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some random thoughts on Andre Norton
Jan. 25th, 2021 12:13 amI have been on a minor Andre Norton kick these past few months -- I have read some books that are new to me, and some that were childhood favorites I haven't read in about 30 years.
I think I mentioned at some point that my childhood hometown library had a surprisingly large selection of Andre Norton's books, most of which they kept in the children's section of the library whether that made much sense or not -- probably because they have no sex and are not overtly gory. So I read an, in retrospect, frankly bizarre combination of fantasy, science fiction, and Norton's own peculiar blend between the two (neither blue nor red but distinctly purple, to misquote Ursula Le Guin).
A year or two back I dug up a copy of Knave of Dreams, which is a "modern American is transported to a fantasy/sci-fi alternate world and must impersonate their dead double" story. Last year I bought a Kindle copy of Wraiths of Time, which is another iteration of that exact same plot. (I am apparently kind of a sucker for that plot, which I blame entirely on Norton.)
This fall I read Operation Time Search, which has a modern American dumped into... it's unclear, but I think, based on the ending, the distant past of our own world? Where Atlantis and Mu and such are real places, and then also randomly there's a place in Brazil-ish called Mayax and a place in Central Asia-ish called Uighur, which is just downright weird set against basically cavemen in Ohio and an apparently Northwest European population in Mu which is located a bit east of Japan. Also I think it may have been written before the widespread knowledge of plate tectonics, because WOW that is not how geology works.
In December I found an anthology version of two books called Flight in Yiktor and Dare To Go A-Hunting, which I remember seeing noted as "other things Andre Norton has written" but had never realized were sequels to Moon of Three Rings and Exiles of the Stars, two books I enjoyed a lot as a child and teenager. Flight in Yiktor resolves some loose plot threads from the first two books, as well as introduces a new POV character who is a Norton stock type -- the boy with a physical difference raised in a spaceport slum who stumbles into adventure in space/on a new planet -- but Dare To Go A-Hunting is kind of shapeless and would have been much better if Norton hadn't tried to shoehorn in all the Celtic mythology and demonology at once. Also there are some awful typos in the Kindle edition. Someone clearly did a global search-and-replace on the "tle" combo for some reason and didn't catch all the resulting glitches, which mainly creates confusion over the name of a particular animal species ("bartle," ends up written as "barde" half the time, which became obvious to me when "castle" suddenly turned into "casde"), and there's also a horrible spellcheck-gone-wrong error in the name of Maelen's god: Molaster, which is a perfectly reasonable alien deity name, spent the entire two volumes misspelled as Molester. *headdesk*
Now I am rereading the Zero Stone duology -- The Zero Stone and Uncharted Stars -- in which Murdoc Jern, an apprentice gemologist, winds up in a lot of trouble due to a mysterious ring his father was investigating, and is also partners with a telepathic mutant alien cat named Eet. I had forgotten just how episodic the first volume was, and also how there are literally no female characters except for brief cameos from Murdoc's mother and sister, and the resident cat on one of the spaceships.
Norton is, in general, kind of weird about female characters. On the one hand, she can write female characters with both great power and unquestioned agency. I don't recall her ever writing a female character who exists solely to be a love interest -- they tend always to be figures of political importance who are actively doing things and have goals of their own. On the other hand, there are almost never female characters just around in the background. All the background characters -- the random traders, the random people in spaceports, the random people in taverns, the random ship crews, the random scientists -- are invariably male unless they're ladies maids and have to be female for gender propriety reasons. That lack of women in the background gets to me after a while, and no number of main or secondary female characters with agency can really make up for that lack.
It's also fascinating reading stock science fiction tropes from the 50s, 60s, and 70s -- the technology Norton assumes is obviously still beyond us in some ways (spaceships, interstellar empires, etc) and astonishingly dated in others (everything is on tapes -- presumably magnetic data storage tapes -- and there are hardly any non-psychic portable communication devices to be found, not even radio). Norton also has a characteristic tendency to blend all kinds of pseudo-science (telepathy, clairvoyance, prophecy, unknown energies, Lovecraftian monsters, fairies, mythical continents, past-life regression, dream communication, lost empires with ultra-high tech that might as well be magic, etc.) in with more properly sciencey science as if they're all the same thing, which I think is somewhat related to various ESP experiments going on in the 1960s when people still thought there might be something there.
I think I may either reread some Witch World or Time Traders novels next... or possibly explore some of the Forerunner books or the Warlock books, neither of which my childhood library had so they will be new to me.
I think I mentioned at some point that my childhood hometown library had a surprisingly large selection of Andre Norton's books, most of which they kept in the children's section of the library whether that made much sense or not -- probably because they have no sex and are not overtly gory. So I read an, in retrospect, frankly bizarre combination of fantasy, science fiction, and Norton's own peculiar blend between the two (neither blue nor red but distinctly purple, to misquote Ursula Le Guin).
A year or two back I dug up a copy of Knave of Dreams, which is a "modern American is transported to a fantasy/sci-fi alternate world and must impersonate their dead double" story. Last year I bought a Kindle copy of Wraiths of Time, which is another iteration of that exact same plot. (I am apparently kind of a sucker for that plot, which I blame entirely on Norton.)
This fall I read Operation Time Search, which has a modern American dumped into... it's unclear, but I think, based on the ending, the distant past of our own world? Where Atlantis and Mu and such are real places, and then also randomly there's a place in Brazil-ish called Mayax and a place in Central Asia-ish called Uighur, which is just downright weird set against basically cavemen in Ohio and an apparently Northwest European population in Mu which is located a bit east of Japan. Also I think it may have been written before the widespread knowledge of plate tectonics, because WOW that is not how geology works.
In December I found an anthology version of two books called Flight in Yiktor and Dare To Go A-Hunting, which I remember seeing noted as "other things Andre Norton has written" but had never realized were sequels to Moon of Three Rings and Exiles of the Stars, two books I enjoyed a lot as a child and teenager. Flight in Yiktor resolves some loose plot threads from the first two books, as well as introduces a new POV character who is a Norton stock type -- the boy with a physical difference raised in a spaceport slum who stumbles into adventure in space/on a new planet -- but Dare To Go A-Hunting is kind of shapeless and would have been much better if Norton hadn't tried to shoehorn in all the Celtic mythology and demonology at once. Also there are some awful typos in the Kindle edition. Someone clearly did a global search-and-replace on the "tle" combo for some reason and didn't catch all the resulting glitches, which mainly creates confusion over the name of a particular animal species ("bartle," ends up written as "barde" half the time, which became obvious to me when "castle" suddenly turned into "casde"), and there's also a horrible spellcheck-gone-wrong error in the name of Maelen's god: Molaster, which is a perfectly reasonable alien deity name, spent the entire two volumes misspelled as Molester. *headdesk*
Now I am rereading the Zero Stone duology -- The Zero Stone and Uncharted Stars -- in which Murdoc Jern, an apprentice gemologist, winds up in a lot of trouble due to a mysterious ring his father was investigating, and is also partners with a telepathic mutant alien cat named Eet. I had forgotten just how episodic the first volume was, and also how there are literally no female characters except for brief cameos from Murdoc's mother and sister, and the resident cat on one of the spaceships.
Norton is, in general, kind of weird about female characters. On the one hand, she can write female characters with both great power and unquestioned agency. I don't recall her ever writing a female character who exists solely to be a love interest -- they tend always to be figures of political importance who are actively doing things and have goals of their own. On the other hand, there are almost never female characters just around in the background. All the background characters -- the random traders, the random people in spaceports, the random people in taverns, the random ship crews, the random scientists -- are invariably male unless they're ladies maids and have to be female for gender propriety reasons. That lack of women in the background gets to me after a while, and no number of main or secondary female characters with agency can really make up for that lack.
It's also fascinating reading stock science fiction tropes from the 50s, 60s, and 70s -- the technology Norton assumes is obviously still beyond us in some ways (spaceships, interstellar empires, etc) and astonishingly dated in others (everything is on tapes -- presumably magnetic data storage tapes -- and there are hardly any non-psychic portable communication devices to be found, not even radio). Norton also has a characteristic tendency to blend all kinds of pseudo-science (telepathy, clairvoyance, prophecy, unknown energies, Lovecraftian monsters, fairies, mythical continents, past-life regression, dream communication, lost empires with ultra-high tech that might as well be magic, etc.) in with more properly sciencey science as if they're all the same thing, which I think is somewhat related to various ESP experiments going on in the 1960s when people still thought there might be something there.
I think I may either reread some Witch World or Time Traders novels next... or possibly explore some of the Forerunner books or the Warlock books, neither of which my childhood library had so they will be new to me.
