No Night Without Stars was a formative novel for me. It came out in 1975, and I read it while it was still new. It gave me ideas, and a few names that I loved the sound of and adapted for my own work in the following decade or two.
All that was left of it when I picked it up again, decades later, was a memory of names and a dim recollection of the plot. Unlike, say, Moon of Three Rings or The Crystal Gryphon, it hadn’t stayed with me. It read almost like new, but through the lens of 2021 rather than 1975.
It hasn’t held up particularly well. There are worse Norton novels, and some far more dated. Mostly it’s kind of inoffensive, as Seventies postapocalyptic science fiction goes. There’s nothing remarkable or memorable about it.
The field was changing dramatically by the time it was published. Feminism had grown strong, and such now classic authors as Russ and Le Guin, Delany and McIntyre, were at the height of their powers. Norton was still to a degree cruising along in the Fifties and early Sixties, revisiting yet again her vision of a world destroyed by nuclear holocaust, with survivors picking their way among the ruins.
It’s a familiar plot. Newly orphaned male protagonist is driven away from the place where he was born, forced to make his own way in an inimical world. He meets and fights monsters. He deals with natural disasters both old and new. He has a mutant animal companion. He meets another human, also with animal companions, and they join forces to achieve a mutual goal.
In this case it’s Sander from the Midwest with his giant riding coyote, hunting for remnants of ancient metal to which he can apply his smithing skills. He meets Fanyi with her pair of giant fisher cats. Fanyi’s village was destroyed by sea slavers while she was away on a shamanic journey. She is the offspring of a line of female shamans and a stranger from a mysterious installation of the ancients; guided by a pendant he left her, she’s looking for the installation and the knowledge it contains.
Sander goes along with her because she’s looking for more or less the same thing he is, though with a different emphasis. Sander is a pure empiricist, and pretty solidly an atheist. He just wants metal to forge so he can show his people how wrong they were to give his unimaginative but fully mature uncle the smith’s job instead of passing it on to the smith’s young and less experienced son. Fanyi is a shaman, and she’s looking for insight into the Before Men’s magic. She also has psychic powers, which Sander persistently refuses to believe in.
Sander is a bit of a jerk. He disses Fanyi’s powers even when they prove to be real. He grabs the lead more often than not, and gets all bent out of shape when she doesn’t defer to his authority. He’s especially snorked when she dares to presume that she might have skills and knowledge beyond his own.
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The Past Is Red
It feels as if this might have been an older plot or outline which Norton repurposed to sell. Sander assumes Fifties gender roles, and so does Fanyi: she does the cooking, he does most of the fighting. And yet, just about the time I was ready to smack them both upside the head, suddenly I was informed that women in this world are basically in charge, choose their own husbands, and make most of the rules. I never would have guessed from context up to that point. I wondered, uncharitably, if Norton herself had, or if she’d suddenly decided to wake up to the Seventies.
In the Seventies, I don’t think I noticed any of this. I let the plot pull me along, however generic it happened to be. The orphan fighting monsters in blasted ruins was standard Norton and fairly standard Sixties and Seventies postapocalyptica. And then at the end, for extra points, we got a favorite theme of the period, the rogue computer mind-controlling humans and plotting to destroy them all.
Norton did a lot of that, not only in her post-nuclear Earth but in various Forerunner novels and even in the Witch World. It’s quite formulaic here. The characters don’t stand out. The animals are very cool, but we never really get close to them, because Sander doesn’t; he doesn’t believe enough in mental powers, and he’s too stubborn in clinging to Just The Observable Facts, Ma’am. I’d have liked more of what’s going on inside their heads, and less of Sander’s obstinate empiricism.
No, I don’t like Sander. He does mellow out eventually. Sort of. He remains a jerk to the end.
While I read, kept getting echoes, not so much of written as of television science fiction. Original Star Trek did a number of Rogue Computer episodes, which might possibly have influenced Norton’s version. And then there’s the whole deal with the eagle symbol, which has echoes of a couple of episodes including “The Omega Glory.”
And then there’s the sequence with the White Ones with their all-white skin and hair and their silver eyes, riding their giant moose-elk against an army of giant mutant frogs. They’re under the control of the evil AI, and they’re out to destroy all life. I wonder if George R.R. Martin had that scene in mind when he wrote his White Walkers. The famous scene in the second season of the TV series could almost work for a filmed version of No Night Without Stars.
Unlike the Game of Thrones series, however, Norton’s dystopia has a strong strain of hope. The title gives it away. The point of Sander and Fanyi’s journey is to prove that their world needs to stop looking backward to the old ways and technologies. It needs to look forward, to make its own way, in its own way.
Next I’ll reread another all-but-forgotten title, Perilous Dreams.
Judith Tarr’s first novel, The Isle of Glass, appeared in 1985. Since then she’s written novels and shorter works of historical fiction and historical fantasy and epic fantasy and space opera and contemporary fantasy, many of which have been reborn as ebooks. She has written a primer for writers: Writing Horses: The Fine Art of Getting It Right. 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.
The heroine certainly is wearing STAR TREK girl clothes on the cover. I was working on my Masters and Doctorate during that period, and I definitely didn’t see such hardcore gender rules. Wouldn’t have put up with it if I had.
Kinda off yet not off the subject, I saw INCREDIBLES 2 for the first time last night, and I was genuinely stunned by Mr Incrediible’s very Fifties attitudes toward women and gender roles, and he was never called on them. Meanwhile, Elastigirl’s female friend in equality was the bad guy who used that equality to destroy Elastigirl. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Sigh.
@1 She wears that exact costume in the book. Norton being puckish, perhaps?
So-called kids’ tv can be incredibly retro. Especially comic-book kids’ tv.
No Night Without Stars was relatively recently republished with Star Man’s Son in an omnibus called “Darkness and Dawn” (even though the two novels clearly take place after different cataclysms)
@@@@@ 2, Seriously? That’s what shamans on a vision quest wear? Bouffant hair and all????.
A riding coyote and fisher cats sound awesome but not so awesome as white eyed calvary charging on moose-elk mounts! The opposing mystic and empirical worldviews could have worked to if balanced sometimes she’s right other times he is. I’d probably gender flip them too as women are all to often cast as mystics.
Norton seemed to have found a pace and quality she was very comfortable with. One generally had a pretty good idea what an unfamiliar Norton would deliver, and it didn’t change all that much over the decades of her career. She’s a bit like Poul Anderson, in that I can point to favourite Nortons but not necessarily great Norton novels.
@@@@@ princessroxana to be fair in the absence of conditioner my hair “bouffants” itself if brushed rather than combed, if brushed with my head down I could easily get that much volume and more.
That “riding” “coyote” looks jolly short to be a riding anything, and very like the black German Shepherd lying at my feet.
@5 The Girl is actually Black, so the “bouffant” is a whitewashed version of her natural hair. Cover whitewashing, still and always a thing.
@6 Indeed. I don’t think she ever wrote an objectively great novel, but she ticked a lot of boxes for an awful lot of readers. She mastered a formula and for the most part it worked.
@7 In the book he’s quite a bit bigger. He can’t carry two humans but he easily carries one, and he packs the luggage when they’re not riding him. He’s also coyote-colored, not whatever that’s supposed to be.
Covers are seldom completely accurate. This one is closer than many.
Andre had a deep frustration with computers. In an article about her called Andre Norton: Loss of Faith, Pt 2 from 1971: ” In Florida, Miss Norton lives on the border of two counties. She has been charged by both for local taxes due to a “computer error” (a term used to cover a computer operator or computer programmer error). She was told that it was too much trouble to correct the programming and to ignore the wrong tax. Which could have led to legal problems.” So yea, computers (and the people that seemed “helpless” against them) became a target of hers for a while.