Thursday, February 13, 2014

Jo Clayton Planetscape


Jo Clayton was another of the DAW Books fantasy/sf writers whose work I liked in the 1980s. This small planetscape  was from DIADEM FROM THE STARS, the first book in a trilogy about a female adventurer in an interstellar civilization. She finds a magic diadem headband which contains captive "virtual personalities" whose souls and memories were absorbed by the alien technology. The female adventurer finds that she can take on the skills of these alternate personalities if needed. Naturally, our adventurer has flaming red-gold hair. She is born and raised in a primitive desert tribal culture but escapes after encountering the Diadem. "Jaydugar" is the desert world that she escapes from, which is illuminated by a red giant/white dwarf binary star. Later in the trilogy she discovers that not only does she have healing powers but that her heritage is from a red-haired super-race in another star system. I think that inside every female fan who reads these books is a red-haired beauty with healing and psychic powers whose origin is not from Long Island but from a race of superbeings from another planet.

Brown ink and watercolor on sketchbook page, about 8" x 2 1/2", June 1981.

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