to take the Renunciate's oath and make the lie come true. Rohana does not think this is all coincidence; Bradley suggests there is a higher power at work. Bradley often implies that fate is at work when a character uses the Darkovan proverb, "The world will go as it will, not as you or I will have it", which appears in nearly all the Darkover books. Consistency Bradley says, in A Darkover Retrospective, that she does not really like "series books". She also claims, "I am simply not up to the kind of planning and long-range forethought that a "series" demands", such as Robert A. Heinlein's Future History series. She mentions a fellow novelist who has a grand scheme worked out for 2000 years into the future, and every book must fit into the scheme. She thinks that is "horrible". Bradley says: "So these are the ground rules for the Darkover books, series or not; every one is complete in itself, and I do not assume that the reader has read, or will ever read, any other book in the series". As an example of what she avoids, Bradley cites Roger Zelazny's Amber series, which led her to believe that it was soon to be resolved when she was reading it, but then it wasn't. Another example is the cliffhanger ending of one of Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom books, "where at the very end of the book the heroine ... was stolen away and popped into some kind of giant wheel with cubicles which moved at a fixed rate" and "John Carter and his sidekick were left staring at the giant wheel until the next book". "Also", Bradley says, "... whenever consistency from book to book threatens to impair the artistic unity of any single book as a unit in itself, inter-book consistency will be relentlessly sacrificed... If I perpetuate anything in a Darkover book which I think could be altered for the better, I simply write it in the next book the way I think it ought to have been all along... I can't imagine why readers should be bothered by this kind of thing". In "A Note from the Author", published with Sharra's Exile, Bradley says that she wrote the novels "as they occurred to me" instead of in "strict chronological order" and that, as a result, the chronologically earlier novels were written after the later ones, and