Review: The Works of Andre Norton: 14 Books and Short Stories (mild spoilers)

[jeriendhal]

Downloaded this one from Amazon's Kindle store for $1.99. Having never read any Norton before I figure this was a cheap way to dive in. After attempting to plow through the contents for a month or so, here's my opinion on the first four tales.

The Gifts of Asti: A bit of proto-Beastmaster in which a priestess escapes her temple after it was attacked with her mindmated alien sabertooth critter and travels across the landscape, eventually rescuing an astronaut from suspended animation in a crashed spaceship.

If that doesn't sound terribly coherent, well it ain't, and the overblown style comes across as a mix of Robert E. Howard and Gene Wolfe. If there was a plot I never saw it.


All Cats Are Gray: One of her more famous stories I gather, with a tough female protagonist from a time when they were damned rare in sci-fi. Again, not much science in the fiction but it's a quick little mystery story, even if Colorblindness Doesn't Work That Way.


Key Out of Time: Two guys and a buxom Polynesian girl who talks to dolphins go to an alien world, time travel back in that world's history, run into bad guy aliens they would have never had to worry about if they had just stayed put and not interfered in history like they shouldn't have.

There's a bit in the last third of this book where Norton brings in an attempt to make this a meta-story, with Our Heroes getting the help of what amounts to the Three Witches from Macbeth (or Greek Mythology, take your pick), but it doesn't really change the fact that the novel has no real point to it, or characters that are anything but vague archetypes of "Hero" "Villian" "Tough Native" and "Magical Telepath Girl". Add a downer ended and it left a bad taste in my mouth.


Plague Ship: The second book in her famous Solar Queen series. Better characterization here with the good guys, but the baddies stay mustasche twirling villians and there's a bit of a colonialist vibe that was off putting. I gave up before I ran into the titular plague.


Should I keep plowing forward, or just chalk this up to me not being the right audience to appreciate Norton?

Comments

[threeringedmoon.livejournal.com]

I've always considered myself a Norton fan but have noticed that SF books I read four decades ago have not held up. (I still reread most of her Witch World series.) Try Moon of Three Rings, which is the best of the Solar queen series.

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

Thanks, I'll see if I can find it at my library. It's not included in this collection.

[eric-hinkle.livejournal.com]

It'd be easier to give some advice if I knew what the other titles were. Her "Breed to Come" and "Starman's Son" were books I loved back in high school, along with her gothic romance "The White Jade Fox".

[mbernardi]

Of course the original Beastmaster novel was by Norton. Also some of best work was written 50+ years ago and has dated somewhat. I admit she did write her fair share of clunkers, but some of her early work is out of copyright / available for free.

[allah-sulu.livejournal.com]

I believe it's been over thirty years since I last read anything by Andre Norton. I have almost no recollection, good or bad, about her books, so they obviously didn't make much of an impression on me. FYI, you could have downloaded them for free from Project Gutenberg.