Falcons of Narabedla

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

A further fantasy novel from the author of THE MISTS OF AVALON, CITY OF SORCERY, THE SPELL SWORD, STORMQUEEN and THE WORLD WRECKERS.

Genres: Fantasy, Science Fiction, Fiction, Science Fiction Fantasy, Ebooks

160 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1957

About the author

Marion Eleanor Zimmer Bradley was an American author of fantasy novels such as The Mists of Avalon and the Darkover series, often with a feminist outlook.

Bradley's first published novel-length work was Falcons of Narabedla, first published in the May 1957 issue of Other Worlds. When she was a child, Bradley stated that she enjoyed reading adventure fantasy authors such as Henry Kuttner, Edmond Hamilton, and Leigh Brackett, especially when they wrote about "the glint of strange suns on worlds that never were and never would be." Her first novel and much of her subsequent work show their influence strongly.

Early in her career, writing as Morgan Ives, Miriam Gardner, John Dexter, and Lee Chapman, Marion Zimmer Bradley produced several works outside the speculative fiction genre, including some gay and lesbian pulp fiction novels. For example, I Am a Lesbian was published in 1962. Though relatively tame by today's standards, they were considered pornographic when published, and for a long time she refused to disclose the titles she wrote under these pseudonyms.

Her 1958 story The Planet Savers introduced the planet of Darkover, which became the setting of a popular series by Bradley and other authors. The Darkover milieu may be considered as either fantasy with science fiction overtones or as science fiction with fantasy overtones, as Darkover is a lost earth colony where psi powers developed to an unusual degree. Bradley wrote many Darkover novels by herself, but in her later years collaborated with other authors for publication; her literary collaborators have continued the series since her death.

Bradley took an active role in science-fiction and fantasy fandom, promoting interaction with professional authors and publishers and making several important contributions to the subculture.

For many years, Bradley actively encouraged Darkover fan fiction and reprinted some of it in commercial Darkover anthologies, continuing to encourage submissions from unpublished authors, but this ended after a dispute with a fan over an unpublished Darkover novel of Bradley's that had similarities to some of the fan's stories. As a result, the novel remained unpublished, and Bradley demanded the cessation of all Darkover fan fiction.

Bradley was also the editor of the long-running Sword and Sorceress anthology series, which encouraged submissions of fantasy stories featuring original and non-traditional heroines from young and upcoming authors. Although she particularly encouraged young female authors, she was not averse to including male authors in her anthologies. Mercedes Lackey was just one of many authors who first appeared in the anthologies. She also maintained a large family of writers at her home in Berkeley. Ms Bradley was editing the final Sword and Sorceress manuscript up until the week of her death in September of 1999.

Probably her most famous single novel is The Mists of Avalon. A retelling of the Camelot legend from the point of view of Morgaine and Gwenhwyfar, it grew into a series of books; like the Darkover series, the later novels are written with or by other authors and have continued to appear after Bradley's death.

Her reputation has been posthumously marred by multiple accusations of child sexual abuse by her daughter Moira Greyland, and for allegedly assisting her second husband, convicted child abuser Walter Breen, in sexually abusing multiple unrelated children.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Craig · Rating 3 out of 5]

Falcons of Narabedla first appeared in the May issue of Other Worlds Science Stories in 1957, which was owned and edited by the remarkable Raymond A. Palmer. For some reason which will probably remain forever unknown, Palmer altered a still photograph from a wonderful little film called The Mole People and used it as the cover illustration for the story. The story is listed as part of her Darkover series, but I didn't catch any connection. It's a simple romp of an adventure in which a man is magically transported to an alien planet where he gets engaged in political turmoil, romantic intrigue, and armed conflict, in the tradition of John Carter. Bradley is now known to have engaged in some heinous activities, and one should remember the purpose here is to consider her works, not her actions. I enjoyed listening to this very well performed reading thanks to Librivox.

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Marion Zimmer Bradley (1930-1999) was one of a small number of female science fiction writers ( that I was aware of) in the 60s. She was best-known for her "Darkover" series which featured strong female characters and for her "Avalon" fantasy series set in Arthurian Britain. "Falcons.." is one of her earlier works, pulp fiction suitable for the pulp magazines, originally published in 1957 I believe. It's a story that's been done a number of times. In this one, a man has the strangest vacation ever. While on a camping trip in the Sierras, he wakes up to find himself in another man's body on another planet. Furthermore, he gets caught up in a conflict in which he has to save the world. I read it fast, forgetting who's who, so the story got somewhat confusing, but I just raced on to the end.
I can't help but think that this esteemed and even admired author was accused by her daughter of sexually abusing her and other children. As much as I like her writing, I feel very disturbed thinking of what she had done. I will give this story 3 stars but I don't think I will read any more books by her and I can't recommend her books to anyone.

[Jackie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this short novel more than I thought I would. While I didn't really connect to any character specifically, I was captivated by the story itself.

If you're a Marion Zimmer Bradley fan, then you don't want to miss this novel.

Wikipedia describes it as "marginally linked" to Darkover, but I see no correlation and feel wiki is misinformed.

[Laura]

Free download available at Project Gutenberg.

Somewhere on the Time Ellipse Mike Kenscott became Adric; and the only way to return to his own identity was to find the Keep of the Dreamer, and loose the terrible

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Other Worlds May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

[Mark Richard · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is one TRIPPY book.
You have this guy MIKE, but he's not MIKE, he's this Aldrich guy, he's on a planet called NARABEDLA which is sort of Earth in the FUTURE..... Sort of.......OH and it has TWO suns.

He then Realises he is Mike but he's stuck in this guy s body... hmmmmmmm

The idea that the main character isn't actually in the right body, you really don't care who or what happens to him or the people he meets.....bummer right, yeah bummer.

There's talk of 'dreamers' 'rainbows' and other seemingly LSD induced guff which really made no sense to me what so ever.

[Ken · Rating 2 out of 5]

Marion Zimmer Bradley has written some very good books, but this isn't one of them. This is the tale of an ordinary guy who suddenly finds himself transported to an alternate universe, trapped in a body that isn't his, and fighting its original owner for control of it. Intrigue ensues. I wanted to care, really, but the clunky narration and nearly incoherent storytelling kept me at arm's length. I finished the book because it's short -- but seriously, don't waste your time. There's a reason this is out of print.

[Brian Bridges · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is schlock. And that's okay! The author even sort of admits it in the Forward, talking about how she loved old pulp magazines growing up and was inspired by them. And I often like schlock, as well. Going into this type of a story, it's usually safe to assume that the focus will be more about the gimmick, or the world, or the twist, or the weirdness, and less about the depth of characters or the craft.


So with that in mind, did I like the world of Narabedla? Hmm. Not especially. It was okay. I appreciated that it was an original crafted world and not just a rehash, like Terry Brooks retelling Tolkein's Lord of the Rings. But MZB's world didn't feel very fleshed out or cohesive. There were toymakers, dreamers, a crimson tower, and a rainbow city? But I never quite felt like I had a good picture of the world and I never quite understood it. And I also never quite cared.


Overall, this story left me confused in several places. I'm sure MZB had a good handle on the ways in which her toymakers and dreamers operate within this world, but I did not. And I just don't think I should have to work this hard to try and piece together such a cotton candy story.


But hey, I finished it! And that's because it was only 150 pages! So if you want to give it a go, at least you know you can binge it, and even if you're not a fan, it will be over quickly! That's the beauty of little paperbacks.

[Tim Pendry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Marion Zimmer Bradley's first novel (1957) was a future fantasy. The story is nothing to write home about. What she proves to be good at is the creation of atmosphere. Otherwise it is yet another variant of tropes that will be familiar from Edgar Rice Burroughs and pulp science fantasy.

She does, however, show exceptional skill in one very difficult task. This is a time slip body swap story. A contemporary earthling possessed by a treacherous aristocratic from the far future is thrown into the far future personality's body.

Instead of taking the easy way out and having distinct personalities battle it out for good and evil and their respective female interests, Bradley has the primary 'Adric' (bad guy) core personality and memory retained within the body into which the good guy 'Mike' has been thrust.

'Adric' takes over for his own remembered ends while 'Adric' the current mind is in the past leaving 'Mike' with a problem of how to maintain his identity and not to do what is bad but only what is good. It takes skill to makes these torments plausible. Bradley even at this early stage has it.

Because the baseline story remains rather weak and is not always clear in its exposition, it should be classed as a light pulp entertainment and not much more than that but one that shows promise of more sophisticated work to come.

[Scott Campbell · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bradley’s first novel is an homage to the adventure-fantasy pulps she read while growing up. The problem with those pulps is that most of them were not very good and this book is no exception. A plot that is both simplistic and overly complicated, absolutely no characterization and clunky dialog make this short novel a real slog. For Bradley completists only.

[Ethan Jankowski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Falcons was a tidy, short read (that admittedly took me over a month between traveling, moving, etc.) that was quite enjoyable! I won’t separate the artist from the art, I certainly condemn Bradley’s actions in her life, knowledge I came by after reading this. I will at least appreciate the art itself for what it is - an enjoyable read.

[Chris Allen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was more novella length than book length.

[Joanne Pascoe · Rating 2 out of 5]

Published in 1964; read in 2020. Hard for me to rate against standards of the time it was written. Very vague connection to Darkover series as I see it. (oath used Zandru's Hells).

[Llona ❤️ "Così tanti libri, così poco tempo." · Rating 2 out of 5]

disturbante

[Tricia · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a short novella about a man who gets moved in time to a period with magic and no technology.

This was ok but not one of her best

[Torfinn Ingolfsen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked it.

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

I listened to this as part of The 11th Science Fiction Megapack. It was very interesting with will developed characters lots of action and misdirection leading to the conclustion. 2023

[Bob Hall · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I love her Darkover series, this one was a hard read for me.

[Andrew Brooks · Rating 1 out of 5]

Bailed on this story... I was finding it too disjointed to make any sense out of it. A matter of more than one level of intrigue going on combined with a bunch of dialog that skirted about the edge of things, not wanting to clearly mention something unmentionable? Either way it was too cloudy to continue

[Morgan Dhu · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was paging idly through my collection of ebooks looking for something to read, when my eye was caught by Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Falcons of Narabedla, which I had never actually read but have sometimes heard mentioned as loosely connected to the Darkover books.

Setting aside all considerations of Bradley’s quite reprehensible personal actions, which I’ve discussed here before, I’m not al that fond of her early writing at a technical level. It contained too many of what I find to be the least interesting elements of the “pulp” style - overblown writing, limited background and characterisation, and the sense of getting thrown into situations without any context or incluing, such that, if the character is confused or taken by surprise, the reader is not just equally so, but not given much information about what is happening to the character right now, from which some notions of what’s happening can be drawn.

Falcons of Narabedla is like that. The lead character, Mike Kenscott, is a man of the mid-twentieth century, a scientist what has been somehow strangely affected by a lab accident. He disrupts energy flows, shorts out electrical devices, things like that. He goes to spend some time in the wilderness with his brother, and his consciousness is somehow transported across time to what may be a far future.

He finds himself in the body of a man named Adric, Lord of the Crimson Tower, with only the faintest and most fragmentary access to Adric’s conscious memories, although he seems to function well enough in matters if habitual action, such as dressing in unusual clothing or getting around the Tower. He tries to tell those around him - a Dreamer named Rhys, a veiled woman named Gamine, Adric’s brother Evarin - that he’s not Adric, that he doesn’t known anything about where he is, or about Adric’s life, no one gives him any really useful information and so he’s left to figure things out on his own. Among the few things he does learn is that he has a controversial relationship with a powerful and not particularly liked woman named Kameny, and that unlike the others of his class, who each have properly bound and exploited the telepathic abilities of one of a group of people known as the Dreamers, his Dreamer is unbound and free to move.

Kenscott comes to understand what’s happened to him in this passage, which I quote rather than try to paraphrase:

“Once before, for a little while, Adric and I had touched lives on—what had Gamine called it? The Time Ellipse. That day they thought the lab was struck by lightning. For eighteen hours, while I lay crushed under a laboratory beam, and later under drugs in the hospital) he and I had shared a fragment of life somehow. But the escape had not been complete. Something had driven him, or drawn him, back to his own world.

And he had tried again, or had been sent back And this time he seemed to have succeeded. Was he in my hunting cabin in the mountains, cleaning fish for supper, curiously rummaging through my electrical equipment? Viciously I hoped he'd give himself some damned good shocks on it.”

But it seems that more than Adric’s memories remain, or perhaps Kameny’s “magic” is affecting him, for he finds himself taking actions that he doesn’t understand, that he, Mike Kenscott, would never do. At times Kenscott gains ascendancy, but the Adric personality seems to be more in control, a circumstance that becomes potentially disastrous as Kenscott/Adric finds himself caught up in a rebellion of commoners and Dreamers, hoping to end the rule of the Tower dwellers. Kenscott himself is in sympathy with the aims of their leader, Narayan - the Dreamer he is incompletely bound to - but Adric seeks to use Narayan’s power to avenge himself on Kameny, who challenged his power as leader of the Rainbow Towers.

And then, somehow, Adric returns, in Kenscott’s body, and forces Kenscott back, retaking his own body - now both Adric and Kenscott are in the same time and place, in their own bodies. Can Kenscott warn Narayan in time, and be believed?

It’s a decent pulp portal fantasy, but having read it, I have no idea why it’s sometimes associated with the Darkover books. Oh, there are telepaths and towers, but those are common tropes. The only actual textual link is that the characters sometimes swear by Zandru, but that’s hardly enough to build a link on. So, now I’ve read it, and need no longer wonder about it.

[Judy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I became a fan of Marion Zimmer Bradley when I read The Mists of Avalon in the 1980s. a book I have read twice and given as a gift to many women. MZB, as she is known to her fans, also wrote the Darkover Series (of which there are 36 volumes), as well as at least 40 other novels.

Falcons of Narabedla is her first published novel. For a writer who is known as being female-centered, feminist and sometimes lesbian, this story is a surprisingly hardcore masculine fantasy. But hey, everyone starts somewhere. Mike Kenscott is an electrical engineer in real life on earth, but a series of inexplicable electrical occurrences cause him to lose his job and end up in a different body on another world, complete with Rainbow Cities, twin suns, man-eating flowers, human-like falcons and naturally some dark deeds done regularly.

Our hero's main trouble is the memory loss connected with the body switch. After dealing with being in Narabedla against his will, he recognizes his responsibility to help the good guys, assumes the role of Adric, Lord of the Crimson Tower and gets down to sorting out the place.

The story is quite hard to follow, the battles are standard fantasy fare, but as usual with MZB, it is the characters who got hold of me and kept me reeling through the tale feeling about as amnesiac as Mike/Adric.

I am actually thrilled to think that for almost every year of the rest of My Big Fat Reading Project, there will be a Marion Zimmer Bradley book on the list.

[Mirrordance · Rating 2 out of 5]

Contrariamente a quanto indicato non appartiene al mondo di Darkover (se non per il riferimento al signore delle forge Zandru).
La sensazione è che sia una bozza per un racconto più ampio. Il mondo strano, ed i poteri sovrannaturali che lo caratterizzano, in cui viene trasportato Mike Kenscott è confuso e caotico. La storia in sè con una maggior definizione dei personaggi ed un approfondimento di quel mondo e dei poteri dei Sognatori e del legame con quei particolari amuleti poteva forse trasformarsi in un racconto avvincente ma il lettore, alla disperata ricerca di particolari e dettagli che spieghino gli eventi, rimane deluso. Una novella breve pubblicata agli albori della carriera su "Other worlds" e quindi da giudicare per quello che è. Un 'opera estremamente acerba e non degna di una vita autonoma ma ripubblicata sull'onda del successo delle serie di Avalon e Darkover.

[Lynne Page · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel certainly feels dated. It has that style that only books from the 60s or older can really convey. The author considers the novel science fiction, but it's more fantasy, to be honest.

Everything is quite vague, and all of the descriptions are rather to the point.

But overall, this book is a LOT better than the cover art suggests!

[Ranmaru · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Falcons of Narabedla shows Marion Zimmer Bradley's exceptional talent for conjuring up new, strange worlds. The story didn't grip me though and it almost felt as if Marion Zimmer Bradley herself had lost interest and just dragged it on to finish it.

[Anna · Rating 1 out of 5]

i liked the storytelling, but not the story. thrown into this complex world without much explanation as far as characters and the reasons for their actions go. idk, I was confused from the beginning until the very end.

[Tarma · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really really liked this story. It jogs back to when the 'original' science fiction/fantasy genre started; a simple, direct story about an event which happened and 'this is how it is'. MZB has the ability to write that one feels the magic .. the beingness of magic. Of wonder. Of awe.

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Book was alright, not my favorite. It had a nice ending.

[Marianne Thompson · Rating 1 out of 5]

I actually couldn't finish this book. It was terrible!

[Frieda · Rating 3 out of 5]

This has not been one of my favourites by MZB. Maybe the longer stories have more built up. It is very different.

[Rachel C. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Another proofread for Project Gutenberg. Lots of classic sci-fi tropes, but nothing mind-blowing.

[Janelle]

Dnf. Not my cup of tea