were more mature. When she wrote The Heritage of Hastur she decided she would not be "locked into" the immature concepts of The Sword of Aldones, which she had "dreamed up at the age of fifteen". She rewrote it as Sharra's Exile. Although the books written between 1958 and 1995 were intended to be stand-alone stories in accord with Bradley's "ground rules", with the publication of Exile's Song the story was continued from book to book with The Shadow Matrix and Traitor's Sun. Adrienne Martine-Barnes was the uncredited co-author of these books. This broke Bradley's "ground rules". Bradley was at that time approaching the end of her life; she died in 1999, the same year that the third book of this "trilogy" was published. Chronology This Darkover chronology uses the time period designations first provided by the author as "A Readers Guide to Darkover" in The Heirs of Hammerfell (1989). Some of these time periods overlap, particularly the Ages of Chaos and the Hundred Kingdoms eras. It's occasionally the case that the official readers guide places a book in one era, but internal plot evidence places it in another (or both). Additionally, Bradley was not particularly sympathetic to her fans' need to organize the books into a consistent chronology, and the timeline evidence from one book to another is sometimes in conflict. Commenting on this problem, Bradley wrote, "I have fiercely resisted any attempt to impose absolute consistency, straightforward chronology, or anything but the most superficial order on the chronicles of Darkover". Furthermore, in the introduction to the "Between the Ages" section of Sword of Chaos, Bradley concedes, "chronology in the Darkover novels was never my strong point anyway", after humorously quoting an old rhyme about a centipede who did not know "which leg moved after which". Bradley herself recommended that the books be read in the order in which they were written, rather than the Darkovan chronological order, as her writing style changed considerably over her career. In The Planet Savers, Jason Allison says that the city of Carthon is 5000 years old (pg. 24). In Darkover Landfall, the final sentence suggests that 2000 years elapsed between the colonization and rediscovery by the Terran Empire. In Sharra's Exile, published in 1981, Lew Alton says, in the Prologue, "Travel among the stars has strange anomalies; the enormous interstellar distances play strange tricks with time... The elapsed time on Terra was