"You cannot take hawks without climbing cliffs."

The ironic realism of this proverb underlies Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover novels. For every gain, there is a risk; choice involves a testing of will and courage. Darkover—a stark world of inbred telepaths, forest fires, blizzards, and a precariously balanced ecostructure—is not one of the bliss-filled utopias that fill books of speculative fiction. Unlike such places, in which, it seems, consensus and good intentions promote social well-being, on Darkover any attempt at change or progress carries with it the need for pain-filled choice. From the very settlement of Darkover, after an accident that caused colonists to crash onto an unknown world, people accepted the necessity of deliberate choice. (p. 73)

Starting from Darkover Landfall, in which the colony director explains how women, since their fertility is affected by forced adaptation to a new planet, must be sheltered, Bradley traces the decline of women's status from people who must be protected from hard manual labor because they are so valuable and continues (in Stormqueen and Two to Conquer) to reveal the consequences of this choice: protectiveness becomes oppression. By the time of the Ages of Chaos, women have essentially two options: to provide laran heirs or to opt out—with all the penalties that implies in a rigidly patriarchal culture—into membership in one of the sisterhoods. Underlying Bradley's work and her main theme of choice is specific emphasis on the roles of women on Darkover and the choices open to them. Since their roles are restricted, their choices are correspondingly restricted. Any choices outside the time-honored ones are laden with risk and made only with great pain and sacrifice.

The pain of choice for Darkovan women is especially apparent in The Shattered Chain, Bradley's novel about the Free Amazons, or, as they are more properly called, the Order of Renunciates…. [In] The Shattered Chain, the Amazons (or Renunciates) became a metaphor for female and human conditions on Darkover and elsewhere of being bound by old choices, refusing to remain so, and—through enduring the pain of choice—arriving at new solutions and restored integrity. (p. 74)

The Shattered Chain opens with a series of conflicts that directly concern women. Years after the capture of a Comyn noblewoman and the death by torture of kinsmen who tried to rescue her, she reaches out telepathically to touch Rohana Ardais, Lady of that Domain and a skilled telepath who left her work in a tower when her clan married her off. Defying her lord's ban on interference in Dry-Town affairs, Lady Rohana recruits Kindra n'ha Mhari's band of Amazons to rescue her kinswoman Melora. Because Rohana is the only one capable of telepathic communication with her, she must accompany the Amazons. So she cuts her hair, dons Amazon clothing, and attempts to adapt to Amazon ways. These actions are radical enough for a Lady of the Comyn. But she discovers that life among the Amazons is not merely a matter of wearing trousers and persevering in the face of fear. It is, as she learns, life in the face of one dramatic renunciation. And it requires a total reevaluation of all of Rohana's attitudes. (p. 76)

The chains that must be shattered in this story take many forms. There are indeed those chains that the Dry-Town women wear, signs of ownership, luxurious uselessness (a chained woman is one fewer person for the work force), and subjugation. But there are more subtle psychic chains as well. For example, the reason why Melora dared contact Lady Rohana was that she saw her adolescent daughter Jaelle "playing grown-up" by binding her own wrists with ribbons. Most important of all, the chains in the book are the enslaving attitudes of men and women….

The shattering of intellectual and spiritual chains is most pronounced in Lady Rohana. Although she has hired Amazons out of desperation, she shares many of the Domains' preconceptions about them…. She is surprised to learn that they do not seduce young girls, that they do not neuter women on a regular basis, and that they are kind, even motherly. Once freed of these attitudes, Rohana extends her mental liberation from the Amazons and examines her own world…. (p. 77)

Rohana's freedom takes the form of intellectual independence. In this new liberation, she questions most of the customs that have previously bound her. (p. 78)

At this point, Rohana faces the consequence of her intellectual freedom. If she decides that, yes, she is only an instrument to give Gabriel Ardais sons, she may either continue to live with him—no better than chattel herself—or she may free herself and accept the consequences of social outlawry. And if she is not merely an instrument to bear sons, she must decide what she is to her husband and whether her value to him is worth the having.

She has learned that even intellectual freedom—before taking any action—carries its consequences of pain and doubt. (p. 79)

Here Bradley demonstrates her understanding of human nature by allowing Rohana's reflections to run contrary to the preachments of those popular and critical writers who paint liberation only in the rosiest terms. For every woman who "ups and leaves" her responsibilities, there remain burdens that other people must shoulder. (pp. 79-80)

Experienced, mature, saddened by her own hardships, Rohana expresses Bradley's philosophy of choice to Jaelle: "Every woman must choose what risks she will bear." (pp. 84-5)

Rohana's mental image of "a great door swinging wide, both ways, an opened door between locked away worlds" is transmitted to [others, including her daughter Jaelle,] as the book ends. This door is a choice, taken in pain and renunciation, that enables people to go on to other choices that may produce joy. Opening such a door is a risk, but only through risk can true joy come. (p. 85)

Perhaps the most personal of Bradley's examinations of choice is her work with Lew Alton and Regis Hastur in Heritage of Hastur. If the Amazons represent her statement on women making choices, the characters Lew and Regis are choice makers who are important, personally, to Bradley's development as a writer. Both appeared in her fiction from the time when Darkover was a series of unpublished manuscripts about a place called Al-Merdin, a pleasant amalgam of Henry Kuttner, A. Merritt, and J.R.R. Tolkien. In the Al-Merdin stories, Regis is a youth out to vindicate a friend, while Lew Alton developed into what Bradley … calls her animus, her private voice in her fiction.

In Heritage of Hastur, Regis and Lew are portrayed as interrelated as their bloodlines and the choices each must make. Structurally and emotionally they are foils to one another.

Regis begins as a prince, accepted, but not gifted with laran. Therefore, he regards himself as an outcast, a feeling intensified by his lack of parents and close friends. Lew, on the other hand, is a superb telepath and has experienced the closeness of a Tower circle and of a loving family, but he too feels himself an outcast because the Comyn Council has refused to regard him as more than a legitimatized heir. Neither Regis nor Lew feel as if they fit in. And they both reach the same conclusion: their lives would be simpler if they could opt out: Lew to a Tower or to his renegade kindred at Aldaran; Regis—audaciously enough—into the service of the Terran Empire.

Neither wants any part of the Comyn, which attempted to arrange their lives, marriages, careers, even their thoughts. But where Regis rebels overtly against Comyn control after his friend Danilo is disgraced, Lew rebels against his father because of a cruel misunderstanding. Their reasons for making choices thus become important because they control the choices available. Regis realizes that "he, who had once sworn to renounce the Comyn, now had to reform it from inside out, single-handedly, before he could enjoy his own freedom." His choice is to rebuild. (pp. 85-6)

Regis takes on the burden of responsibility he does not want. And like the women in The Shattered Chain, he accepts the fact that on Darkover, choice consists not so much of shattering chains but of choosing what chains will bind him. Choice compels him to shoulder increasingly arduous burdens. And, like Rohana before him, Regis sees how these duties may produce satisfaction. (p. 87)

At the end of The Sword of Aldones, [Lew] is depicted as an exile. Regis becomes, essentially, the savior of Darkover by participating (The World-Wreckers) in an alliance with Terran telepaths and science. Neither is completely satisfied. Each has lost too much for that. But as Rohana Ardais, wisest of all of Marion Zimmer Bradley's characters, says, "I did not say I had no regrets … only that everything in this world has its price, even such serenity as I have found after so many years of suffering." Like Regis, Rohana has everything she wants but her freedom. That would have cost too much. Nevertheless, what they both make of what they have is Darkover's salvation and a tribute to Bradley's realistic understanding and exposition of human psychology. (pp. 87-8)