Misty White Towers And a Bloody Sun (Darkover)

[ase]

There are Darkover discussions going on across two different entries on coffeeandink's journal. As coffeeandink puts it:

Darkover! Planet of the Bloody Sun! World of broody redheaded grey-eyed part-alien telepaths who called their powers laran! Extended polyamorous marriages, thinly disguised consciousness-raising feminist groups stuck down in a medieval patriarchy, contradictory but strangely convincing world-building, mountains, cold, horses, virginity as a requirement for psychic power except maybe not, great dollops of the Golden Bough, shiny blue stones called matrices used to amplify psychic power, bare is the back without brother, what's done under the four moons need be neither remembered nor regretted, ohmygod I loved this stuff.

Let's have a moment of Darkover love. Many of the books are terrible - particularly City of Sorcery, Heirs of Hammerfell, and Two to Conquer - and have not worn well - parts of Thendara House come to mind - but who cares? The series had atmosphere and kinky telepathic romances and weird embedded author attitudes and such elaborate character relationships you could draw six-generation family trees. Reading the Darkover novels at 12 or 14 is just great; if I were introduced to them today I'd throw 'em across the room. But when I was a teenager I was hooked.

So, why should you read these? Honestly, I'm not sure you should. People marry their cousins, and lust after their older half-brothers, and have orgies, and fall in love with their obnoxious husband's ex-wife, and have touching slashy relationships right until the author realizes it's time for them to do their duty and sprog.

(Granted, no one character did all of those. But some of them did two of those.)

There's a particular sort of sf/f novel series which has nothing but evocative worldbuilding and elaborate character genealogies to recommend itself to readers. Everyone is related to everyone else, and each character on the tree has a story (novel plus) of their own. There's made-up vocabulary to describe ideas and artifacts and relationships that don't exist or aren't legitimized/institutionalized in the "real" world. Oh, and fake geography! (How many Towers can you name? There's Neskaya and Arilinn and Tramontana, and if it hadn't been at least a year and a half since my last reread I could probably get the rest of them.) Darkover does it, Asaro's Skolia series does it, the Vorkosigan series edges into it - don't tell me it doesn't, you can draw a four- or five-generation Vorkosigan family tree, and if lecture's really boring you can try to hang Vorvaynes and Vorsoissons on there too. Tolkien does something similar with the Silmarillion material. Following the concept of the "fantasy of manners", I'd call this the "fantasy of genealogy" subgenre or something. I'm not sure it's exclusively SFnal, it just goes well with some of the SF gimmes. (I'm thinking of romance series where an entire family gets romanced and married off one character/novel at a time.) It's trashy stuff which you'd never recommend, but which makes great comfort reading.

So. What was the last fantasy of genealogy you read?

Comments

[herewiss13.livejournal.com]

Best I can remember is Melanie Rawn's Sun-Runner bi-trilogy. First novels I can remember where it was necessary to _consult_ the family trees on a regular basis just to keep everyone straight. There are other, more complicated trees, but they usually weren't all characters "on stage" at the same time!

[ase.livejournal.com]

But was it fun? And were there magic powers involved? If you have things like, "OMG, character's grandmother was an Alton, s/he might have the Alton Gift!" it's a fantasy of geneaology. If it's just that character A's marriage to character B has political implications, it might just be Byzantine politics. Also, there should be characters in the first book who might not show up in the last. Having to consult is a little dubious, but wanting to consult marks a book as being a fantasy of genealogy.