Andre Norton (1912-2005)

kw: book reviews, science fiction, speculative fiction, novels

Last week I read Echoes in Time, the sixth of seven "Time Traders" novels by Andre Norton—this one co-written with Sherwood Smith. Then today, while looking up the Andre Norton Bibliography website, I found this notice of her recent passing: Andre Norton (1912-2005) - SFWA News. She passed away May 17, 2005, age 93.

The seven Time Traders titles were written from 1950 to 2002. She knew how to return freshness to earlier ideas. Echoes in Time was released in 1999. I like Norton's handling of time travel, that one cannot self-loop. Rather, after spending a week in the past, one must return a week later than one's departure. This, and confining the story line to time trips over centuries rather than shorter intervals, avoids the paradoxes that many authors either fall afoul of, or must resort to a lot of "I had to do that, because it was already done in the future" to gloss over (Harry Potter's saving himself from Dementors via a time loop is a case in point).

The machinery that accomplishes time travel, and the spaceships, are products of alien technology, ultimately stolen from them. The notion that these "aliens" may be human descendants is brought up, and not quite solved in the novel. The short war between these (possible) aliens and others, including humans, is also shown to be a perfectly understandable response on the part of the owners of the technology to their theft.

Other ramifications, including the gene-twisting entity that makes other questions moot, I'll leave you to read for yourself.