It’s been a long voyage since the first post in this series. Five years! It’s a tribute to the range and extent of Andre Norton’s work that I’m still here and that you all are still here with me. I haven’t loved every book of hers that I’ve read or reread, but I have loved the journey, and I have even more respect for her now than I did when I began.
I’ve often repeated the things she doesn’t do. She doesn’t do complex or nuanced characters, or character development beyond the bare basics. Her plots are very much in charge, to the point that characters will act and move without volition, simply because the plot requires them to.
She is not a prose stylist. Her writing is serviceable. It’s there to do the job of moving characters through her clearly delineated and firmly constructed plots.
Once in a while she may run out of plot halfway through and start the same sequence of events all over again, presumably to fill up the word count. Or conversely and much more often, she will reach the end of her word count and have to wrap everything up in a couple of pages or even a couple of paragraphs.
She has quirks and biases, as do we all. She has an ongoing hate-affair with toads and toadlike beings, which spills over into a general tendency to equate physical ugliness with evil. In her worlds as in her characters, there’s not much nuance, and little ambiguity. What you see, for the most part, is what you get.
Even when something looks fair and is foul, there are clear signals that This Is Bad. The garden of evil overstates its case; its beauties are excessive, its colors too bright, its scents cloying. The wicked queen or the cruel stepmother is too focused on her looks. She’s cruel and shallow and vain, and she has minions who reflect her darker side. You know as soon as you meet her (or him) that this is an antagonist.
And yet, what Norton does do, she does as well as anyone out there. She is a master of pacing. Her plots move, and they pull the reader right along with them. She knows how to keep the pages turning.
She builds worlds with a clear and present sense of joy in her own imagination. She loves to fill them with the weird and the wonderful. Whether magical or science-fiction-alien, her worlds are full of flora and fauna both strange and familiar.
She stretches her own talents and her readers’ imaginations by trying to show truly alien minds and thought processes—not all of which inhabit other planets. Humans aren’t the only intelligences in her universes. Some of those are beyond human comprehension. Some are benevolent, some malevolent, and many are simply indifferent.
Buy the Book
Seasonal Fears
Best of all, at least for me, she loves the idea of animal companions. Cats in particular, or beings like cats. Norton was a cat person, and that shows in novel after novel and story after story. Over and over again, her characters form bonds with creatures in animal form, either straightforward animal intelligences like the ones in the Beast Master series, or beings of at least human intelligence, such as the mysterious alien, Eet.
The point she makes, continuously and consistently, is that the universe is vast and varied, and humans are not at the center of it. Nor is one variety of human the measure of all others. She strove to portray diverse characters and diverse cultures—not always successfully or with sufficient examination of her own White, middle American assumptions. But she tried. She did her best to do justice to Black and Native American characters in particular, which is still an American-centric view, but it’s not purely White-centric.
It really is amazing how prolific Norton was, and how many genres she managed to write and publish in. She’s best known for her science fiction, and for the grand work of science fantasy that is the Witch World. She wrote mysteries, thrillers, boys’ adventure stories, historicals, Gothic romances. She tried her hand at the medieval beast fable. She wrote for adults, for teens, for younger readers.
She was tireless. What’s even more amazing is how little sense I got that she grew bored with the requirements of the different genres. She repeats plots and character types and themes over and over, but there’s always something fresh there, something a little different, some reason to keep reading, even when I know how it has to end. The familiar tropes bring a sense of comfort. I know what I’m getting here. I can strap in and let her take me on this latest voyage, whether it’s to a world I’ve known and loved before, or one I’ve just now encountered.
It’s no wonder she was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America as they were known at the time, and that she was awarded the Gandalf Award as a grand master of fantasy, and that she received the Life Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Convention. She wrote science fiction, she wrote fantasy, she crossed the genres early and often, and she did it with confidence. She knew exactly who she was as a writer, and what she wanted to do.
Norton brought so many readers into both science fiction and fantasy. She had a gift for telling a story, and a gift for building strange new worlds, and a gift for opening those worlds to her readers. She came back again and again to a particular kind of character: young, alone, isolated from the world they live in; orphaned or disconnected in some way from their family; thrust into situations they were never trained or prepared for.
They find their way through. They not only survive, they triumph. And in the process, they find family. They’re no longer alone. They’re a part of something bigger than themselves, doing things well worth doing, whether saving the world or making a home for themselves and the hearts’ companions they’ve found along the way. Or, usually, both.
This is a powerful theme, and she is masterful in her development of it. She assures her readers that however terrible her characters’ situations are, they will come through. They will find a place that’s theirs, and people (in whatever shape or form they may be) who feel the same way and want the same things.
She gives her readers what they need, time after time. She keeps her promises. And above and beyond all that, she shares. She welcomes other writers into her worlds. She turns them loose and lets them play, sometimes brilliantly, sometimes less so, but always with grace and generosity.
I knew when I started this series that Andre was an amazing person. Having read almost every word she wrote, and taken time to think about each of her numerous novels and many of her collaborations, I have nothing but admiration for the body of work she left, and the influence it’s had on our genre. She showed so many of us what was possible; what our imaginations could do, and where they could take us.
We’re in a different world now than the one she knew and wrote in. But she saw it coming, and she did her best to lay the foundations for it. I like to think she would have loved to the depth and breadth of the genre as it now, the level of talent we’re seeing, and best of all, from the point of view she showed us, the variety and diversity of people who are writing and publishing.
It’s not a perfect world, or even close, but neither were the worlds Norton created. She knew that humans are a difficult species, much prone to sabotaging itself. And yet she held on to hope. That’s a good example to follow.
Judith Tarr has written historicals and historical fantasies and epic fantasies and space operas, many of which have been published as ebooks. She has won the Crawford Award, and been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award and the Locus Award. She lives in Arizona with an assortment of cats, a blue-eyed dog, and a herd of Lipizzan horses.
I’m honestly kind of staggered at the number of books Norton wrote. I thought I had read a lot of her output, but not even close. It’s also been fascinating to discover the variety of genres in which she wrote. My hat’s off to her!
My first Norton was a children’s book, called LAVENDER GREEN MAGIC, and I followed that up with WRAITHS OF TIME. Since both featured Black characters, I thought she might be Black. I’m glad that your survey of her works made note of the fact that she wanted to diversify the fantastic, in her own way. My favorite thing to do when I was young was go to the library and find new Norton books. There are so many!
Years ago, I belonged to a subgenre group of the Romance Writers of America for fantasy, paranormal and science fiction romance writers. Back then, we used an email group, probably Yahoogroups, to communicate with each other. Someone shared an email about Andre Norton being very ill, and she was feeling very down about her career. Every last one of us, the unknown and the Name writers, said we were writing what we were writing because of Andre Norton. She showed us that girls could have adventures and succeed. It was a very powerful lesson to learn to those for us who were Boomers who had been told that we weren’t welcome or capable of writing important guy fiction. The state of fantasy, science fiction, and paranormal fiction would not be the same without this woman. She will never be forgotten if we have our say.
Andre Norton (along with Rosemary Sutcliff and Tolkien) helped me survive middle school. My family lived overseas between 5th and 7th grades and when we returned I was quickly assigned to role of school outcast and universal punching bag. Norton’s stories helped me understand that personal integrity and doing something meaningful was more important than what other people thought.
Thank you for the reread!
Now can we do a Judith Tarr re-read? That has truly my progression, from Andre Norton and Anne McCaffrey to Judith Tarr, Barbara Hambly and Robin McKinley as I grew older.
Any chance we can can get your list of top 10 Norton books for those new to her? (Not just kids)
I have enjoyed this reread. I’m in my mid-60s and attribute my long preference for SFF to the year I was 10, when I read both The Hobbit and Norton’s Time Traders. I read a lot, but not all, of her works – for some reason the Witch World books never really connected for me as well as her SF did. But it was a great launch.
MByerly, that’s interesting to hear about the RWA subgroup. It makes perfect sense to me, even though nobody could consider Norton’s writing romantic.
It’s been wonderful. Thank you for committing so much time and energy to it.
Now to get her onto the acting map…
Thank you! Like others I thought I’d read a lot of Norton’s work, but your series has shown me how much more there is. I’m not sure how many I’ll read, but it’s nice to know that if I need it there is more from a writer who, as you say, I can depend on for a particular kind of story.
Thanks for this wonderful column on a wonderful author. While I didn’t read much of Norton’s fantasy, I adored her science fiction.
Thank you for a fantastic series covering a wonderful and important author.
Like so many folks, I grew up reading Norton from my local library. The crumbling, pulp copy of “Postmarked the Stars” with the giant ant on the cover will stick with me forever, I think.
Norton brought so many readers into both science fiction and fantasy.
When she was announced as GoH at Noreascon 3 (1989), part of the announcement observed that a lot of the concom wouldn’t be in SF without her. ISTM she was a primal YA author: as you note, there are an assortment of wrting flaws to older eyes (I had a hard time getting through some of the books I hadn’t read when young), but a flair for story — and there’s also a refusal to talk down to readers or simplify on the assumption that they couldn’t cope. The latter is something a lot of non-prime YA authors miss.
In addition to having Black and Native American lead characters at a time when that was … unfashionable …, she also did stories about people stuck in difficult circumstances — analogous to the poor of any ]race[, not to the unrecognized-hero types that were common in books of the 1950’s and 1960’s, and not succumbing to the narrative that poverty represents moral failure.
I echo @11’s thanks; I hadn’t realized how many collaborations she’d done later in life, and have enjoyed some of the ones you pointed to as good.
I just stumbled upon this post, and now have the entire reread to go back for! Andre was definitely a gateway author for me. Her works, along with the Heinlein juveniles, taught me to look for that yellow rocket-and-atom sticker on books in the library, and then to look for specific authors on the paperback spinner racks at the newsstand. Which lead to the wonderful Ace Doubles. I was hooked for life, and it was definitely due to Andre Norton. Thank you!
An odd small thing I’ve noticed about Andre Norton: I think she was the earliest SF writer I ever saw not trust the cops. Or rather, there was some SF where you couldn’t trust the cops–but that was generally because the society was a dystopian dictatorship that needed to be overthrown and so the cops were the secret police and obviously villains. So it could happen, but if so it was an anomaly, a plot feature.
But in Andre Norton, you can’t trust the cops (eg the Patrol) simply because you’re low status and an outsider, and they’re the cops–they have their own agenda and your welfare isn’t it. In general there was this somewhat seamy social realism Norton did that would never have occurred to, say, Isaac Asimov or Hal Clement or Robert Heinlein. They were doing Hercule Poirot, she was doing Philip Marlowe. I’d say modern SF has tended to follow Norton in that direction.
Thanks for the reread. Norton has long been one of my favorite writers. I can remember finishing a book of hers with a sigh of satisfaction and looking at the book and wondering how she fit so much story into such a slim volume.
Bravo! I’m a long-time Andre Norton fan. Her novels take up an entire double-stacked shelf of the paperback book collection I amassed as a teen. Count me as another reader who Norton helped to survive middle school! I identified with her alienated young heroes who were thrust into situations they had never encountered or even envisioned. Particularly strong for its era is her portrayal of the galactic underclass: poor people, refugees, minorities, and outcasts of all sorts who dwell on the margins of society.
I’m also a big fan of her Witch World series, which oscillates between high fantasy and horror tropes. Her tapestry is broad and intricate: Simon Tregarth and other exiles from modern Earth, the nun-like Estcarp witches, political intrigue with Karsten, invasion and war in High Halleck, and general weirdness among people with strange psychic powers.
The journeys through underground caverns and toad-like aliens did get a bit repetitive. Some of her attitudes are a bit dated. But I’d still recommend Norton any day.
@9 RWA local chapters were very big on training the new generation of writers, the MWA and SFWA was more interested in the published authors, so many now famous sf, fantasy, and mystery writers got their training there which helped female writers when both markets opened up to female authors and more emotional stories in a big way. Some of us instead went into paranormal romance, fantasy romance, and science fiction romance because the famous writers of romance who published the first “weird” romances and their editors didn’t have a clue including having humans evolving on Neptune. (Amanda Quick/Jayne Ann Krentz is the exception when she became Jayne Castle, too.)
Special interest chapters like the one for science fiction and fantasy and one for mystery were formed when the technology for emails for groups opened up.
My own journey into science fiction romance was a romance author who thought sexual slavery was sexy-time fun so I thought to myself, “Wouldn’t it be interesting to have a human colony where the men were being enslaved and brutalized for women’s sexy-time fun and to breed babies, and have a kidnapped Earth male who didn’t care for that idea, but he finds the perfect ally in a local female scientist.” Her first comment, “He’s not a slave. He’s a genius scientist.” His best friend who was also kidnapped discovered the horrors of rape and brutalization. Sorry about that needed subplot, Kellen.
One of the great benefits of being a newspaper features writer was the chance to meet and interview a wide array of personalities. And sometimes you get to meet your childhood heroes. Andre Norton was one of my favorite writers when I was a kid, an almost mythic figure. Much to my delight, she was living in Orlando part of the time when I was book critic for The Orlando Sentinel, and I met and talked with her several times. She was unassuming but personable as she discussed her work, books, cats and book jacket art. She also appreciated that I still had my original paperback copies of several of her books.
Thanks for the reread — a reminder that I still have more Andre Norton books to read.
First started reading Andre Norton when I was 10 years old, living in the Bronx, and going to a public library whose children’s librarian was an SF fan—her daughter later married Ted White. Got to thank Norton for her wonderful books at that Noreascon that Chip (#14) mentions. Published an interview with her in my ALGOL, and reused Emsh cover art that first appeared on her books on the covers of my ALGOL and SCIENCE FICTION CHRONICLE. A wonderful author, still have a shelf full of her books, and last month paid way too much for a hardcover edition of THE STARS ARE OURS!, a book which made an enormous impression on me when I first read it as half an Ace Double more than 60 years ago!
Thank you all for the kind words, and for coming along on this long voyage–both those who have been with me for a while and those who have just boarded. It’s been an honor and a pleasure. Norton’s work is sometimes dated, but so much of it is still relevant and timely. She deserves her status as one of the greats in the field.
Thank you Judith for a long and fun slog thru the words of Andre Norton. Took me back to 1969 and a summer of reading every Norton book the library had. I think what i noticed first were the amazing hard cover art by Richard Powers, and then the stories got me hooked, all of dark futures (xiks in Beast Master destroying the earth bothered me for weeks) that seemed to turn out well in the end. She would sketch a world quite a different read from my prior Tom Corbetts. A year later I was on to Heinlein and never much looked back, but I can still see the Ifts, and Forerunners, and Zacathians (they looked like the Gorn you know) and amazing critters who would talk in your head that made those reads magic. Hope you have helped to bring Norton back for a new generation.