Witch World by Andre Norton
222 pages
Published 1963
Read from October 31 to November 3
Rating: 1.5 out of 5
If you browse used paperbacks with any regularity, you've seen this book. Andre Norton was such a prolific and popular SF/F writer during the midcentury pulp period that her books fill discount bins to this day. The Witch World books, in particular, are inescapable. I've orbited around the series for a while, intrigued by their place in the history and development of fantasy fiction yet confident that they would prove to be schlocky trash, and probably not worth the effort.
Sure enough, Witch World fulfilled my expectations. Norton's prose is awkward, written in bulk for a less discerning audience. Our hero is a stock sci-fi archetype, the cool and collected man of action whose unsavory reputation was thrust upon him by an unfair world. At a time when most fantasy was packaged with science-fictiony framing devices, it's almost amusing how our hero stumbles into a crackpot-inventor archetype straight out of a midcentury time-travel tale.
Our heroine is a sorceress from a land of matriarchal power, where mating with a man means losing your spark of magic. You can fill in the gaps of how this is employed as a plot device in a 1960s novel. And surprising no one, at the end our heroine (by implication, at least) proves willing to give up her power in exchange for the big strong embrace of our hero.
I skimmed Wikipedia to get an idea of where the series goes from here. Apparently it turns out that when a magical woman and a magical man love each other very much, their powers complement rather than negate each other, so there's that, I guess. Now that I've done my due diligence, however, I don't feel any desire to revisit Witch World or its dozens of sequels. Give me something newer, gayer, and better written, please!
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