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April 14, 2005
Remembering Andre Norton (1912-2005)
My SF education was shaped by the holdings of small public or school libraries and rural secondhand bookstores. This meant that I often had to find what, if any, SF they had among General Fiction (or Horror) and make my selection from that. I could often count on finding something by Andre Norton (who I did not yet know was a woman), but I never read any complete series of her books. (I also missed out on most of the books that people mention when her name comes up.) Three of her books remind me of my clearest memories of those small libraries: The X Factor (1965), Breed to Come (1972), and Fur Magic (1968).
The X Factor was a space adventure. In hindsight I can see why the library included it in their small SF collection, but I can’t sort out why they chose it over other books of that era.
Breed to Come stayed with me a long time, and my continued impression is that it was a rather dark book. Definitely SF and an animal story, but why did the library choose it over any of her other SF animal stories? (The same library also had Anne McCaffrey’s Decision at Doona.)
Fur Magic was one of those books I checked out over and over and read and re-read. It is a work of fantasy based on Native American mythology, with a transformation at its center. Although the library had a few of her other Magic books (Steel Magic, Octagon Magic, Lavender Green Magic, Red Hart Magic, Dragon Magic) they didn’t make the same impression on me. I think one of the things I liked about it was that it dealt with an unfamiliar, although very terrestrial, landscape and culture (unlike Jez, I did not grow up in the Southwest)and the transformation section of the book was alien in a very different sense than most YA SF.
Official Website:
http://www.sfwa.org/news/anorton.htm
Bibliography (!):
http://www.andre-norton.org/books/date.shtml
http://www.andre-norton.org/books/coll.shtml
Awards:
http://www.andre-norton.org/awards/index.html
Obits:
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/0328obit-norton28.html
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA512815?display=Book+NewsNews&industry=Book+News&industryid=1990&verticalid=151
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F50F1EFB3B580C7B8DDDAA0894DD404482
http://www.lisnews.com/article.pl?sid=05/03/17/2113207
The New Norton YA Award:
http://www.sfwa.org/News/nortonaward.htm
-LV
Posted by lisav at 12:49 AM | Comments (0)