science fiction fans.

Dorothy Quinn, Bradley recalls, saw The Sword of Aldones in its earliest manuscript form, long before Bradley had the courage to show it to any professional editor (and long before she felt that it was in any condition to be shown).

Sneary, a longtime fan residing in the Los Angeles area, became a correspondent of Bradley’s when they both sent letters to the old Planet Stories. (The magazine included correspondents’ addresses in its readers’ columns, and many such relationships developed through this medium.) The friendship between Bradley and Sneary (although it was years before the postal friendship resulted in a face-to-face meeting) developed such warmth that Bradley dedicated The Sword of Aldones to Sneary.

As is the case with many science fiction fans, Bradley sought to emulate the writers she admired (in the sense of entering their profession, not imitating their styles or themes). Her favorite authors of the then-burgeoning pulp school included Catherine L. Moore, Henry Kuttner, Theodore Sturgeon, and Jack Vance.

These authors she read in magazines oriented toward colorful adventure—like Planet Stories and Startling Stories—rather than in the most famous science fiction magazine of that era, Astounding (later renamed Analog). Astounding’s orientation was more heavily technological. In the area of pure fantasy, Bradley remembers that she never liked Astounding’s companion magazine, Unknown (later Unknown Worlds) “because I don’t think the writers ever really liked or believed in fantasy.“2 She preferred the longer-lived Weird Tales.

Favorite works included the Jirel of Joiry and Northwest Smith stories of Moore, The Ship of Ishtar (1926) by Merritt, and The Dying Earth (1950) by Vance. She states that “Henry Kuttner formed my mind. what I tried to do in The Sword of Aldones [was] to make you feel that these are real people, that this is a world that might actually fee someday. This is what happened when I started reading Henry Kuttner. There was just enough scientific rationalization that I could feel, My God, these people are real. Even if some of them were werewolves and things. It was a real werewolf, a man who had something weird changing his bones so that he could actually change.”

Other writers whom she admired at the time were H. Rider Haggard, Sax Rohmer, the members of the Order of the Golden Dawn, and Mary Renault, in the earlier years of her output.

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.