randy_byers | Entries tagged with andre norton

I guess I'm done with crime novels about psychologically bizarre characters, so I'm not going to read the last two novels in the Library of America's Women Crime Writers of the '40s and '50s omnibus. I got one chapter into Margaret Millar's Beast in View and thought, "I can't take any more mental illness!"

So I retreat to some comfort reading: Andre Norton. The X Factor is classic Norton. Like Kilda in Dread Companion, Diskan Fentress is the child of a three-year marriage contract between a Survey scout who was soon reassigned to another planet and a planet-bound mother who was unable to raise him because she died during his birth. So he was raised in a government creche. Unlike Kilda, she had no mentor to look after her, and Diskan became an outcast held in contempt for his mental slowness and physical clumsiness. So a typical orphan/outcast protagonist for Norton, and soon he's jetted off to an unexplored alien planet, where he undergoes a survival ordeal while exploring ancient abandoned ruins and encountering a race of sentient furry aliens (the brothers-in-fur) who see potential in him where his fellow humans saw only disability.

Norton likes nothing better than to have her characters wandering around lost in an underground labyrinth of ruins. Diskan finds allies, both human and alien, to wander through the ruins with him, and eventually he discovers the talent within himself that only the aliens could see before. Once again, a human protagonist in a Norton novel survives either by becoming alien or by learning from aliens. There are archeologists also trying to understand the ruins, and Jacks (basically pirates) looking for buried treasure. It's a survival adventure with some great action and a coming-of-age story, and I found it very satisfying in a comfort-reading kind of way. Norton takes me back to the Golden Age of science fiction, which is the age of twelve.

I know that Norton eventually made contact with fandom even while she was still living in Cleveland, where she lived until 1966 -- the year after this novel was published -- and where she knew Harlan Ellison, for example. If she didn't understand that it was a proud and lonely thing to be a fan, her love of ostracized-alienated protagonists seems ready-made to appeal to the fannish subculture.

I've probably written before that when I was the golden age of science fiction (twelve) I worked my way through the shelf of Andre Norton novels at the Salem Public Library, and that was my introduction to science fiction. The thing I've realized recently is that none of her earliest SF novels were on that shelf, probably because the original hardcover editions of those '50s books had worn out by the time I got to my reading project in 1972. So I've decided to go back to those earlier novels, starting with this one because a friend had a copy I could borrow.

Star Guard was published in 1955, and of course now that I've read it I discover there was an earlier novel in what is called the Central Control sequence, which concerns a point in Norton's rough Future History in which humanity has reached the stars only to discover an existing galactic federation that finds humans to be militaristic savages and thus forces them to serve as mercenaries in the rare instances where military endeavors are still required. So this is a military novel focused on Terran mercenaries, but it is also an adaptation of Xenophon's Anabasis or The March Upcountry, which is a non-fiction account of an army of Greek mercenaries hired by Cyrus of Persia to dethrone his brother Artaxerxes II in 401 BC. As in Xenophon's historical account, the alien leader who hires the Terran mercenaries is killed, followed by the leadership of the mercenaries, and then the survivors have to fight their way through hostile alien territory to try to get back home.

Norton adds a backstory about humanity's grudging subservience to their alien overlords, with additional speculative history about how Terrans may have previously reached the stars before they met the aliens, as well as deeper history regarding a thousand years of nuclear war on Earth that nearly wiped humans out and largely drove them underground. Clearly in 1955 Norton was still thinking about World War II, militarism, and Hiroshima, and as so often her sense of human savagery is refreshingly bleak. But she's still an idealist, and you know her heroes aren't going to be subservient forever.

On one level this is just another variation on the Galactic Patrol or Legion of Space story, but bending it to the story of Anabasis plot makes it more interesting than the run of the mill variety of these kinds of stories. Since I had recently reread Ordeal in Otherwhere I was struck by some similarities in the marine-based alien races and environments of the planets in the two books. Norton's world-building always feels as though it's borrowed from other books, but the details are re-aggregated in fascinating ways. The plot is clean and well-structured and moves right along, with lots of good action, factional intrigue, and political maneuvering. There may not be a conceptual breakthrough (cf. Clute's remark about the lack of such in Norton in his article about her in the SF Encyclopedia), but it's a coming of age novel about the young protagonist in which he comes to a new understanding about his purpose and goal in life. There's also a transformation of political reality in the end that feels a little like something out of van Vogt. It all feels thoroughly familiar, but it's handled with supreme skill and confidence.

Dread Companion is my favorite type of Andre Norton novel. A lot of her novels have grim subject-matter -- orphans, refugees, war, crisis -- but her best novels add a weirdness to the darkness. She can create a twilight mood with the best of them, in which the uncertain light threatens to reveal inner monstrosity.

Dread Companion is a science fiction wrapper around a fantasy core. The opening is a very sharp depiction of social customs in the future history that Andre Norton used in most of her science fiction stories. Protagonist Kilda c'Rhyn is the child of a Survey scout father and a mother from a trading family. Her parents entered a standard three-year marriage contract common for Survey scouts, who can't stay in one place for long, and Kilda was raised in a creche after he left for his next mission. She never saw either parent again. The children of such "cross-births" are usual male and can qualify for government service, but as a female she's blocked from this career path. (An interesting bit of feminism in this 1970 novel.) Instead she uses her mutant outcast mentor, Lazk Volk, to find her a governess job with the wife of a government archaelogist and their teenage daughter and son. The husband has been assigned to the planet Dylan, where his job is to judge whether the mysterious ruins ("it might once have either had native inhabitants or been a colony of one of the Forerunner race"), and they travel by spaceliner to meet him there.

The daughter, Bartare, is a difficult personality who is clearly hiding something. Both she and the boy, Oomark, refer to a Lady who is invisible to everyone else, and Oomark shows signs of extreme anxiety regarding Her. Eventually all three characters are transported to an alternate reality, which even the characters themselves compare to Faerie. Both Ooomark and Kilda begin to transform into strange creatures, although Kilda resists it. This theme of becoming alien is also quite common in Norton's novels, and it's where the weirdness really starts to enter the story, as Kilda finds her toes becoming rootlike and attempting to dig into the ground for nourishment. This is yet another rite of passage story, which is usually what Norton's young adult novels are, and Kilda is another orphan/outcast who finds herself thrust into an existential crisis in which she struggles to find the inner grit, the external resources, and the allies to help her survive.

Because of the reference to Forerunner races early on, I kept expecting the strange twilight world they find themselves in to be rationalized in terms of a lost superscientific technology, but in fact the story becomes a straight magical fantasy in the long middle section. However, as in Ordeal in Otherwhere, the alternate reality and magical powers of its inhabitants have rules that do give even this part of the story a science fictional cast, and Norton is particularly good at depicting the shifting transformations of the characters from human to alien/supernatural and back, depending largely on the food they eat but also on certain talismans of power. As is also typical of her work, there are several contending factions in a complicated array, with the beleaguered protagonists stuck somewhere in the indefinite middle of the conflict between multiple sides. My one complaint about this section is that the character reactions seemed a little repetitive at times.

What really lifts Dread Companion above the run of Norton's mill is the ending, and I don't think I can really discuss this without SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS. Of course Kilda and the two children and another character whom they meet in the alternate reality escape back to the planet Dylan. But like other visitors to Faerie, they discover that a great deal of time has passed while they were away. Basically the world they return to has been completely transformed. An alien invasion destroyed civilization in that sector of the galaxy, and Dylan was evacuated, leaving only a rump colony. Everybody the characters knew is long dead, and their choices are either to join the rump colony and breed children, or ... what? There's another option involving the stranger they met in the alternate reality, who was there even longer than they were, but while it gives Kilda some hope for the future, the uncertainty of the situation she faces is, if anything, even greater than her uncertain prospects at the beginning of the novel. Now all four characters are orphans of a sort, having lost not just their families but pretty much everything else as well. We've seen Kilda survive a terrible ordeal, so we expect she'll do okay, but nothing has gotten easier, despite her rite of passage. This is pretty powerful stuff, and I could easily see this one as a direct influence on C.J. Cherryh, who has acknowledged a debt to Norton. I also think Dread Companion is another great title, invoking an anxious, threatening intimacy.

Most, if not all, of Andre Norton's science fiction took place in a shared future history in which human colonists (called Terrans) had spread out into the galaxy to such an extant that Terra had become a lost place of legend. I'm not sure how much of the future history Norton had worked out, although the article in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction finds outlines of a rise and fall of a Galactic Empire, although I believe all that happened in the remote past of most of her stories. Mostly it seemed to allow her to use some common elements between stories, including Free Traders, colonies, blasters, credits, Survey ships, interstellar wars and resulting refugee planets, ancient pre-human Forerunner races and superscientific technology, telepathic animals, etc, etc.

Ordeal in Otherwhere is a sequel to Storm over Warlock. However, there's a shift to a new protagonist, Charis, who is a typical Norton protagonist: an orphan whose father is murdered at the beginning of the book by the fundamentalist colonists they were thrust amongst in a failed attempt to prevent the fundies from following their extremist beliefs into rogue behavior. (Distrust of religious fundamentalism is basic to American science fiction, and so I guess it's not unusual to see it crop up in Norton's story universe, which is built from many common tropes of the field. Still, the antagonism to know-nothing fundamentalism seems heartfelt.) Like the typical Norton protagonist, Charis is thrown on her own resources and has to dig deep inside herself to find the strength to survive an existential crisis. Norton's favorite story is the rite of passage. What's unusual about Ordeal in Otherwise is that, as far as I can tell, it was the first of her novels to feature a female protagonist, and that made this book stand out for a generation of young female readers.

Charis soons find herself sold into a form of indentured servitude to a Free Trader (indentured to a Free Trader? Hm), who is looking for a female to help him make contact with the matriarchal rulers of the planet Warlock, who are called Wyvern. The Wyvern are witches, although their magical powers are rationalized as psionic. Amongst other things they have the ability to create dream worlds, which are the otherwhere of Charis' ordeal. After making contact with the Wyvern and spending time with them, Charis begins to develop powers of her own, and before long she's allied herself with the protagonist of Storm over Warlock, Lantee, along with his two telepathic wolverines and a telepathic alien cat (another common Norton trope), in an attempt to prevent rogue Traders from stealing the secret of the Wyvern powers.

Ordeal in Otherwhere is just about a perfect title, but the book itself seemed a little rote to me. It doesn't have the twilight mood of Norton's best books, and it doesn't connect with the mythology of the mysterious Forerunners, which gave her universe a sense of deep time and civilizational permutation. That was a disappointment, because I'd seen the book listed as part of the Forerunner series, but it turns out to be only retroactively part of the series because the heroine of Forerunner Foray is the daughter of Charis and Lantee. The most interesting thing about Ordeal in Otherwhere for me was the way she worked out rules for how psionic powers function -- for example the way that locations have to be visualized in order for someone to teleport -- but I was mostly curious whether Norton had come up with the rules herself or had borrowed them from elsewhere. The world-building in the novel is otherwise nothing particularly interesting, although the matriarchal society of the Wyvern is perhaps unusual and bracingly contemptuous of humans. Norton eventually shifted away from science fiction into fantasy, and you can see the tendencies already at play in the essentially magical nature of the Wyvern powers. Still Charis is a sympathetic character of the plucky type that you want to see succeed. It's a young adult novel, so you can be pretty sure she will, in fact, succeed, with a little help from her friends, furry and otherwise.