The Things, They Change…

[ursulav]

So Andre Norton’s back catalog seems to be mostly out in digital form these days-really out, and not in the shady iBook editions that had me going “I kinda wonder what’s up with that.” And while I re-read The Crystal Gryphon approximately eleventy million times as a pre-teen, I had not read most of the other Witch World books. (I think I remember “

Comments

[varjohaltia]

I primarily wanted to say that it's interesting to hear your perspective on this, and that said perspective was expressed in an awesome manner.

[thanate]

I think I must have missed arranged marriages as a Thing... the only ones I can think of off the top of my head were the two that spectacularly failed to go through in The Outlaws of Sherwood. But I had the same experience with the language thing a while back, trying to read something where both plotting style and prose screamed early 80s fantasy so much I couldn't deal and sent it back to the library. (I *think* it might have been a Norton & someone else book, but I bounced hard enough-- more from aggressive foreshadowing than prose-- that I'm not even sure without going to look it up.)

I haven't read any Springer recently, but rereading McKillip always surprises me by how simple and clear her sentence-level prose actually is. It just builds up well.

[rabid_bookwyrm]

McKillip's individual sentences are fairly basic, but she leaves out vast swaths of Actually Making Any Sense, so the sense (for me, anyway) is of being in a dream - every individual thing Is Fact, but they don't build up to a coherent whole very well. You know: ...and then I was at my father's house, but it didn't look like my father's house and anyway I had a completely different family in this dream, and my family was throwing this big feast and I was cooking in the kitchens, and I kept finding messages from the Autumn Court of Faery about the food I was making and how it was/was not Autumnal enough and would I like to come join the court... * Every individual bit was definitely true, but taken as a narrative whole it's just bizarre.

Not that I'm complaining about McKillip, I own several of her books. But they're like reading dreams, and I usually have to read something else more solid after.

* Yes, I've had this dream. It kept going, too - faery battles and all kinds of stuff.

[archangelbeth]

That dream sounds quite logical to me...

This may say something about my dreams. >_>

[fatfred]

Booksontheknob.com had most of those available for free on the Kindle during DragonCon. I picked them up but haven't read them yet.
I remember reading and loving her Magic books, Fur Magic especially, but it has been quite a while.

[fatcook]

Oh, this is just too weird. We were just talking about Andrea Norton at breakfast this morning!
Mostly my Dad saying that Poul really liked editing her stories because she only had four ideas for her stories. ABCD, then it would be BCDA, then DACB and so on and so on. It was the way she told them that made them work. That and a good editor.

[innostrantsa]

Heh.

About... two years ago? I re-read The Crystal Gryphon and, um, the other books in that series (no titles due to brain fart and not being willing to look them up, fresh cookies are to hand) and hocrap, they aredated. I didn't think they held up well at all, for a number of reasons that you mention, and just, well, being more practical and pragmatic now. Could Josan really not have made some helpful logical leaps that would have kept the party out of trouble, later in the series? Did Kerovan honestly have to angst and wibble every goddam day? Could no one have punched that one mysterious guy the fuck out?

I for sure saw how they appealed to the young and newly-stirring of the female (and occasionally male) of the species, and even more, saw how they appealed to what I now know as power dynamics (witchery! telepathy! prophetic dreams! omg!) and kinks of the xeno-prefixed variety. I'm with your inner pre-teen, Kerovan was totally smoking hot. Those hooves just made him spicier! Along with the angst and woe, which now...