Darkover Landfall
core novel 1972 Darkover
Record
| First published | 1972 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.86 (6,815 ratings, collected 2026-09-14) |
| Page count | 160 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780886772345 |
Synopsis
A Terran spaceship carrying a mixed crew and a shipload of colonists suffers catastrophic damage and crash-lands on the inhospitable planet Cottman IV, losing all contact with Earth and any hope of rescue. Stranded among towering red peaks, chemically hostile plant life, and a climate far harsher than anything they trained for, the survivors must abandon their original mission and improvise a way to endure, arguing bitterly over how closely to cling to Terran technology and values versus adapting to the world around them. Their uneasy, often fractious settlement becomes, over the following generations, the seed from which the entire Darkover civilization and its telepathic Comyn caste will eventually grow.
Where it sits
- Universe: Darkover
- Series: Darkover core; position 7 of 22 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Marion Zimmer Bradley
Notes
- From the series record (Darkover): Core Canon = the 22 novels published under Bradley's own credited authorship during her lifetime (1958-1999; some jointly credited with a co-author -- Mercedes Lackey on Rediscovery, Adrienne Martine-Barnes on Exile's Song/The Shadow Matrix/Traitor's Sun -- but always alongside Bradley herself). Per Bradley's own stated preference, publication order is used rather than the internal Darkovan chronology (Founding/Ages of Chaos/Hundred Kingdoms/Rediscovery/Modern eras), consistent with this project's deliberately-unrecorded-chronology pattern used elsewhere. Expanded Canon (the post-2000 continuation novels written entirely by Deborah J. Ross after Bradley's 1999 death -- the Clingfire Trilogy, The Alton Gift, Hastur Lord, The Children of Kings, Thunderlord!, The Laran Gambit, Arilinn) is deliberately deferred out of scope per the credited-authorship bright line (same approach as Pern's generational handoff), same treatment as InCryptid's and Solomon Kane's deferred Expanded backlogs; not populated as book records yet. The Door Through Space (1961) shares worldbuilding details but is explicitly not part of the Darkover setting per its own cover copy and is excluded. The Sword and Sorceress anthology series (which Bradley edited but did not herself write) is out of scope for the same reason Songs of the Dying Earth was excluded from Cugel's Saga.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings and are never conflated: a book's place in one says nothing about its place in the other.
- Publication order, within the series Darkover: position 7 of 22: previous The World Wreckers (1971) · next The Spell Sword (1974)
Sources
- Wikipedia: Darkover series
- sfadb: Marion Zimmer Bradley
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkover_Landfall
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Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.