Traitor's sun Book

I was all set to give this five stars until the stupid ghost showed up.

Traitor's Sun is the culmination of all the plots and schemes found in both Exile's Song and The Shadow Matrix, but is better than both of those put together. Maybe it's the fifteen-year timeskip that does it, since it allows Bradley to drop all of Marguerida and Mikhail's angst and pass it on to their children, where angst is a bit more palatable. Much of the first two-thirds of the book deals with the Terran EmpireFederation's troubles as the new Expansionist Premier dissolves the Senate and rebellions are gestating, including on Darkover where the local Terran official is thinking of using the chaos to overthrow the Comyn. The Comyn have their own troubles, since there's a significant group who believe that Mikhail is unfit to rule--and honestly, his story about time traveling and meeting Varzil the Good does sound like a pack of lies--and their intrigues keep them from implementing a unified policy against the Terrans.

The best parts are Katherine and Domenic. I have a lot more sympathy for Katherine's complaints than I do for Marguerida's in the previous books, since "woe is me, I have superpowers" is never going to make me very sympathetic. Katherine gets pulled out of her bed in the middle of the night by her husband, dragged to a frostball world in the middle of nowhere, and then learns that her husband is a telepath, her daughter might be a telepath, the people around her are all telepaths, and she's not a telepath. Now that's worth complaining about.

Though Traitor's Sun does ruin it a bit later by implying that Katherine is an empath, because of course you can't have a Darkovan protagonist who doesn't have laran.

Domenic was appealing mostly through his interactions with Illona. I liked watching him interacting with commoners (even if they are nedestro Comyn daughters) and learning that there are large parts of Darkovan society who don't think that the Comyn walk on water. I found it especially interesting that there's a fraternal organization on Darkover that wants a democracy, since the Darkover books tend to fall into pastoralist aristocracy-pushing with the idea that of course the Comyn are a better choice for ruling than the Terrans would be. I mean, they're born to it, right? It's nice to see that some Darkovans realize that red hair does not actually make you a better administrator. I know that the psychic powers are one of the draws of the books, but I'd like more Darkovan books with non-Comyn protagonists to explore that kind of viewpoint a bit more.

Now, about the ghost. The question of Mikhail's legitimacy are finally put to rest not by debate, nor by force of arms. Nope, it's deus ex machina--in the middle of a council session, the ghost of Regis Hastur shows up claiming that Varzil the Good has sent him from the Overworld and yells at everyone for not accepting his choice of heir. This is an unsatisfying conclusion, to say the least. Might as well have Varzil himself show up, or maybe Aldones descend in glory and put a crown on Mikhail's head. When you have ghosts show up, and since Evanda already showed up last book, why not?

I hope future books have Mikhail's adversaries assume he was using Varzil's matrix to trick them, because that's pretty obviously the most believable solution.

What I really hope future books go into is the blatant violation of the Compact at the end, though. I know that the Terrans had blasters, but using laran to rip an army apart with telekinesis is straight up Ages of Chaos-level warfare. Probably worse, because I think even in the Ages of Chaos most direct laran use in warfare was in telepathic confusion and playing on enemies' fears, while direct weapons like clingfire were first made in the Towers and then deployed by hand. They didn't have Tower circles just psychically bomb people's castles, but it sounds like Mikhail and Marguerida could do it. Once the worry about the Terrans starts to fade after they leave Darkover, are the knives among the Comyn going to come out again? What kind of balance of power is there if the Hastur regent can probably kill anyone else he wants with laran?

Without the spiritus ex machina this would be one of the best Darkover novels I've read, but with it it's merely good and requires slogging through two other mediocre-to-bad books before it. I don't regret reading it, but I'm not sure it's worth the hassle.

Previous review: The Shadow Matrix