The Laran Gambit

By: Marion Zimmer Bradley

Narrated by: Alyssa Bresnahan

Length: 15 hrs and 48 mins

Publisher's summary

Terran child psychologist Bryn Haslund has her hands full, treating the traumatized young victims of the interplanetary Star Alliance. She’s tried to stay out of politics, leaving that to her charismatic statesman father, Ernst. Despite her best efforts to remain neutral, she gets caught in the crackdown of a protest-turned-riot. Then Ernst delivers a robotic speech in support of the Alliance’s tyrannical leader and goes missing.

With the Alliance’s secret police hot on her heels, Bryn finally locates her father in the research labs on Alpha, only to find that a mind-control device has been implanted in his brain. Searching for a way to disable the device, she discovers the records of a remote, almost-forgotten planet where telepathic powers have been developed to an extraordinary degree…Darkover, a Lost Colony world circling a dim red star far out on the galactic rim. In the desperate hope that natural telepathy can disable the mechanical device and free her father’s mind, she hustles him onboard a smuggler’s ship. When they try to land on Darkover, however, powerful winds knock their shuttle off course, and it crashes in a rugged, glaciated mountain range. As the shuttle spins out of control, Bryn cries out for help…

…and someone answers her telepathic plea.

Darkover poses its own dangers, from ice avalanches to bandits to gigantic carnivorous birds. Moreover, the planet has a complicated, often contentious history with Terra. When the Terrans rediscovered Darkover after millennia of isolation, the aristocratic Comyn struggled to maintain their unique culture, often at a terrible price. Using their extraordinary psychic abilities called laran, they forced the Terrans to honor Darkover’s independence. The vicious interstellar wars waged by the Star Alliance eventually forced the Terrans to withdraw. Two generations later, smugglers, pirates, and rebels still use Darkover as a hidden base, threatening to drag the Comyn into their own battles. So far, Darkover’s leaders have managed to avoid becoming a battleground for a larger conflict. Now Bryn and her father threaten to break that precarious isolation.

To make matters worse, the mind-control device seems to be tightening its hold over Ernst, the Darkovans have their own agenda, and Bryn’s newly awakened psychic powers just might turn out to be lethal.

Can Bryn convince Darkover’s telepaths to help, when they are deeply suspicious of Terrans and would rather remain forgotten? What are these strange new powers she’s developing? And can she restore Ernst’s mind before the Alliance enforcers track them down?

©2022 Marion Zimmer Bradley (P)2022 Recorded Books

If you're a Darkover fan

You will enjoy, great to revisit the world and this had flashes of what could of been a better story.
Each time the author took the safe path.
She can close to doing a modern take on the formula but instead she stayed true to the path MZB had walked.
I will always want more and maybe someday the writer will allow the newcomer to Darkover to be taken aback by the lack of modern stuff. I mean who wants to deal with chamber pots, no books. Instead, everyone new to the world is suddenly ok with wearing the same clothing and not being able to use a modern toilet, or eating food cooked over a fire. If you camped or done a long hike ir done without toilet paper in your travels this lack of resentment just rings untrue.

Long boring, and very dreary

It takes forever to tell the story. And I cannot blame it all on the author, because the narrator did not bring any life to book.

I don’t think I will be buying any more books by this author.