Wank Wednesday: Marion Zimmer Bradley Fanfiction Controversy
Ever wonder why authors can never read fanfic of their work? Part of the reason is today's Wank Wednesday, the Marion Zimmer Bradley Fanfiction Controversy.
Marion Zimmer Bradley was a prolific sci-fi/fantasy author. She was often involved in her fandom, reading fanzines and encouraging fans to write stories in her universes, one of which was her popular Darkover series. In 1991, Jean Lamb wrote their fic Masks about the Darkover character Regis Hastur, and it was published in the zine Moon Phases. Bradley's forthcoming novel Contraband was also supposed to be about the character Regis Hastur. The next year Bradley offered Lamb money for the copyright to Masks, which Lamb refused and Lamb tried to negotiate a counteroffer which Bradley refused. The events after that are a little muddled, but Bradley's lawyers sent Lamb a cease and desist order, and Contraband was never published. Bradley's team would later claim that Bradley could no longer read fan material because a fan had tried to sue Bradley, something that Lamb vehemently denies. Ultimately this incident, along side a few others, lead to major changes in how authors interacted with fanfic.
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I was going to start the great book shuffle-and-weed, but I can’t reach the start of the alphabet without moving stuff I don’t like my odds of moving by myself. (Ultimately I want every surface in the house to be accessible but we’re a long way from that still. ) D is working but I wanted to accomplish a part of this job, so I figured I’d weed books from lower shelves. I started with Gaiman, and then realized that losing our MZB books would not upset me, and would free up almost an entire shelf on its own. I checked with D and he agreed that as long as we kept the Darkover Concordance that would be fine.
Marion Zimmer Bradley was one of the people everyone was reading when I went to college. When D and I merged our collections, Darkover was one of the ones we needed to compare copies and keep the better one for. Reading Hawkwind was the catalyst for realizing that I preferred books for young people to books for adults (because it reads like YA and I liked it more than I had been enjoying MZB for awhile). But no one talks about her anymore and, unlike other favorites from those days, I feel no urge to reread and haven’t for years.
I’m not sure I ever did reread any of them, come to think.
If you want a tolerably complete set of Darkover, speak up. These will be going to the thrift store very soon.
Darkover: The Ages of Chaos, a game of psychic conflict -- "On a beautiful alien world, a race of telepathic humans control elemental energies which can destroy their planet" (Eon, 1979; with Michael Whelan box art)
Man, Ive read quite some books by Marion Zimmer Bradley and she has such a nice writing style and especially the Darkover series has such cool ideas, but the second wave feminism in it is INSANE.
Again and again we are following female protagonists that enter cult like communities full of women that just… hate men and think them useless but are also friends with them and hang out with them and in the end she meets her one true love.
And for one it gets repetitive fast and it’s just weird and unpleasant.
Not to forget that she has such weird ideas about monogamy and polygamy and reproduction.
Remind me, why do I keep coming back to her?
(Yes I know of her crimes and how terrible of a person she was as well but all the books I have of her are found and/or bought second hand and also she’s dead)
So. Once upon a long past time, I was a kid of 10 years who was given a book that said on its cover it was rated "13+". Well, I was a wannabe-precocious kid who mistook reading complex Fantasy for having a personality, so I read the damn thing. It was one of the Darkover books Marion Zimmer Bradley had written. It was several years after MZB's death (not that I was aware of that; at that age, I didn't think much of the authors of books that I read), but several years before everyone learned what, by now, everyone knows about MZB and her husband. Back then, there was no way for me to know that this particular series and 'verse had been created by a pedophile rapist and abuse apologist.
The book caught my attention, and I went and asked for more. The friend who gave me the first soon borrowed me the entire series, one by one, and the same way others got engulfed by Hogwarts or Middle Earth when they were young, I got engulfed by Darkover. It was Fantasy, it was Sci-Fi; I loved it. And while I enjoyed them immensely, I didn't have much more critical reading comprehension than your average pre-teen, or else some alarm bells might have gone off earlier. Back then, they didn't. I didn't analyse what I read; I built myself into that world, made myself a home there. It was a world of magic, powerful women, difficult relationships, its very own kind of technology and society, a play on speculative history - it was my very first great love among books, just a little more obscure than the usual picks of most of my generation because the friend who introduced me to them was a generation older and as such had books from the 1970s just lying around. And by now, I've reached the point where I taste bile whenever I see MZB's name. Oh well, it is a farewell comparable to what many young trans people had with the Harry Potter books. And rejecting books that had such an impact on me hurts, which I'm sure is an experience a lot of kids had with some revered media at some point.
From 10 to maybe 13 or 14, I read everything Darkover had to offer. I spent hours upon hours talking about them with my friend, I drew my favorite characters, I drafted up fanfiction long before I knew the word "fanfiction". There were parts of the books, parts of the worldbuilding that, even then, were a little dark for my age. Discussions of sexuality, incest, abuse in families and relationships, systemic oppression... I wasn't ignorant of these themes, but I also can't say that I fully comprehended how Darkover presented them. If I had, I might have noped out way back when. I knew the books discussed pedophilia, incest, rape and controlling, abusive, authoritarian relationships in the framing of its fantasy society - but I would have claimed with all the same certainty that these things were being condemned in the books. In hindsight, and with a look at a critical review of MZB's way more famous bestseller, The Mists of Avalon, I can't help but think that a lot of Darkover was actually, much like MoA, some form of apologia.
After MZB's kids told the public in 2014 what the hell had been going on in their home, I feel like her books very quickly made their way into obscurity - which is right and well; the generations who grow up without them will probably be happier and healthier for it. But I haven't seen a lot of later reflection by those who have read MZB, and who were influenced by her writings. I suspect it's because I'm born too late to be in contact with the people who did; that isn't actually my generation, as the books reached me by way of someone in whose time they "belonged". Despite MZB being occasionally called a "female Tolkien", her books weren't the evergreen The Lord of the Rings is. They were very much 60s' and 70s' books. But there's also a darker side to this: A few people whose opinions I've read who insist, even now, that even The Mists of Avalon, the darkest and most vile of hers in terms of apologia and disgusting content, is and always has been a feminist masterpiece. Which it is not. It's not worthy of reverence, it's not worthy of praise or of being defended. Because it cannot be separated from MZB's crimes. The concept of Death of the Author fails where the author made her books all about her personal views - and those views are a nightmare.
MoA will be part of what I want to talk about here, but my primary experience was with Darkover, the oldest books of which predated Avalon by about 20 years. I genuinely think MZB got a lot worse and a lot more blunt about her bullshit in later years, and perhaps that's part of why I didn't get it. Perhaps Darkover was too subtle for dumbass lil' me. This is the first part of what'll be a sort of serial essay in which I look into my personal history with MZB's books, and how I came to terms with recognizing, rejecting and condemning wholeheartedly what had once been my fantasy refuge. It's also a bit about taking a stance - by now, I should be enough of an adult to say out loud that MZB was a piece of human garbage who should never have been celebrated as a feminist heroine writer (no, not even "for her time") and whose ideas should hold no place in highly praised literature. And that includes literature I used to love.
One of my favorite DAW illustrations so far. This is from Marion Zimmer Bradley's Hawkmistress! I've never read any Darkover, though I grew up reading things like Lackey and McCaffrey, which I'm sure drew from it. This one's actually early '80s - 1982.
