Lost Lands of Witch World Read Online Free Page B

who
doesn’t
list Andre Norton’s Witch World series as one of his or her primal influences. Her peers acknowledged that when she was presented with a Nebula Grand Master Award in 1984. She also has receivedthe Grand Master of Fantasy award in 1977 at the World Science Fiction Convention, the Balrog Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1979, the Fritz Leiber Award
and
the E. E. Smith (Skylark) Award in 1983, the Jules Verne Award in 1984, The Howard (World Fantasy) Award in 1987, the SF Bookclub Award for Best Book of the Year in 1991, and in 1998 another World Fantasy award, this time for Lifetime Achievement. These are in addition to so many other awards that it would take an entire page to list them all. In a time when books seem to be considered important only when they hit bestseller status on the
New York Times
list, and little attention is paid to volumes that aren’t issued first in hardcover printing numbers of 250,000, this level of acclaim may seem unlikely. Nevertheless, I can assure you that nearly every SF and fantasy professional acknowledges these books as seminal.
    The only exceptions to this may be those who have come to the genre considering themselves to be “mainstream” authors who are only using the fantasy genre as a vehicle for their own particular messages.
    And this is their loss. Andre Norton long ago perfected the art of embedding theme and message in pure story, never sacrificing the tale for the sake of making a point. In Heinlein’s words, she was
not
one of those who “sold their birthright for a pot of message.” And in giving us amazing stories, she serves as an ongoing inspiration for more than one generation of fantasy writers.
    It was certainly true for me, and in more ways than just one. Not only was I enthralled and inspired by the books, I was given inspiration by the author. The Witch World books proved several things to me.
    The first was that fantasy was just as valid a genre as science fiction. This seems like a nonissue in 2003, when fantasy titles outnumber science fiction titles three to one. From the 1963 perspective, it appeared that science fiction was the king, that it was getting more and more technically oriented with every passing year, and that soon one would have to have a Ph.D. in physics to be able to write books that publishers and the public would accept. In 1965 it seemed that while one might not have to have a Ph.D. in physics, the way of the future was in literary science fiction, for which I was ill suited. But there were the Witch World books, doing well, prospering—giving me hope that what I liked might also be what other people would like.
    The second was that heroines were as important and as valid as heroes. Again, this seems obvious now—it wasn’t then, when publishers were convinced that only boys read these books, and that boys would revolt in droves if girls were anything but props for the heroes.
    The third was that you didn’t have to be male to write science fiction books. Andre Norton was the first author in the genre who I
knew
was female. Yes, there were others, and plenty of them—C. L. Moore, Leigh Brackett, Marion Zimmer Bradley—but Andre was the first whom
I was aware of
. To me, that meant that I, too, could write science fiction and fantasy.
    Last of all, you didn’t have to be an Oxford don or some sophisticated creature from Greenwich Village to write a fantasy series. In fact, you could be a perfectly ordinary American female librarian living in Cleveland, Ohio, and write amazing books.
    So not only were the heroines of Andre Norton’s Witch World books accessible to a young teenaged girl living in Indiana, not only were they women she could identify with, but the
author
was someone she could hope to emulate. She wasn’t a Leigh Brackett, living in Hollywood and writing movie scripts for the likes of John Wayne. She wasn’t J.R.R. Tolkien, professor at far-off