Doom, gloom, and Andre Norton
Just what I didn't want to read: a pseudonymous article in salon.com by a woman who sold her first book for a large advance and with much excitement, only to end up broke, depressed, and returning to her day job. Her conclusion: unless you're John Grisham, you're all doomed.
Upon re-reading the article, I realize that her first book didn't do okay but not great; I _think_ that given the size of the advance, it was a big flop and the publishers lost a fair amount of money on it. But she doesn't say so explicitly. 150,000 advance vs. 10,000 copies sold: is that a disaster, or just not great? I think it makes a difference.
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2004/03/22/midlist/index.html
Current reading list:
ORDEAL IN OTHERWHERE, by Andre Norton. She was a prolific writer of sf and fantasy in the days before many women were writing it, and was responsible for getting a lot of people hooked on the genre. Her sentences and sometimes plots are clunky but some of her imagery is full of a sense of wonder, and she writes sensitively about misfits and refugees and ordinary, non-Destined kids who make one for themselves. Her alien animals, especially the non-intelligent ones, behave convincingly like real animals in a real ecosystem. You can tell that Norton spent a lot of time sitting down and watching small creatures go about their business.
I loved her when I was a teenager, but most of her books don't hold up well for me now. Still, some do if read with a forgiving eye to the prose, so I'm reading some I missed on the first go-round.
ORDEAL IN OTHERWHERE was inspirational for a lot of budding female sf writers, for the heroine is a young woman, Charis Nordhelm. She's not a beautiful, bosom-heaving, princess or Prophesied One or rescuee, but a well-educated member of the middle-upper class who gets sold into slavery when fundamentalists take over the colony. Because she's female and a linguist, she's sent to another planet to negotiate trade deals with matriarchal aliens who seem to communicate via dreams. So far it's pretty standard Norton, with a catlike alien and lots of hallucinatory shifts in time and place.
If you've never read Norton, I recommend...
YEAR OF THE UNICORN, in which an orphan with no future takes another woman's place to become a bride to a man from a strange tribe of shapeshifters. Gillian is a memorably sensible heroine, some of the scenes are quite beautiful, and her relationship with the man she marries is realistically awkward, sexy, and touching.
THE STARS ARE OURS! Anti-science fundamentalists have taken over (Norton did not like fundamentalists) and a secret crew of scientists escape to another planet, where they have adventures. Likable characters, exciting action, and a very cool alien world make up for the extremely stupid-sounding secret space travel formula and disjointed structure.
SORCERESS OF THE WITCH WORLD. There's a bunch of Witch World books but this one's particularly atmospheric. A young witch who may have lost her powers has to negotiate survival in a patriarchal tribe. That's the good part. It dissolves into incoherence once she escapes.
I could list more, but you get the picture. A few are duds but most are good reads if you're in the mood. Norton was, as far as I know, a prolific midlist author but not a bestselling one. I wonder if she'd have survived as a writer now.
Upon re-reading the article, I realize that her first book didn't do okay but not great; I _think_ that given the size of the advance, it was a big flop and the publishers lost a fair amount of money on it. But she doesn't say so explicitly. 150,000 advance vs. 10,000 copies sold: is that a disaster, or just not great? I think it makes a difference.
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2004/03/22/midlist/index.html
Current reading list:
ORDEAL IN OTHERWHERE, by Andre Norton. She was a prolific writer of sf and fantasy in the days before many women were writing it, and was responsible for getting a lot of people hooked on the genre. Her sentences and sometimes plots are clunky but some of her imagery is full of a sense of wonder, and she writes sensitively about misfits and refugees and ordinary, non-Destined kids who make one for themselves. Her alien animals, especially the non-intelligent ones, behave convincingly like real animals in a real ecosystem. You can tell that Norton spent a lot of time sitting down and watching small creatures go about their business.
I loved her when I was a teenager, but most of her books don't hold up well for me now. Still, some do if read with a forgiving eye to the prose, so I'm reading some I missed on the first go-round.
ORDEAL IN OTHERWHERE was inspirational for a lot of budding female sf writers, for the heroine is a young woman, Charis Nordhelm. She's not a beautiful, bosom-heaving, princess or Prophesied One or rescuee, but a well-educated member of the middle-upper class who gets sold into slavery when fundamentalists take over the colony. Because she's female and a linguist, she's sent to another planet to negotiate trade deals with matriarchal aliens who seem to communicate via dreams. So far it's pretty standard Norton, with a catlike alien and lots of hallucinatory shifts in time and place.
If you've never read Norton, I recommend...
YEAR OF THE UNICORN, in which an orphan with no future takes another woman's place to become a bride to a man from a strange tribe of shapeshifters. Gillian is a memorably sensible heroine, some of the scenes are quite beautiful, and her relationship with the man she marries is realistically awkward, sexy, and touching.
THE STARS ARE OURS! Anti-science fundamentalists have taken over (Norton did not like fundamentalists) and a secret crew of scientists escape to another planet, where they have adventures. Likable characters, exciting action, and a very cool alien world make up for the extremely stupid-sounding secret space travel formula and disjointed structure.
SORCERESS OF THE WITCH WORLD. There's a bunch of Witch World books but this one's particularly atmospheric. A young witch who may have lost her powers has to negotiate survival in a patriarchal tribe. That's the good part. It dissolves into incoherence once she escapes.
I could list more, but you get the picture. A few are duds but most are good reads if you're in the mood. Norton was, as far as I know, a prolific midlist author but not a bestselling one. I wonder if she'd have survived as a writer now.