50 Book Challenge 2012, book 32

Darkover: Landfall by Marion Zimmer Bradley

My mom used to have all of these books (this series is like 20 books long) and I read a handful of books somewhere in the middle chronologically when I was a kid. I recently picked up the whole series, including the ones written/co-written posthumously, and decided I'd like to give them a revisit. Though this novel is the second or third she wrote in the series, it's the first one chronologically, so I started there.

Most of the books in the series are more fantasy genre than they are science fiction, this book however tells the story of the Earth colonists who crash on Darkover and begin establishing a refugee colony when they realize they won't have their shipped repaired any time in their generation.

This book was written in 1972 and had some themes that didn't much surprise me like a much more relaxed stance on casual sex, birth control, and drug use (though it was fairly balanced in showing drugs being good for some and horribly bad for others). It makes a strong push for communal family structures with large intermixed poly families. I also noted Bradley predicting the existence of laptop computers in 1972 and using racial descriptors that would today be considered politically incorrect. As a time capsule into 70s sci-fi, it was nice. There really wasn't a compelling conflict to follow, which made the book a little dull (man vs. nature, where nature isn't particularly tension-building dangerous), but it was a far more engaging sci-fi read than the earlier Gibson novel.