Andre Norton was one of my first favorite S.F. authors. I think the first story of hers that I read as "The Zero Stone", published in 1968, which was just about the time I was really getting into Science Fiction. Somehow, I never caught on to the fact that "Andre" was supposed to be a man's name (to make it easier for her to publish in the man's genere of Science Fiction), I was aware from the beginning of her feminine voice.

Her Witch World series were had begun a bit earlier than that, and were not likely to be found in Elementary School libraries, so I didn't come upon them until later, and I never really got caught up in them. Ms. Norton was a prolific writer, and finding the books of a series that had not been explicitly published as a trilogy was difficult even then, especially trying to find them in order, so I never really got caught up in the saga.

Now Tor is re-publishing the first two trilogies of the series, The Gates to the Witch World, which includes Witch World, Web of the Witch World, and Year of the Unicorn, and Lost Lands, which includes Three Against the Witch World, Warlock of the Witch World, and Sorceress of the Witch World. Unfortunately, it's still difficult to get a whole series together in order, and the Kansas City Public Library is no exception to this rule - the earlier books is available by Inter-Library Loan, but not on the shelves, so I dove into the second one which stands reasonably well on it's own.

In the first trilogy, a modern American is drawn into a world of Sword and Sorcery, where he defies convention, wins the girl, and saves the planet. The Earth Warrior and his Witch Queen have triplets, and the three books of the second trilogy each follow one of them in a common adventure.

The besieged "Elder Race" of Estcarp are at war with the kingdom to the South, who have vowed to exterminate the un-natural magic-workers. To the West and North lie hostile kingdoms that were dealt with in the earlier books. For some reason, our heroes discover, none of the people think to look to the East, where lies a land that they fled from ages ago. The two brothers and sister share a telepathic link that is the core of the magical talents that only the women of the Elder Race are supposed to posses. This is apparently the result of their father's alien Earth blood, which gives all us poor, mundane readers the hopeful fantasy that our blood may also be blessed. When their sister is taken away by the Sisterhood of Wise Women to be inducted into their conforming rule, the brothers rescue her and flee to the mysterious East.

There they find a land wrecked by sorcery "gone too far", as adepts of that earlier age delved too deep and were led into selfish glorification and the depths of shadowy evil. Traps abound for the innocent, and their own magic stirs forces left sleeping for ages.

Mercedes Lacky opens the book with a very nice essay on the seminal influence of Andre on a generation of women that were to discover liberation, Title IX sports, and the notion that they stood as men's equals, a heritage of fantasy that was to culminate in Xena, Warrior Princess. Coming a little late to Ms. Norton's works though, she misses something that was very important to the publishing climate in Fantasy and Science Fiction in the late Sixties.

The mingling of the two genres, of Fantasy or Magic and Science, was not a crude attempt by Fantasy to break free from the more mundane realm. After all, we had The Lord of the Rings, and graffiti in New York that proclaimed "Frodo Lives". Conan the Barbarian and Doc Smith's creations were already looking a bit quaint, and Camelot was on broadway. In the late Sixties though, there was a fad of public interest in Parapsychology - the notion that all of the mysterious forces of the age of spiritualism were, in fact, scientific phenomena that could be investigated in the laboratory. J. B. Rhine was popular, and people bought decks of cards meant to test clairvoyance. Telepathy, Telekinesis, Teleportation, and other "Psi" talents were just the sort of spice that the tired old Space Opera needed to explore new grounds.

This was a field that Andre Norton shone in. From the alternate universe grounding of the Witch World and it's "Gates" to our own "scientific" world and to stranger places, to the world of mentally powered telepathic machines we encounter in the third book of this volume, this mingling is not merely a way to sell Fantasy books in a Science Fiction market, but is part of the climate of speculative fiction of the time. The telepathic worlds of her Young Adult novels like The Zero Stone drew me in, and it was the scientific interest in mental "magic" that eventually led me to the craft.

In some ways, these books do represent an earlier vogue of Fantasy, more the sword-and-sorcery sort than her other novels. The dialog is very much in the Conan style - archaic constructions, awkward dialog, so that by the end I had decided not to go back and read the earlier books after all. There's only so much cave-speak one can stand.

The stories are also the kind of adventure that would eventually be associated with role playing games and on-line adventures, as the characters spin rapidly from one magic talisman to the next magical stone ring, flee on the backs of enchanted beasts and climb over mountains. Although they are pressed never to study or consolidate their new-found talents or resources, the motivation is plausible, and in the end we have an epic adventure that builds an image of a new world.

Andre Norton was a prolific writer, with over 150 novels and many short stories. She colaborated with many promising and established writers like Merceded Lackey, A.C. Crispin, Sherwood Smith and Sasha Miller. Besides the Witch World series, which spawned contributed stories that were collected under her editorial blessing, she wrote the original "Beast Master", from which the regretable movies and TV Series took little besides the title, The Time Traders, and the Halfblood Chronicles.

Sadly, as I sat down to check a few dates for this review, I learned that Ms. Norton passed away on March 17th, 2005, a little more than a week ago. It's a sad reminder that the heroes of our youth are aging. While they won't be around for ever, thankfully their work lives on.