The Sword of Aldones Read Free Page B

before and since in SF and even rarer in fantasy or sword-and-sorcery; the idea that, as the hero has more capabilities than the average man, he also has more capacity to feel strongly about what happens to him. Lew Alton, in this book, is living with the knowledge that years ago, saving his people from an extra-dimensional horror, his young and much-beloved wife had been killed in the crossfire. The usual “hero,” needless to say, usually regarded this sort of catastrophe as just part of the scenery. Conan’s various girls get stabbed, eaten by dragons, or strangled by Bems with monotonous frequency; he never seems to remember the litter of bodies in the wake of his sword. The villains seem to care even less. Yet I reflected that one side’s evil rebel is the other side’s valiant freedom fighter; the villain of any given story would be the hero of his own. If they happened both to genuinely love the girl who died, the seeds of a resolution to their blood-feud lay in that very fact.
    So I seem to have originated the villain who is not evil or wicked, but just the hero of the counter-establishment. I hoped, actually, to provoke comment as to whether the villain was not a better man, fighting for a more worthy cause, than the hero, and the hero simply a good man fighting misdirectedly for a lost cause. Robert E. Lee is a hero, but nevertheless he fought on the side of tyranny and slavery.
    I was also sick and tired of the hero who took all his slashes and scars for granted. In most books the interesting scars on the faces of the heroes are just what the old manuals on how to write fiction used to call “a tag of character”; it never occurred to anyone that a scarred hero might actually suffer self-conscious agonies about how messed-up he looked. And also, Lew Alton had lost a hand, and I went right out of the hero tradition by making him resent it and even have trouble actually handling things.
    To the extent that Bradley achieved these objectives The Sword of Aldones is successful as a novel, from the viewpoint of art. (From the commercial viewpoint, the yardstick is presumably some product of total sales and years in print. The Sword of Aldones has done amazingly well by both of these measurements.)
    As for the failings of the book as seen by its author, Bradley recently characterized these broadly as “puppy fur problems.“8 This is completely understandable if it is remembered that The Sword of Aldones is the conception of a 15-year-old mind. The book is full of the romanticism, posturing, and overstated dramatics to which the adolescent mind is subject. Even though the book was not actually written until the author was 19, and revised for publication when she was past 30, it is still the book conceived by the-author-as-15-year-old.
    From a more literary-technical point of view, Bradley assesses the shortcomings of the book in these words:
    Especially in the beginning of the book, too many episodes are happening. In the first three chapters of the book too many people keep turning up for all the wrong reasons. And disappearing again. And you never really did find out why it was so urgent to get the gun away from Lew. You never found out what all the sound and fury was about.
    It was ill-conceived and not too well thought out. It was a lot of adventure but there wasn’t too much behind [it]. It was all busy-work.
    And yet, the book has its appeal. Once more, Bradley assesses this as a function of its urgency. This she attributes in part to the first-person narration (the narrator, Lew Alton, seems to live in a state of uninterrupted crises) and in part to the emotion, unusual if not unique in adventure science fiction at the time of The Sword of Aldones (and not overly common today). “There’s the poor man bleeding all over the page,” Bradley says, “you have to care.”
    Today it is not uncommon for women to write science fiction from the viewpoint of male characters. Bradley does so frequently although