Revisiting Andre Norton

Andre Norton Releases

Thanksgiving weekend was a working weekend for me, but David Weber and I succeeded in finishing off the proofs for our forthcoming novel, Friends Indeed, and getting them turned in.

Last week, I focused on filling you in on my writing life.  This week, I thought I’d mention some aspects of a very important writing-related part of my life: reading.  A long time ago, I learned that if I don’t read, my writing suffers.  As those of you who’ve followed the Friday Fragments part of this blog (which I plan to resume early in the New Year) know, my reading is widely varied and eclectic.  During this period of recovery from my rotator cuff surgery, that trend has continued and expanded to the point that I found myself in Jim’s and my library, looking for something I hadn’t read or at least hadn’t read in a while.

The shelves of Andre Norton novels caught my eye, and I brought in some I either didn’t remember having read, or hadn’t read—since Jim’s and my library combines books that were his and books that were mine and books that seem to have appeared of their own accord.

Libraries are like that.

After I read The Crystal Gryphon and its sequel, I realized that, although it’s common these days to talk about her work as “dated” and no long appealing to readers, Norton’s themes of outcasts and found family, as well as embracing multi-racial and multi-species casts, are not in the least dated.  In fact, they’re becoming trendy all over again!  After I segued over to her science fiction titles, I found this held true here as well.  The science may be dated, and the emphasis on psychic or mental powers no longer considered “real” science, but if you can look beyond that, the stories work.

Andre Norton’s stories should also appeal to role-playing gamers, as they focus in on small groups dealing with problems.  There’s some justification to the claim that her novel, Quag Keep, was the first role-playing tie-in novel, since she set it in the World of Greyhawk, after playing D&D with Gary Gygax.  Even more trendy, it is probably the first “isekai” novel of the “gamers end up in the game world” sort.

Since many of Jim’s and my Norton books are old paperbacks with yellowed pages, I was pleased to find that many of her works are available as e-books, often as very affordable e-book bundles.  The only problem we had (for Jim soon joined me in re-reading Norton’s works) was that the bundles often had titles that were different from the original works, and it took a bit of poking around to find which bundle contained which novel.  There are some formatting glitches, but on the whole my aging eyes appreciated being able to adjust font size and the like.

I only met Andre Norton briefly, in part because I was simply awed by her.  However, I did submit a story to one of her popular Cat Fantastic anthologies back in the mid-nineties.  It was a “cold” submission, after I saw a listing in Locus or one of the other trade magazines of the day.  As one did in those days, I not only sent in my manuscript, but I included a self-addressed stamped envelope and return postage for when she rejected it.

Except she didn’t reject it.  She complimented “Noh Cat Afternoon,” told me she wanted it for Cat Fantastic IV, and she clipped my stamps to her letter.  What a classy lady!

Until I started re-reading Andre Norton’s works, I hadn’t realized what a quiet influence her works had had on me, and later on the subjects I lean toward in my own writing.  We share a fondness for human and animal characters working as equals.  We also share a fondness for archeology, discovery, and exploration as themes.

It’s been fun rediscovering her works, and even better, enjoying them!