Ditto what the previous reviewer said, I've got another thing that was wrong - the fact that in this book it was stated that all Comyn with laran were red haired and grey eyed when she previously described Dyan Ardais (who no one would doubt his telepathic power) as dark haired. Also, she made Danilo (among other things) red haired in this book, and in Heritage, he was dark haired. =] Just some additions to the previous reviewer's list!

Of all the Darkover books, this is the one that should have been either rewritten completely (a la Sword of Aldones becoming Sharra's Exile) or never reprinted. It was written early, before the development of many Darkovan characters and plots, and it quite simply does not make any sense given later novels.

Among the worst examples:

1. At the end of Sharra's Exile, Darkover has joined the Terran Empire (which turns out to be a democracy, not a monolithic Evil Empire out to destroy primitive planets). Given this, there is no reason for the World Wreckers to attempt to destroy the planet.

2. In Heritage of Hastur and Sharra's Exile, Regis Hastur is depicted as bisexual with a preference for men (or rather, for *a* man, Danilo Syrtis). Danilo is his own age, and is his best friend as well as his lover. The romance with Linnea may just *barely* make sense (it's foreshadowed in Heritage of Hastur), but Danilo's complete lack of jealousy (and his apparent age!) are absurd.

3. The "sex settles everything" ending worked *once*, in Forbidden Tower. It comes across as very, very dated and early 70s.

4. Given that the Comyn have officially surrendured power on Darkover at the end of Sharra's exile, the attempts to kill what Comyn are left should rather be directed at the non-Comyn authorities, such as the Renunciates.

5. Andrea Closson is supposedly out to kill the Comyn because they displaced the chieri. However, considering that chieri intermarried with the Comyn, and that chieri features such as polydactylity and laran are dominant, destroying the Comyn means that she's destroying the last remnants of the chieri. Huh?

If the Chosen Continuators such as Adrienne Martine-Barnes *really* want to do Darkover a service, they should rewrite this. Right now it's probably the weakest of the MZB-written books, and that includes some mighty weak books.....

There were some very good ideas here, and I suppose that theoretically the other (later and better!) books should have been written to be more consistent with this one, but...

Ditto on what the previous reviewers said about inconsistencies, and another one I noticed - Regis is described as fairly short in World Wreckers, while in Heritage he's 5'10" at 15 (and presumably expected to grow some more).

The romance between David and Keral was written well enough and with enough sensitivity to keep this from being a one-star review, but damn, I wish this had been rewritten as The Bloody Sun was....

Before she went on to write some of the greatest classics in science fiction and fantasy, Marion Zimmer Bradley, believe it or not, wrote some awful novels. This is one.

The "Door through Space" is an unremarkable (and almost unreadable) space-travel novel so like many others written at this time. It is pseudo-hard science fiction -- that is, a technologically-focused book with a little metaphysical nonsense thrown in. Marion Zimmer Bradley, when an editor, once said she would never buy a spaceship story in which "the spaceship was more interesting than the people". This is one of those.

That's not to say this book doesn't have some redeeming qualities. It's thin, pulpy-looking, and a looks good on the bookshelf next to the rest of my Bradleys. I picked my copy up for a quarter at a garage sale. I wouldn't have paid a penny more.