The Anything Tree & The Winds of Darkover

by John Rackham, Marion Zimmer Bradley

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction

253 pages, Double Paperback

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

A pseudonym used by John T. Phillifent.

Reviews

[Skjam! · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s time for another Ace Double, two books in one! Sometimes you’d get one novel that was much more popular than the other, and this is one of those cases.

The Anything Tree

This one starts with Selena Ash, socialite, discovering that her spaceship has been sabotaged to strand her in the middle of nowhere. The logical conclusion is that someone has discovered that she’s not the shallow party girl she’s been pretending to be, but a secret agent on a mission. (We’re not told what that mission is just yet.) Selena manages to figure out the sabotage before it’s permanent, but heads to the coordinates anyway to see what’s going on. Rather than hang about in empty space, she lands on a human-livable (according to sensors) planet in the neighborhood.

The planet isn’t in any registry, but it turns out there is one human inhabitant. “Joe” has been here a while, and has learned how to cooperate with the local vegetation. That’s very important as the plants here are mobile and respond negatively to aggression.

Joe would rather be alone, but is kind of stuck with Selena for the time being, as she won’t survive without him. And eventually, the people hunting Selena show up. Now the pair must work together to deal with the intruders. But is the Anything Tree something they need to protect from the enemy, or something they need to protect the enemy from?

It’s good that we see Selena being competent in the first chapter or two, as she’s rendered near helpless for a long time in the alien environment of Jensen’s World, before the last couple of chapters allow her to be competent again. Which is a bit better than Quest for Camelot, which this novel reminded me of certain scenes from. Mind, the ending kind of cuts off the chances of a sequel applying the lessons she’s learned here.

Joe is cut from the “back to nature loner” cloth so often used as romantic leads, and most of his background is easily guessable from clues in the narrative. (Especially when we learn what Selena’s mission is, and how her current circumstances tie into it.)

The villains are two-dimensional, but then they only show up about two-thirds of the way through and have very limited interactions with our main characters.

The most interesting part of the book is the plant and animal life of Jensen’s World; they aren’t exactly compatible with human lifestyles and Joe’s had to learn how to get along with or avoid most of the locals.

This isn’t a bad book by any means, but not a particularly good one, and suffers by comparison with its companion.

The Winds of Darkover

This novel takes place on Darkover, a planet where the local humans had natural psionic abilities in a much higher proportion than the people of Terra. As a result, their culture and technology developed along different lines, what Terrans would consider “magic.” However, for some reason, telepathy and the other psychic abilities have been fading from the general population, so a lot of the old technology has been lost, and civilization had somewhat fallen apart.

Relatively recently, the starfaring Terran Empire has made contact with Darkover. While the Empire has an outpost there, the Comyn that’s the closest thing to an overall government of Darkover is concerned about the introduction of Terran superscience destroying their culture, and therefore has limited what they’ll accept. Most of the Darkover stories involve individual Terrans interacting with Darkoveran culture and its “magic.” This story starts with an introduction describing the previous books and their approximate timeline. (Characters from those are mentioned in this novel.)

Our first protagonist is Dan Barron, who was an air traffic controller for the Imperial starport on Darkover. He’s been having hallucinations of being a completely different person in another place and time, and of a chained goddess. But he hasn’t told anyone about this. When he had an episode at work and nearly caused an air disaster that would have killed thousands of people (averted by a skilled pilot who is the hero of another story), Barron still didn’t bring up the hallucinations as he thought they would be treated as a thin excuse.

As a result, Barron has become a pariah in the Terran Station, but the brass recognize it wasn’t a deliberate action, and he has an excellent service record. So while he can’t be an air traffic controller anymore, they don’t want to discharge him either. As it happens, a Comyn lord has decided that optical lenses will not be too disruptive to Darkoveran culture, and has asked for someone to train a select group on lens grinding. And Dan Barron has lens grinding as a hobby! Off he goes. heading into the “real” Darkover for the first time.

The second protagonist is Lady Melitta of Storn Castle. The mountain fastness her family controlled has been taken over by Brynat Scarface, a cunning bandit. Though mighty in battle, Brynat cares little for the responsibilities of lordship to those under them and will be a cruel ruler. Melitta’s blind brother, the Storn of Storn, is holed up in a tower, protected by a forcefield but in deep trance, so he can’t be harmed directly, but also cannot rout the invaders.

Melitta is a very active young woman, skilled at riding and climbing, and has a bit of telepathy herself. When Storn contacts her telepathically and asks her to seek help from a distant city, she’s the one person in the castle who might be able to escape by the ancient secret passages.

The third protagonist is Storn himself. Blind since birth, he’s self-taught in the ancient arts of Darkoveran psychic ability. He knows by peeking into the future that Barron is somehow important to freeing his castle and people, so has been influencing events to that effect. But to fully take control of his destiny, Storn must commit a horrific crime, violating an ancient taboo.

This winds up being more science fantasy than science fiction, using sciencey-sounding explanations to justify what is basically magic. The story is very much in the planetary romance tradition, and quite well written in that type of story.

One especially appreciated feature is that Darkover is not a monoculture, but the different cultures aren’t defined by “hats.” The mountain people have different ideas about politeness and hospitality than the Drytowners, and the Comyn lords have different social rules to both (and have internal disagreements about what level and speed of social and technological change is acceptable.)

There’s a particularly difficult conversation between Storn and Lord Aldaran about the conflict between doing what’s best for everyone in the long run, and helping out an individual or small group in the immediate timeframe. Lord Aldaran has invested fully in preparing for the future, but that means he has no military forces to rescue Storn Castle. The bandit problem does need to be dealt with at some time, but it’s way down the priority list. Storn understands, but can’t be patient for the decade or two it might take before Lord Aldaran and his allies are prepared to free his people.

Surprisingly for a book of this type, there’s relatively little violence. The siege and overthrow of Storn Castle is over by a few days when we first join the story, and our protagonists avoid having to fight as much as possible. The final battle is rather impersonal though the implications are horrific, and we understand why the Comyn bans weapons that go outside a man’s reach.

We only get a little time with Brynat, but it’s clear that while he’s a cruel and brutal man, he also understands the rules of his society and is prepared to follow them when it doesn’t directly interfere with his plans. If he can just hold Storn Castle long enough, and follow the forms, the other mountain people may just shrug and accept him as the new lord of the area. The peasants have had bad lords before, and their affections might eventually be won or worn down.

The ending might be a little too neat, but it works well with this sort of story.

Content note: Death in war, threats of violence. Rape is done off-page, and threatened on-page. Storn briefly considers incest, which is not a taboo among the mountain folk. He steals a horse, and commits something all Darkoverans consider highly taboo (and the Terrans would also consider a crime even if the exact thing isn’t in their laws.) The Drytowners consider women property. Older teens and up.

The Winds of Darkover is available separately, and it’s probably much easier to find that way, or in a Darkover collection. However, if you stumble upon this Ace Double in a used bookstore, it’s worth picking up and reading the flipside as well.

[Valerie]

I wish I had the Ace Double with The Winds of Darkover/The Planet Savers. I have no intention of reading The Anything Tree. I read Rackham's Beanstalk, and found it to be a bad development of an intriguing concept (the 'beanstalk' in question is a space elevator).

The Winds of Darkover (c1970) was apparently only loosely connected to the series. Several of the central characters are associated with Storn, though Larry Montray (as Valdir Alton's foster-son), is involved in the story, as he exchanges knives with the Terran (Dan Barron) who is possessed by the blind Lord Storn. Valdir Alton is also seen, as well as a cameo appearance by Cleindori, who is also fostered by Valdir.

This is the backstory to the 'Sharra' books, but it's not critical to read it beforehand. Enough of the story is summarized in the later books that it's not necessary to read the 'prequel'. Other than that, there's a description of Carthon at about the time it was taken over by Drytowners--previously it had been more or less abandoned, functioning mostly as a supply depot and hiring fair for mercenaries. What it was before is not clear.

Note that in this book there's yet another rehearsal of the Darkovans' perverse arguments against literacy. Despite the fact that the Darkovans REPEATEDLY suffer severe consequences because of a general ignorance of their own history, geography, and technology, people too often undergo major ordeals rather than simply take the time to write things down, and study them in training. It may be true that there need to be labs, and that it's often better to learn from experts directly rather than read about the arts. But that's not always an option, and leaves people too vulnerable to losing skills before they can be passed on. Then somebody has to undergo a major vision quest, just to recover something that was once a matter of course. Suspenders AND a belt would surely be preferable. One wonders if this aversion to literacy was passed down to the Darkovans from their book-burning ancestors, and became so engrained in their training that people didn't recognize that it was a questionable tradition at best.

There's a Ghost Wind in this volume, by the way, and one of the inexplicable attacks by the Ya-Men. It's odd that it never seemed to occur to anybody to try to find out more about the Ya-Men.

Intelligent nonhumans are generally ghettoized and segregated in the Darkover stories, except for the ones who work as servants to humans (many of which are the products of genetic engineering). Even they are generally regarded as not really people, and as unworthy of consideration. In several of the books a Terran will ask about the status of nonhumans, and will be fobbed off with vague generalities which are probably not accurate. The Trailmen, for example, who are quite definitely PEOPLE, are generally treated as if they were not very intelligent monkeys. This is insulting both to monkeys and to Trailmen. The Terrans never seem to follow up on the questions, either.

Human Darkovans tend to be reflexively designated as non-technological, though they have not only matrix technology (variably widespread); they also have non-motorized technologies on quite a sophisticated level (not only wind-and-water mills, but also solaria and quite sophisticated greenhouse technology, for example). The technical level is about that of twelfth-century Iceland (which had a similar use of hot springs, as well). This is NOT a 'non-technological' society. The treatment of the human Darkovans as what used to be called 'barbarians' and of the forest-dwelling nonhumans as 'savages' is not only outdated, it's deliberately insulting.

The denigration of 'uncivilized' peoples was not the original intent of trying to categorize levels of technical and social development. Though the natural philosophers of the eighteenth century generally believed that their own level of societal and technical development was a return to the acme of Classical Civilization, and the ideal toward which others ought to aspire (despite the fact that their sciences and technology were only in their infancy at the time), they were puzzled that other peoples seemed to be generally satisfied with their own cultures, and that often, this satisfaction seemed to be legitimate.

Confederations like the Iroquois League puzzled the savants of Europe, at least partly because they had elements of participatory democracy almost unknown in European societies at the time (maybe in San Marino... Even Iceland had become considerably less democratic by the end of the Middle Ages). What probably contributed to the contempt that later developed was an attempt to devalue the ways of 'native' peoples in order to justify growing incursions and takeovers by Europeans. It was also, however, probably reflective of a degeneration of peoples under attack by violence, disease, and other destabilizing forces. Von Humboldt, for example, argued that the peoples of Mesoamerica and Northern South America were in a considerably degenerated state: that they had once been highly civilized, but that generations of internalized and external pressures had caused societal breakdowns. Other Europeans mocked him for these beliefs, though he could point to quite massive physical ruins indicative of fairly recently abandoned cities.

On Darkover, the spread of Terrans in two waves (first the survivors of the downed starship, then following the arrival of the Terran Empire) probably led, first, to driving nonhumans out of the lowlands (the nonhuman ghettos were probably almost never walled sections of the human cities, but rather in wilderness areas generally inaccessible to humans), then to squeezing 'indigenous' humans more and more out of the cities of their ancestors (Thendara was NOT the capital of any Darkovan societies before the Ages of Chaos. Humans may have moved out of Hali to escape contaminated areas, and many of them probably moved to Thendara).

The decision to move the spaceport from Aldaran lands to Thendara was apparently a deliberate decision on Lorill Hastur's part, probably along the 'keep your friends close and your enemies closer' principle. But though not all Terrans moved to Thendara, one result was probably to keep Terrans from inquiring too closely into the relations between the human Darkovans and their nonhuman neighbors.

Which brings up the matter of the Forge Folk. There's some implication that the Forge Folk were fully human (although from the description, they seem to hold more or less the same position that dwarves did in terrestrial folklore). They're described as being shorter and stockier than most Darkovan humans, but also as being quite capable of interbreeding with their neighbors (the aristocracy of Storn is described as having kinship with the Forge Folk in at least one version).

It seems, from hints in this text and others, that there must have been some sort of Inquisition-like 'purging' of the Forge-Folk around the time of the Ages of Chaos. The Forge-Folk evidently had more than a little skill in matrix work, and used matrices for mining. Later this sort of work is described as being exclusively done through the Towers, if it's done at all. And it seems that the altars of Sharra were forcibly abandoned.

The Sharra Matrix which later caused so much destruction was somehow contaminated from what was probably originally a dangerous but non-hostile form at some time. The events in this book are one element. But I doubt they were the only one. Legends of the binding of Sharra by the 'son of Hastur who was son of Aldones' seem to imply that the Comyn engaged in religious as much as technical appropriation.

One thing that disturbed me a lot more than things like the implication that the blind Lord of Storn might have an affair with his sister while in possession of another man's body (it's not, after all, clear what harm that would do) was the callous destruction of cave flora and fauna. The phosphorescent growths might have been harmful to humans, but so what? After all, how often are humans going down there? And there was surely an alternate route. I understand that time was short. But this isn't an excuse for wanton destruction.

One other thing: the 'bandit excuse' is in full force here. The idea that any isolated nobles who don't maintain what amounts to bandit forsts of their own will be attacked by bandit gangs (from where?), and turned INTO bandit hideouts with their former inhabitants either enslaved, murdered, exiled, or all of the above, is uncalled for. When the Lord of Storn and his sister appeal to Lord Aldaran for aid, the Lord argues that while he would willingly help, he doesn't keep armies of his own anymore.

So what happens? Lord Aldaran ignores the Compact in one way, and Lord Storn and his allies ignore it in another. It's not just that the weaponization of the Sharra matrix causes all kinds of grief and suffering later on. It's also that it causes all kinds of devastation in this book, as well. The Storns should, granted, have had friends and allies enough to prevent becoming an attractive target for bandits. But the bandits also are people. Yet they're treated as if they've forfeited not only their humanity, but even their individuality by attacking Storn.

Whatever kind of person Brynat Scarface may be (and it's not clear, really. He's individuated to a certain degree, but he's not consistent. Sometimes he argues that he's just behaving as people in the mountains always have, and that the Storns themselves were once such as he. Other times he argues that he's the rightful ruler of his followers because he's smarter and tougher than them. Probably he also had his internal conflicts. Otherwise, why would he feel it necessary to arrange a marriage by rape to one of the Storn women?), his followers are ALSO real people, with histories and motivations. Treating bandits as if they were faceless throngs with no selfhood or individual meeds, biographies, and obligations is essentially to argue that they might as well not exist--and wouldn't, as a threat, except for (quasi)-aristocratic chieftains.

It's also, tragically, to argue that the rank and file bandits have no individual personhood, and therefore no right to live. Probably one of the reasons the evocation of Sharra is made so hallucinatory is to keep the foci from being aware of the horrors they themselves are practicing. But this is a cop-out. They get to kill without guilt: which is PRECISELY what the Compact was designed to prevent.

Note also that a very aged Desideria Leynier appears as late as The World Wreckers.

[Dee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read the anything tree not the winds of darkover