Sharra's Exile

Начало книги

Like all previous Darkover novels, this story is complete in itself and does not depend on knowledge of any other. More than any other Darkover book, however, this one was written by popular demand.

One result of writing novels as they occurred to me, instead of following strict chronological order, was that I began with an attempt to solve the final problems of the society; each novel thus suggested one laid in an earlier time, in an attempt to explain how the society had reached that point. Unfortunately, that meant that relatively mature novels, early in the chronology of Darkover, were followed by books written when I was much younger and relatively less skilled at storytelling; and of all these, the least satisfactory was The Sword of Aldones, perhaps because this book was, in essence, dreamed up at the age of fifteen.

In 1975 I made a landmark decision; that in writing The Heritage of Hastur, I would not be locked into the basically immature concepts set forth in Sword, even at the sacrifice of consistency in the series. After Heritage appeared in print, Sword of Aldones seemed even less satisfactory—for years, it seemed that everyone I met asked me when I was going to rewrite it. For years I replied “Never,” or “I don’t want to go back to it.” But I finally decided that I had, in Sword of Aldones, developed a basically good idea, without the skill or maturity to handle it as well as it deserved; and that the characters deserved serious treatment by a matured writer. I decided not to rewrite, but to write an entirely new book based on events in the same time frame as Sword. The present book is the result.

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