I'm an admirer of Darkover. This remote, chilly world under a blood-red sun … is a marvellous creation—and though the same characters, or their parents or children, wind in and out of the books and though there is a prevalent stock theme (the collision of Darkovan and Terran, the latter discovering strange affinities) yet the various books of the cycle aren't formulaic or mere lead-ons from one to the others; all exist solidly and independently, some for better, some for worse. (p. 92)

[Darkover Landfall and The Spell Sword are], in the chronology of Darkover, the first two novels—though, since Bradley dips into the Darkovan mythos when and where she pleases, not the first two to be written by any means. The cover calls them "science fantasy", with suggestions of Sword & Sorcery, and for a long time I confess I was put off entering Darkover by the aura of mighty-thewed barbarians hefting cutlasses, priestesses in negligée, eldritch forces and warring fiefs that emanated from the Ace and DAW paperbacks…. Not a bit of it, though. Good solid sf, this. A real culture is here, as well-realized as Le Guin's Gethen, not a wish-fulfilment one. The paranormal is intelligently handled. The swordplay and "primitivism" is all appropriate, necessary, and vital.

Yet is this the place to start in on Darkover? I don't really think so. These two novels are comparatively minor ones in the cycle—by far the better of the two, The Spell Sword, paling beside its mature successor The Forbidden Tower…. The events that happen after Spell Sword are much more harrowing and gripping—and the way Bradley organises her book there's no need to read the predecessor first to appreciate the successor to the full. And Darkover Landfall—the only work set before the Terrans arrived on Darkover in force, two millennia earlier when a human starship of colonists crashed, is entirely disconnected from the rest of the cycle—a prelude, and almost an unnecessary one…. [If] you start here, in a minor key, be assured that there are major keys already played elsewhere. (pp. 92-3)