Andre Norton (1912–2005)

Andre Norton (real name Alice North) was a writer I loved as a kid, and this book in particular -- which I think was one of the first, and very likely the first thing of hers I read -- absolutely enthralled me. I think it was one of the books that really cemented my love of science fiction, well before I even understood the concept of a genre at all. And just seeing the title and the cover hit me with an instant and powerful wash of nostalgia when I encountered it at a library sale last show more year. So of course I had to pick it up and revisit it, although I have to say, I was a bit nervous about doing so. I have reread some of Norton's books as an adult, and they were okay, but not all of them hold up super well. It's always a little bit depressing to return to a childhood favorite and discover that it has somehow been "visited by the suck fairy" since the last time you encountered it, to use Jo Walton's evocative phrase. But it's a real delight to do so and find yourself thinking that, hey, child you actually had pretty good taste!

Well, I am very happy to report that this book definitely fell into the latter category. It features a space-going apprentice gem merchant who's inherited a ring with a strange alien stone from his dad, which leads him inadvertently into adventures that include fleeing people who want to make him a human sacrifice, crashlanding on an alien jungle world, encountering the relics of long-dead civilizations, and getting captured by a space cop who's accusing him of things he didn't do, among lots of other stuff. And of course I have to mention the weird telepathic alien mutant cat, which is actually way less cheesy and way more interesting than you'd think. I didn't remember any of the details of the story at all, just some of the very general elements like the ring and the cat, and I found myself surprisingly invested in seeing what would happen next. I sort of expected that, if it ended up still being worth reading at all, I'd feel some pleasant nostalgia as aspects of it started vaguely coming back to me, and that would be the main appeal. Instead, I felt nostalgia of a different, broader, and I think more satisfying kind: nostalgia for the days of my childhood when I could just sink thoroughly into a good old-fashioned adventure yarn. show less

Andre Norton was a very prolific writer, and I read a lot of her novels in my youth, but I hadn't revisited her in many years. This volume consists of the first two books in her Time Traders series, SF adventure stories written in the 1950s. I'm fairly sure I'd read both of them before, but I didn't remember much of anything about them, and I thought it would be interesting to see what I thought of them now.

The first installment is The Time Traders, in which it's the 21st century, time show more travel has recently been invented, and the Russians have been showing up with some surprisingly advanced pieces of technology. Which, since you can't time travel into your own future, they must somehow have been getting from the past. So US time agents have been sent back to various periods, trying to figure out what the Russians have found, and when.

It's a good premise (if rather dated in its cold-war sensibilities), but I felt the story really never lived up to it. The problem is that even if you're happy to accept time travel as a concept (which I am), the plot is still full of details that are utterly unconvincing. It could still have been interesting if the societies of prehistoric Britain that the time agents infiltrate for their mission had been really brought to life, but they're not. There are complexities there that are hinted at a little, but they're never delved into. So even though it's readable enough and there are some not-bad action scenes, this one just never held my attention all that well.

In the second novel, Galactic Derelict, the time agents find a crashed spaceship in the past, and, after being brought forward into the present, it takes off with them on it. I enjoyed this one a lot more than the first one. Once you get past the beginning, in which a completely random guy is brought in on a secret mission and told all about it just because he happens to stumble across it, this installment doesn't have the same plot difficulties and implausibilities the first one did. Maybe because it doesn't really have all that much of a plot, but I was mostly okay with that. Also, the alien planets that our protagonists end up on really aren't fleshed out any better than the bronze-age civilization of the first novel, but in this case it feels like more of a feature then a bug, as we're supposed to only be getting little glimpses of places that are intended to be mysterious. Not that any of it was super-exciting, but there was something at least a little pleasantly nostalgic about revisiting this kind of old-fashioned story I used to enjoy as a kid.

Although it may be old-fashioned in a slightly less pleasant way, too. Because the POV character in this one is an Apache. The way he's written is actually really well-meaning and pretty good for the 1950s, I guess. Norton is clearly actively trying to de-exoticize the guy for readers who are mostly familiar with Native Americans from 50s TV Westerns, while still honoring his heritage. But what was good for the 1950s is still not exactly up to 21st century standards of sensitivity and cluefulness when writing about other cultures, especially when you also factor in some unrelated comments about "civilized" vs "primitive" people. I found it didn't bother me enough that I couldn't shrug it off easily, but then, Native American stereotypes aren't personal for me, so other readers' mileage may vary.

Rating: I'm going to give it a perhaps overly generous 3/5, mostly on the strength of Galactic Derelict and the nostalgic appeal it had for my inner 12-year old. show less

Golden Trillium is the third book in the Trillium series of fantasy novels, which debuted, with much fanfare, in 1990 with Black Trillium. Since that’s over 30 years ago, I’ll recap the project here.

Three respected female writers of classic SFF, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Andre Norton, and Julian May, were approached by a literary agent to jointly write a SFF novel. May authored the original novel, an outline of sorts, which was about a set of royal triplets who must save their beleaguered show more kingdom. The idea was to rewrite it, with each writer taking on the POV of their chosen princess: Haramis, the cold but talented mage written by Bradley; Khadiya, the hot-headed warrioress and lover of nature, by Norton; and Anigel, sweet and home-oriented, but with a steely will, by May.

It seemed a project destined for success. The world these authors created is a science-fantasy one with magic and obscure technology that might as well be magic. The location is a planet coming out of its last glaciation with the central part of its continent still wild and covered by ice. Various lands exist around the borders as well as two pre-human, Ewok-like races with psychic powers. Ruwenda, the kingdom of the princesses, is a swampy land of temperate bayous and canals. It's well-detailed and almost real, the best part of the book. In fact the worldbuilding was the best part, but a concept does not a satisfying novel make.

The magical MacGuffin of the original book was a three-part artifact the triplets must assemble in order to repel the evil sorcerer, Orogastus, who has invaded their kingdom; each must do so in her own way and on her own quest. It was all just a little too pat, including the one-note personalities of the female protagonists which matched their hair colors (black=stern, auburn=passionate, and blonde=angelic, respectively.) The adventures involving a lot of running around and visiting different parts of the world in a lengthy, meandering plotline that had me skipping ahead. Probably a fault of the round-robin structure.

In all, interesting concept with an execution that left a lot to be desired. But lookit those maps!

Ruwenda and (in inset) its neighbors on the peninsula, drawn by the talented Claudia Carlson. Click to see the larger version.

The greater continent, drawn by Claudia Carlson. Click to see the larger version.

It's really a shame no developed a wiki for this world. It sorely needs one.

Since the concept had hooked me I proceeded ahead with Blood Trillium and later Lady of the Trillium, disappointments both. When I found Golden Trillium at the local Goodwill I assumed it would be more of the same. But I was wrong. It turned out to be the most entertaining of the four.

I’m not even sure why I bought it since I always thought Norton was the weakest writer of the three. I never cared for her style, which involved a lot of repetition and muddled plotlines. But this, paradoxically, is also her strength. The characters in her writing are unsure of themselves, and so tend to flail around; they are prisoners of a more primitive society, one that relies on intuition and supernatural signs that are not always clear. They have only their own wills to guide them, and that means they must also acknowledge and do battle with their weaknesses. There’s a lot of back-and-forth psychological turmoil as they try to succeed, which is tedious, but also realistic. There are no easy answers in Norton’s worlds. Only lots of hard work.

The story picks up just after Orogastus, the evil sorcerer who invaded Ruwenda in Black Trillium, is defeated. After that mighty battle the talismans of the sisters are dead... or are they? Haramis continues with her magic studies, and Anigel is crowned as Queen, but Khadiya feels aimless. She returns to the swamplands to inter her swordlike talisman The Three-Lobed Burning Eye (an obvious cop from H.P. Lovecraft) in the city of the Ancient Ones.

But the talisman comes back to life there, warning her of a new danger: a terrible plague that turns the native Oddlings into shambling, infectious monsters. As Khadiya is also a Chosen One of sorts (which is never clearly explained to her) she gains the help of the Ancient Ones themselves, who, though living in their own pocket Universe, are able to manifest themselves in Khadiya’s world as statues in the city who come to life. They tell her some of their brethren turned evil millennia ago, and so have been locked away in mountain tombs; one of them has returned to life through Orogastus’ machinations and he is out to free the others and so send the plague all over.

It’s a superfluous, tacked-on storyline after all the drama about saving the kingdom, but I liked it. The whole thing read like an indigenous tribe’s spirit quest, the participants banding together in commonality without egos getting in the way. And here is where Norton succeeded: she stage-directed every one of the 10 or so characters involved, making it feel the reader themselves was in their midst. Every character had their own strengths, even the ones that seemed the weakest. Each one contributed to the whole. The victory wasn’t just Khadiya’s and the godlike Ancient Ones’ to claim.

The swamplands of Ruwenda -- the Mires in the map above -- are another character in the story, one that is neutral. There is beauty in them, but they are also harsh, poisonous, and unforgiving, prone to extremes of hot and cold, and filled with deadly monsters. I read the book while I was recovering at home from a hospital stay, and felt I was there, in the muck and the rain. It took me away from my own concerns for that time, and led me to re-evaluate my previous opinion of Norton as a dull, wordy writer. Those swamps were real. It’s never explained why Khadiya loves them so; but maybe that’s the point... it’s because they are wild and dangerous.

The worldbuilding, as I said earlier, had elements of both science fiction and fantasy. At times the story reminded me of Jack Vance’s and Tanith Lee’s lushly described worlds where both magic and science coexist, but unlike them Norton doesn’t supply editorial commentary as she writes. Fantastic things happen, but are they supernatural, or highly evolved technology? Norton takes neither side, and neither do her characters. They are all of their milieu; it doesn’t even occur to them there is a dichotomy. The story is refreshingly void of modern terminology.

But there was lots of archaic phrasing that I had to read twice, and sometimes go back and read again until I grokked on to what was happening. At times I scratched my head. But having read The Worm Ouroboros, and enjoyed it, I was well-equipped to tolerate it here.

The story ends better than I hoped, and rather touchingly: Khadiya finally finds her place in the world, and it implies she exit from the larger narrative. Which, yes and no. I’ll get around to explaining that if and when I read Sky Trillium, the final book in the series. show less

I was a young teen when I first read Andre Norton, and I appreciate her work more now than I did then. A book like Star Guard has elements my younger self would have missed. For example, Norton tells us we won’t get into space far enough to get anyone’s attention for almost three thousand years. I would have missed the snark.
Nor would I have appreciated the humor in her idea that civilized aliens will look down their presumptive noses at us and say, you can come out here only if you show more make yourselves useful. The only job you are good for, though, is canon fodder to fight nuisance wars against cultures that are as backward as you are. Say the aliens, you may believe with your cowboy ancestors that you should never take a knife to a gunfight, but we are going to make sure that you don’t take guns to a knife fight. So, our young hero finds himself slinging a sword in the 40th century.
That the plot comes straight out of Xenophon’s Anabasis would have also been beyond my young ken. I forgive myself for that. show less