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rushthatspeaksI felt like reading some Andre Norton, and my collection of crumbling old paperbacks is still in boxes in the portico. Fortunately, the public library-- as any good library should-- has a collection of crumbling old Norton paperbacks that almost completely does not overlap with mine.
One good thing about how sheerly prolific Norton was is that I know I'm never going to read them all. There's always another handful of titles I haven't seen at each new used bookstore. Of course, this is also an annoying thing, because I know I'm probably missing some of her best, and on occasion I discover that I haven't even read all of a series. I had no notion of the existence of one of the Krip and Maelen books until last year, even though I'd read the books before and after it.
Andre Norton is, of course, the literature of my childhood. I can't remember how old I was when I started reading her stuff, but I must have been very young indeed, because I stole phrases from her wholesale in my first attempts at fiction, when I was six or seven, meaning that she'd have been one of my very first sf and fantasy writers, along with Heinlein and E.E. Smith. My father has multiple shelves of her-- he bought his SF as a teenager in the late sixties, avidly read everything important up until the New Wave, and left fandom in a huff when postmodernism happened, so the books I read as a child were on a lag of about a generation. (I really think I must be one of the youngest people raised on E.E. Smith. I just turned twenty-nine.) But he did try to keep me informed about his books and their authors and why he cared about them, and I was so young when I found out Norton was a woman that for many years I assumed Andre to be a standardly female name.
Therefore I can't say for certain whether Norton holds up to a new adult reader nowadays, but I really do think she must, at least a fair bit of the time. She never read as YA to me, when I was a kid, and honestly doesn't now, except when she's intending to, though I see a lot more of her stuff shelved there than there used to be.
What I like about Norton is her atmosphere and her ability to create suspense. I also enjoy the way that her fantasy and sf blend into each other. Honestly, you can't tell which is which-- her spaceship books have psychic powers and spells and incomprehensible Lovecraftian forces, her Witch World books have alien supertech setting up dimensional portals. Her sf gains from this a sense of deep time that I like: old and crumbling ruins are her dominant setting, people lost in the confusions of endless fallen higher-tech civilizations. And her fantasy gains a certain double vision, a multiple perspective wherein you can see both the fantastical appearance of a thing and have some idea of what it might have looked like from the perspective of someone who knows more science. Entropy is her principal theme and I cannot imagine what she would have thought of the internet, because the inability of any civilization ever to correlate its stores of knowledge, or pass them on in a coherent way, or even maintain reasonable internal communications, is huge with her. It rather surprises me that as far as I know none of her books are set entirely in an ancient collapsing library. (Does anyone know of one like that?)
And as a result she is, I think, underrated as a horror writer, because I was not joking about the Lovecraftian incomprehensibility. She knows when not to describe the things chasing her protagonists, and this can lead to moments that are genuinely intense and frightening.
Case in point, this book. The title, as far as I can tell, has nothing to do with anything; this book is survival horror, rather more purely sf than usual, and I would love to see it filmed.
The protagonist, Nik, gets plucked out of a slum and entirely remade via plastic surgery to resemble the imaginary friend of a twelve-year-old some powerful people would like to kidnap. The kid has been psychologically programmed to hate all strangers, but he'll follow somebody out of his own imagination. The two of them wind up on Dis, a planet which has an infrared sun, meaning that everyone needs infrared goggles to see anything. Dis is full of hungry wildlife, and that's really only the start of their problems.
This is some of the best Norton I've read. The characterization is more complex than she sometimes manages, the plotting and counterplotting is taut, and the endless travel through almost complete blindness really comes off as creepy. The kid also comes off as creepy; the things that have been done to his head mean that he isn't your usual twelve-year-old in some very impressive ways. And the protagonist is both believably trying his hardest and believably entirely outclassed. I might have liked the ending to go on two pages longer, but it's also a remarkably clear and plausible ending for a Norton standalone, so in general I'm entirely satisfied.
My favorites list: Year of the Unicorn, Warlock of the Witch World, Moon Called, Wheel of Stars, Galactic Derelict, Forerunner, Dread Companion, Flight in Yiktor. At least, those are the ones I reread most frequently. Anyone else have a list?
ETA: It occurs to me that Norton probably came into my head at the library because of the recent very good discussion of her inrachelmanija's journal, which people who would like more detailed rec lists for her should totally go look at.
One good thing about how sheerly prolific Norton was is that I know I'm never going to read them all. There's always another handful of titles I haven't seen at each new used bookstore. Of course, this is also an annoying thing, because I know I'm probably missing some of her best, and on occasion I discover that I haven't even read all of a series. I had no notion of the existence of one of the Krip and Maelen books until last year, even though I'd read the books before and after it.
Andre Norton is, of course, the literature of my childhood. I can't remember how old I was when I started reading her stuff, but I must have been very young indeed, because I stole phrases from her wholesale in my first attempts at fiction, when I was six or seven, meaning that she'd have been one of my very first sf and fantasy writers, along with Heinlein and E.E. Smith. My father has multiple shelves of her-- he bought his SF as a teenager in the late sixties, avidly read everything important up until the New Wave, and left fandom in a huff when postmodernism happened, so the books I read as a child were on a lag of about a generation. (I really think I must be one of the youngest people raised on E.E. Smith. I just turned twenty-nine.) But he did try to keep me informed about his books and their authors and why he cared about them, and I was so young when I found out Norton was a woman that for many years I assumed Andre to be a standardly female name.
Therefore I can't say for certain whether Norton holds up to a new adult reader nowadays, but I really do think she must, at least a fair bit of the time. She never read as YA to me, when I was a kid, and honestly doesn't now, except when she's intending to, though I see a lot more of her stuff shelved there than there used to be.
What I like about Norton is her atmosphere and her ability to create suspense. I also enjoy the way that her fantasy and sf blend into each other. Honestly, you can't tell which is which-- her spaceship books have psychic powers and spells and incomprehensible Lovecraftian forces, her Witch World books have alien supertech setting up dimensional portals. Her sf gains from this a sense of deep time that I like: old and crumbling ruins are her dominant setting, people lost in the confusions of endless fallen higher-tech civilizations. And her fantasy gains a certain double vision, a multiple perspective wherein you can see both the fantastical appearance of a thing and have some idea of what it might have looked like from the perspective of someone who knows more science. Entropy is her principal theme and I cannot imagine what she would have thought of the internet, because the inability of any civilization ever to correlate its stores of knowledge, or pass them on in a coherent way, or even maintain reasonable internal communications, is huge with her. It rather surprises me that as far as I know none of her books are set entirely in an ancient collapsing library. (Does anyone know of one like that?)
And as a result she is, I think, underrated as a horror writer, because I was not joking about the Lovecraftian incomprehensibility. She knows when not to describe the things chasing her protagonists, and this can lead to moments that are genuinely intense and frightening.
Case in point, this book. The title, as far as I can tell, has nothing to do with anything; this book is survival horror, rather more purely sf than usual, and I would love to see it filmed.
The protagonist, Nik, gets plucked out of a slum and entirely remade via plastic surgery to resemble the imaginary friend of a twelve-year-old some powerful people would like to kidnap. The kid has been psychologically programmed to hate all strangers, but he'll follow somebody out of his own imagination. The two of them wind up on Dis, a planet which has an infrared sun, meaning that everyone needs infrared goggles to see anything. Dis is full of hungry wildlife, and that's really only the start of their problems.
This is some of the best Norton I've read. The characterization is more complex than she sometimes manages, the plotting and counterplotting is taut, and the endless travel through almost complete blindness really comes off as creepy. The kid also comes off as creepy; the things that have been done to his head mean that he isn't your usual twelve-year-old in some very impressive ways. And the protagonist is both believably trying his hardest and believably entirely outclassed. I might have liked the ending to go on two pages longer, but it's also a remarkably clear and plausible ending for a Norton standalone, so in general I'm entirely satisfied.
My favorites list: Year of the Unicorn, Warlock of the Witch World, Moon Called, Wheel of Stars, Galactic Derelict, Forerunner, Dread Companion, Flight in Yiktor. At least, those are the ones I reread most frequently. Anyone else have a list?
ETA: It occurs to me that Norton probably came into my head at the library because of the recent very good discussion of her in
rachelmanija's journal, which people who would like more detailed rec lists for her should totally go look at.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-04 12:27 am (UTC)I really need to reread The Jargoon Pard. I only found a copy once and remember nothing about it at all. And I've never read The White Jade Fox, which is a great title, or The Zero Stone. The Gryphon books are awesome.
The Janus books are frickin' depressing and I don't like them either. Dread Companion is also very depressing but I love it because it was the book that demonstrated that if you behave the way people traditionally behave in the sort of book it is, everything is going to go completely to hell, and stay that way. Seriously, if anyone in that book had tried to do something other than the things people in that story usually do, it would all have been fine, you could tell; and the usual happy endings of that sort of book have never seemed plausible to me again.