The Gemini Problem: a study in darkover
| Zine | |
|---|---|
| Title: | The Gemini Problem: a study in darkover |
| Publisher: | Friends of Darkover |
| Editor(s): | |
| Type: | writing tips |
| Date(s): | 1971: Christmas present to MZB 1973: a FAPA Special Leaflet 1975: a chapbook by T-K Graphics September 1978: for Friends of Darkover |
| Medium: | |
| Size: | 36 pages |
| Fandom: | Darkover |
| Language: | English |
| External Links: | |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
The Gemini Problem: a study in darkover is a Darkover 36-page zine with text and graphics by Walter Breen, who was Marion Zimmer Bradley's husband.
It is a "fanzine dedicated to Marion Zimmer Bradley's fantasy works. It was originally published as a Christmas gift in 1971, but has been revised and republished for the Friends of Darkover in 1975. It offers tips on how to write like MZB."
Contents
- How to Create a World (3)
- Themes & Variations (10)
- How to Write a Darkover Novel (19)
- Toward a Sociology of Telepaths (25)
Printings and Revisions
Originally a xmas present for MZB, 1971. Revised and published as a FAPA Special Leaflet, 1973. Copyright 1973 by Walter Breen: ~ Reprinted in different format by T-K Graphics, Baltimore, 1975. Copyright 1975 by Walter Breen. Now EXTENSIVELY revised & updated. This NEW edition printed September 1978 for the FRIENDS OF DARKOVER, Box 72, Berkeley, CA 94701. Copyright 1978 by Walter Breen.
Gallery
front cover of the 1975 T.K. Graphics edition, cover art by Bob Lewis
TOC, inside front cover of the 1978 Friends of Darkover edition, note publication dates
sample interior page from the 1978 edition
Introduction
In the Darkover novels of Marion Zimmer Bradley, we are witnessing the creation of a mythos as well developed, as consistently conceived, and as thoroughly elaborated, as Middle Earth. Like Tolkien's epic (and to a lesser extent a variety of other private universes), MZB's Darkover cycle holds up a mirror to our own people (past, present, and developing) , and to our planet: notably to how its changes have affected people, their biology and their life styles--and more recently also vice versa.
Like THE LORD OF THE RINGS, MZB's stories make applied psychism into an important element, particularly among the planet's aboriginal humanoids and those humans whose ancestry includes members of those races.
Unlike the Ring trilogy, the Darkover events take place not in a parallel-universe Earth (though indeed they began that way) --nor yet in our own Earth during the centuries just following the destruction of Atlantis, but on a planet as alien as any of Hal Clement's and "about as clearly visualized. And again unlike the Tolkien sagas , each Darkover novel (a separate entity, plot growing out of character rather than vice versa) deals with one or another type of Identity crisis as one of a group of seven all but inexhaustible themes. In the present study -- which was not. shown to MZB before its completion (hence neither my conclusions or my mistakes are to be ascribed to her)--I intend to deduce some hidden features of importance about her themes and her methods, demonstrating that her total achievement far transcends in long range importance anything that might have been suspected from extant articles on this writer's work.
In any such essentially alien world, an absolutely paramount element has to be the be the way in which humans interact with alien planetary conditions: climate, flora, fauna and minerals absent from Earth, aboriginal humanoids, other sapient species. Lesser writers, such as too many on STAR TREK, are strong on background and--maybe--on plot; but the characters developed a distressing tendency to become puppets. It took Theodore Sturgeon to make a believable humanoid of Mr. Spock, and even_then only by showing a side of his physiology which Vulcan training was designed to keep out of sight. In lesser hands, Spock is too often a mask speaking all too predictable lines. But in MZB's work, characters are first strongly visualized, then placed into the Darkovan environment. "What happens next?" generates plot. She herself has said that if a character is clearly enough visualized, (s)he will create his or her own plot. (Of such elements is greatness made.)
Some Excerpts
Regarding themes:
...as I know, none of MZB's major characters ends a story in stable triumph: human life doesn't work out that way. A triumph is as brief as an orgasm.
These are vast themes, capable of infinite variation, and no one of them is exhaustible in any one lifetime, let alone in one book, were it of the scope of War and Peace. The extraordinary thing about MZB's achievement in the Darkover novels is that she has managed to say genuinely original things about each of these themes.
They will be considered in the light of her working methods — as remarkable as they are apparently simple. By "methods" I do not mean such things as a writer's preceding each day's stint at the typewriter with six sharpened pencils and a pot of green tea — nor yet laboriously constructing a chronology and genealogical tables for all characters to tack up on his wall for ready reference. The former is a mannerism, the latter a crutch. (Tolkien's famous maps of Middle Earth and Hal Clement's celebrated Mesklin globe are not in the same class, of course, nor is Heinlein's probably after-the-fact rough chronology of his "Future History" stories.)
Regarding influences and originality:
Naturally, MZB's avoidance of certain techniques — whether or not anyone else writing on similar themes would find them appropriate — has been interpreted as a wholesale rejection of the "New Wave" (if anyone could ever agree on whether any given story does or does not belong to the latter: a question not nearly as cut-and-dried as it may sound). However, it would be doing her work an injustice to label it as oldfashioned. True, some of her earlier stories (Falcons of Narabedla, Door Through Space, etc.) show strong influences of Kuttner and, to a lesser extent, Leigh Brackett; true that her methods are somewhat similar to those of Cornell Woolrich alias William Irish, whom she has long admired as a writer; true that some few of her names echo those in Robert W. Chambers' King in Yellow stories, which she admired as a child thirty years before Lin Carter got hold of them to reprint. True that her Darkovans are as prone to quote ancient proverbs as Sancho Panza: but then they are descended from old proverb-quoting Spanish and Scottish stock. True that other occasionally familiar bits come up from time to time: but then (as with the alleged "Influence" of Tolkien and Austin Tappan Wright, the ideas were "in the air" as her earliest sketches date years before The Lord of the Rings or Islandia ever saw print) this is only to say that any creative artist is, in general, neither the beginning nor the end of a series, but one in a long succession of influences, and likely to create her own unique recombination of a diversity of sources (themselves, if the truth be known, eclectic more often than not). Originality consists in the unique recombinations of selected elements jn a pattern of relationships not earlier perceived than by the originator. But the selected elements may derive from earlier sources, even as with Bach and Mozart.
The test, then, is how MZB has dealt with her major themes using the above methods.
Four main points, near the end of the zine:
1. SHE has now created what amounts to a sociology of telepaths: a special and extremely elaborated integration of themes I, II, Til, IV, into one immense problem framework. Contrary to all expectations, many cultural "universals" vanish in telepath groups; and some telepath adaptations would be unthinkable in ordinary human families. The Comyn member is a Man Divided because he also shares ordinary human motivations; the Terran or half-Terran telepath (Magda or Andrew Carr or perhaps some of you reading these words!) infinitely more so. Tn the H.G. Wells Country of the Blind, the one-eyed man--so far from being king--is instead the green monkey among pink monkeys. Hence the fear and awe some feel for Comyn and Keepers, and Terran ambivalence to them. Hence, too, the outright panic some materialists experience at the mere Idea of possibly trainable ESP. A path to transcendence of human limitations it. may be, but only MZB has shown us its actual cost, and the way toward a lifestyle compatible with such abilities.
2. SEXUAL ambiguity or ambivalence, homosexuality, hermaphrodism, al] fall into a totally new perspective , subsumed under Man Divided, as special or even totally natural manifestations of human variability. This was years before Gay Liberation; but since the Stonewall Riots, these issues have acquired a new relevance, a new poignancy.
3. LONG before STRANGER TN A STRANGE LAND, MZB has developed new perspectives for many controversial social and sexual issues. Now that Ace is finally making the earlier novels again a-vailable, simultaneously in fact with reprints of the later ones, the implication latent in her concepts will become potentially as far-reaching as those in STRANGER in the middle 1960's.
It is even entirely conceivable that new social experiments will follow the MZB concepts, as others did Heinlein's. Imagine that in a few years any one. or more among the following methods succeeds in developing latent psi into a trainable skill, the way musical talent is trained into professional reliability: a) med-Itational systems from raja yoga and Arica to Zen, b) George Randolph's BEYOND YOGA, c) Harold Schroeppel or his successor in "Advanced Perception" courses, d) "Mind Games" work with altered states of consciousness, e] advanced hypnosis techniques, f) Dr. Norman Don's experiments with biofeedback- - especially , as my son Patrick suggests, if in addition a computer is programmed to analyze EEG tracings as they emerge, signaling any "ramp functions" concealed therein. (Psi activity goes with these. Cf. Matthew Manning, THE LINK— pp. 14-18 gives the technical details.)
4. ANY resemblances between Darkover and certain Terran regions (Texas, with its machismo, frontier code and hatred of the far-off centralized government; Siberia, with its climate; Northern Snain, with its isolated mountain communities and its culture built on extraordinary elaboration of the concept of Inherent Dignity) are exactly as incidental as are the shapes of individual jigsaw puzzle pieces to the picture formed by the whole.
The last paragraphs:
ANY of MZB's best ideas are proleptic (as one expects of good science fiction) or even authentically prophetic, In WINDOW ON THE NIGHT (1956/unpublished because made overnight obsolete by Sputnik) are many correct anticipations of inventions now commonplace. But in Darkover novels, her prophetic ideas are mostly sociological, some of them oddly anticipating the anti-technological reaction of recent years even unto the ecology movement--as in one famous 1963 instance:
- "Resist incursions of Terran technology lest your planet be polluted, your workers enslaved, their work rendered meaningless, repetitively fragmented, your ecology destroyed to support the System." — Danvan Hastur, BLOODY SUN, p.115, anticipating WORLD WRECKERS.
AND one by one, dozen by dozen, her ideas -- whether "in the air" when she records them, or flung into the air by her efforts--are beginning to appear independently in print, fiction or nonfiction alike. Ideas in the air--independent invention- -must be the fate, even the long term task, of the best creative thinkers of every age. This gives color to the familiar and variously stated oriental proverb: Thoughts are reality, are things. The isolated hermit's ideas, born in the privacy of his ashram, create ripples in the cosmos, eventually affecting other minds worldwide more profoundly than the prime minister's speeches. (Versions of this abound from Lao-tse through Ralph Waldo Emerson to Alan Watts.)
WE may thus genuinely regard MZB as one of the greater hitherto unsung creative forces writing in the present day. We may and must profitably examine the implications of some of her most penetrating and disturbing insights: for they are of planetwide importance, and the disturbance affects mostly our own preconceptions and prejudices. And we must take seriously the worldview spelled out by her major themes--a philosophical system in popularized form. She has long believed in the necessity of certain types of nondistorting popularization. Her Method 5 alone would make this inevitable; and it is essential that certain ideas reach the public as is, rather than only after generations of filtering down through academic journals, for their implications obviously transcend in importance any academic ivory tower games. But then, this is what science fiction is ideally supposed to be all about!
IN this way we have begun to see how one woman's private universe, transmuted into a vast science fictional mythos, holds up a mirror to humanity--and, we may add, it is not the fun-house mirror of much modern fiction, but something at times awesomely near the Mirror of Galadriel.