Page 2 - Switch World News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Andre Norton seems to have really liked writing stories set in High Hallack and the Dales of the Witch World. Or maybe her fans really liked her to write them. Three are collected in this volume, two longer works, “Dragon Scale Silver” and “Amber Out of Quayth,” and one much shorter, “Dream Smith.” They’re all pretty much the same story with some variation. Misfit protagonist learns to wield magic under influence of the long-vanished Old Ones, against a backdrop of the devastating war against the Hounds of Alizon. All three stories feature victims of the war and its aftermath, a...

Andre Norton has a habit of running out of page count in her novels. Her adventures gallop headlong from peril to peril, swerving past monsters both human and otherwise, diving underground, careening through weird and wonderful landscapes, until they screech to a halt on the very last page, sometimes the very last paragraph. Then the characters of opposite sex, if any, suddenly swear eternal—something. Not love so much as end-of-movie lip-lock and rapid fade to black. It’s not often that she loses control of her material. Her adventures for the most part are tightly plotted. She might run...

Andre Norton was a master of the adventure plot, and she loved to mash up genres—science fantasy was one of her favorite things, as the Witch World cycle demonstrates. Every so often however, she either did not connect with her material, or the book she wanted to write simply did not fit into her wheelhouse. Merlin’s Mirror is one of these rather rare misfires. The idea is not terrible. It’s the Witch World concept: a vanishing Old Race of impossible antiquity, an alien world of war and superstition, ongoing attempts to bring peace and higher civilization to the reluctant natives. The ...

Plotting was Andre Norton’s main strength as a writer. Her novels are plot-driven, to the point that characters frequently do things “somehow” or “without thinking” or “something made them do it.” Their own volition is subordinate to the pressure of the plot. Norton was a master of rapid pacing. Her novels are full of breakneck action and unstoppable adventure. Characters race from peril to peril with little or no pause in between–and then, almost without fail, come to an abrupt halt. Endings in Norton novels waste no time at all, either in wrapping up the action or in throwin...