Author Profile · Science Fiction & Fantasy
Andre Norton
1912–2005 · American
Who was Andre Norton?
Alice Mary Norton, a Cleveland librarian who adopted a male pen name for the 1930s market and went on to publish well over a hundred novels across seven decades. Norton was the great gateway author: generations of readers — disproportionately the ones who became writers — found the genre through her fast, clean adventure novels of displaced young outsiders finding their people among star traders, telepathic animals and the witch-haunted continents of the Witch World. The first woman to be SFWA Grand Master, first woman inducted into the SF Hall of Fame, and the namesake of SFWA's award for young adult fiction.
Why they matter
Quietly one of the most influential figures in the field: she trained the readership. Witch World pioneered the science-fantasy crossover and portal fantasy years before they had names, and her outsider protagonists opened the genre's door to readers it had ignored.
Essential books — and where to start
Star Man's Son
1952 · Science Fiction · Post-Apocalyptic, Children's & YA Fantasy
Two centuries after the atomic war, Fors of the Puma Clan — silver-haired, mutant, and therefore barred from the Star Hall explorers he was born to join — steals his dead father's gear and rides out into the contaminated lowlands with his telepathic hunting cat to map the ruined cities. What he finds includes rad-haunted ruins, the rat-like Beast Things, and a Black plainsman named Arskane whose friendship points towards a federation of the scattered tribes. Also published as Daybreak — 2250 A.D., it sold in the millions as a Marines-jacketed paperback.
The Beast Master
1959 · Science Fiction · Planetary Romance, Military SF
Hosteen Storm, a Navajo veteran of the interstellar war that ended with Earth burned to a cinder, emigrates to the frontier world of Arzor with his team — an African black eagle, a meerkat pair and a dune cat, all linked to him empathically — nursing a private vendetta and finding instead Xik holdouts, ancient off-world ruins and a reason to live. Norton treats Storm's Diné heritage with unusual respect for 1959, and the human-animal team remains one of her most-loved inventions. The Beastmaster films borrowed the title and nothing else worth keeping.
Witch World
1963 · Witch World, book 1 · Fantasy · Science Fantasy, Portal Fantasy
Simon Tregarth, ex-colonel and hunted man, takes the one exit his pursuers can't follow: the Siege Perilous, which delivers each sitter to the world that fits him. His is Estcarp, ruled by celibate witches whose power answers to true names, under siege by the Kolder — invaders whose soulless technology comes from somewhere else again. Sword, sorcery and science collide as Simon, the witch Jaelithe and Koris of Gorm fight a war on two axes of reality. Norton's matter-of-fact prose makes the strangeness land like reportage.
Series
1898–1963 · British (Irish-born)
Narnia is one of fantasy's two great gateway drugs (the other being The Hobbit) and the model for every portal fantasy since; with Tolkien, Lewis made Oxford the unlikely engine room of the modern fantastic.
1875–1950 · American
The father of planetary romance.
1926–2011 · American-Irish
The bridge between SF and fantasy readerships and the genre's great gateway author for young readers — particularly girls, whom the field had largely ignored.
