Lost Lands of Witch World (2 page)

At any rate, Andre had a respected name in science fiction, and was popular enough that her titles made it to corner drugstore racks everywhere. I already was an avid devourer of her work, as
Beast Master
was the second science fiction book I ever read (I believe I was about eleven at the time), and it led to my combing the shelves of the Science Fiction section of my local library for her works. She was among the few—such as Isaac Asimov, Poul Anderson, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, and H. G. Wells—whose works were popular enough that libraries purchased them in special hardbound editions. How could I not enjoy her work? Here were incredible, wild, exotic worlds where being different was special. Heady stuff for a bookish kid who was very definitely “different.”

That was where I first encountered
Beast Master
, in fact, and if all you know about that story is the regrettable and eminently forgettable movies and television series, then believe me, you don't have any idea of what wonderful books it, and its sequel,
Lord of Thunder
, are. To begin with, these are real science fiction masterpieces with never a fur loincloth in sight. They feature Native Americans (not vanilla Caucasians) as the heroes, something that was totally unheard of at the time, and Andre Norton carefully researched the Navaho culture to bring her high-tech, psionic warrior, Hosteen Storm, to life. His Beast Team, genetically engineered before there was a term for such things, is composed of meerkats (
not
ferrets), a cougar, and the creature that truly enthralled me, an African Black Eagle (
not
a Redtailed Hawk, nor a Harris Hawk, nor any other bird of prey, short of an owl, that the cheapskate movie producers had on hand). Go read the books; you will soon understand why Andre insisted that her name be removed from the movie, and why she regards the sale of those rights as the worst mistake she ever made.

But I digress. Needless to say, Andre Norton was very familiar to me, and I soon went through every Norton book in the library. Then I canvassed the drugstore, then made twice-yearly forays to Chicago and the only “real” bookstore I knew of, Krochs. Finally, in desperation, I began
mail ordering
volumes from the backs of existing books. This might seem irredeemably quaint in these days of amazon.com and Web sites, but in those days people generally didn't mail order anything, unless it was in a catalog from a major department store like Sears, Montgomery Ward, or the like. I would save money from my allowance (fifty cents a week), put together four or five dollars, and, with grave trepidation, put it in an envelope to Ace Books. Six or eight weeks later, a brown-paper-wrapped package would arrive, holding treasure. I still have my original forty-cents copy of
Witch World
, purchased at Krochs. On the list of books in the back, I put tick marks for the books I didn't have yet and wrote little numbers beside them for the ones I wanted first. My book also had an Antioch Bookplate in medieval illumination style with my name on it in the front.

I bought a lot of those books—always trying, being as frugal as possible, to get the books at thirty cents each before the price went up to thirty-five or forty. After all, my fifty-cents-per-week allowance had to stretch as far as I could make it go—not only to buy science fiction books but Christmas and birthday presents, records (classical and folk), and after Beatlemania hit me in late 1964, fan magazines and still more records.

At any rate, here was
Witch World
, in my hot little thirteen-year-old hands. Let me quote the blurb on the back:

BY THE AUTHOR OF DAYBREAK 2250
A.D
. For the myriads of Andre Norton readers, those who know Norton's books to be the tops in science-adventure,
WITCH WORLD
will prove to be a special treat. It's an
all-original novel about a weird, adventure-filled planet where certain of the laws of nature operate differently—in fact, certain types of “magic” apparently work. Into this far-out space world, an Earthman is sent to test his skill against this new type of science.
Witch World
is high adventure in super-science, witchcraft, and fantasy-romance that will remind you of the best of such varied writers as Burroughs, Tolkien, and Brackett—and yet remains ANDRE NORTON in top form!

Now, by now you should have noticed that the word
fantasy
appears only once in that blurb, and that, if you were not already aware of the fact that it really was a fantasy, you could be forgiven for assuming this was another of Andre's space-faring tales. The fact is, it was marketed as science fiction; even the cover (by the great Jack Gaughan) would make you think that was what it was—the art prominently featured a man wearing a helmet that appeared to be a cross between the head of a hawk and the head of a toucan. He was carrying what looked, for all intents and purposes, to be a classic ray gun. True, the three men behind him had swords, spears, and shields, but they were in the background. The
ray gun
was in the foreground. From the perspective of 2003, I still wonder about this decision, which persisted into the late 1960s. What was so difficult about the word
fantasy
? Why did the publishers shy away from using it? Were they afraid that it would somehow be dismissed as another Conan clone?

But from the moment you read the first page, you knew you had something different.

The hero was a shadowy man with a shadowy past, Simon Tregarth, on the run in some unspecified, modern city, being hunted down by a hit man named “Sammy” (never seen), sent by one “Hanson” (also never seen), for some unspecified, but clearly terrible, affront. Whoever he was, Simon Tregarth was clearly dangerous, clearly competent, and his services (also unspecified but darkly hinted at) came at a high price, for he had something like twenty thousand 1963 dollars in his pocket (that would be enough to buy a new car, a house, a vacation home, a boat, and still have half left over). In short, it started rather like a James Bond novel. And within a few pages, you also knew that Simon Tregarth, though he trafficked with bad men and considered the money he made to be dirty, was, at heart, a man of honor. He had been tricked into the position he was in, his fall from grace engineered by the unscrupulous, and he continued because he had no other choice.

But he is intercepted over his (presumably last) dinner by a mysterious gentleman, Dr. Jorge Petronius, a man who has a reputation for making hunted people vanish. Simon is very well aware of this reputation, so he listens as Petronius tells him a strange story of menhirs, ancient magic, and the Siege Perilous, which he claims can open to a man the world he has been unconsciously searching for all his life. He styles himself the Guardian of the Siege Perilous—the latest
of many. He offers Tregarth the use of the Siege Perilous. Being desperate, Tregarth takes his offer and the seat upon the Siege—and at dawn, a new world opens to him.

And that is where the book takes an abrupt departure from everything that Andre Norton had written before this.

Oh, there were some superficial trappings of science fiction—the “dart guns” used by Estcarp and other nations of the world, and some few similar bits and bobs. The ultimate enemy in the book does turn out to be the Kolder, a nasty set of aliens, who have wrenched open a way to their world with the goal of conquering the one that harbors Estcarp. And certainly Simon Tregarth himself speculates that
some
of the “magic” might be psychic in nature, because the Witches of Estcarp do use telepathy and some other powers that might be called “psionic.”

But there is magic,
real
magic in play here, for not only is it magic that opens the gate to another world, but within nine pages after their meeting, the hunted Witch that Simon rescues from men and hounds calls up a lightning storm that kills every one of her hunters. She does this using nothing more than a drop of her blood and a mysterious cloudy gemstone she wears around her neck.

By this time readers had figured out that this was nothing like science fiction. What was more, they liked it.

I
certainly did; here, in a pure adventure story, was not only fantasy, but something new to me, at least—not a hero, but a fantasy
heroine
. The unnamed Witch that Simon encounters within moments of his entry into Witch World is a woman in command of herself, competent to a fault, and possessed of her own sort of power that does not depend on swords or guns. And Estcarp, unlike the iron-fisted kingdoms of the Conan stories, was a matriarchy. Women had power here and were perfectly capable of ruling their kingdom without benefit of a king. Forget Conan; he'd find himself out-maneuvered in five minutes by the Witches of Estcarp, shown the door, and left standing outside, scratching his head and wondering what had happened. Our first look at the Witches of Estcarp is sympathetic, although the Witches have scant use for one of their sex who shares her gift and power and gives it up to live a life with a mere man.

It got better. A quarter into the book we encounter Loyse of Verlaine, the feisty young heiress to the wealthy wrecker-duchy, who is about to be bound in ax-marriage to the ruler of Kars. She appears to be a classic Gothic heroine; slight, pale, unpretty, unregarded, the pawn of her stepfather's plans. She is even presented in the classic Gothic setting—the storm-wracked castle tower overlooking a cliff and an angry sea.

In fact, she is nothing like that helpless maiden. She has had a plan all along, and proceeds to not only escape her bondage by her own wits and courage but to take the captive Witch with her. All by herself—no hero required.

It's time for a little perspective here. Nineteen sixty-three had far more in
common with the stodgy and uptight fifties than the swinging sixties. There were a lot of things that “nice” girls “didn't” do, and I'm not talking about sex. Girls were supposed to be passive. Girls didn't have adventures. Girls didn't take the initiative. Try renting one of the classic old science fiction movies, like
Them
, and you'll see what I mean—the female scientist plays second fiddle to her father, totters around on high heels in a skirt too narrow to permit a reasonable stride, and requires an untrained military officer to do her observations in the giant ant nest for her. The women in science fiction books were mostly similar. They existed as foils for the young heroes. When they had any power whatsoever, they were generally evil and existed only to be put in their place by the heroes—or else, to fall in love with them and see the evil of their ways.

Andre Norton's women of
Witch World
were the antithesis of what girls were “supposed” to be like.

I seem to recall buying
Witch World
in May of 1963, so at that point in time, JFK and Pope John XXIII were still alive. Martin Luther King Jr. had not yet made his famous “I have a dream” speech. The cost of a first-class stamp was five cents. The Beatles were just beginning their rise to popularity in the U.K.; over here, no one had ever heard of them. Rock and roll was hardly mainstream; it still had something of a tainted image. In those days (unlike now, when a top twenty song will show up as Muzak within six months), if you had played a rock hit in a grocery store, you might have been lynched. Instead, the Grammy for that year went to “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” and Bible-school classes were burning Elvis Presley records as being “detrimental to the morals of youth” (sound familiar?).

At the time, I was into folk music, myself; I would listen to a folk music show that was on after 10:00
P.M
. on radio station WLS—secretly, because I wasn't supposed to be up that late. This, by the way, was an AM station—no one had ever heard of FM. Peter, Paul, and Mary had been recording for just under three years. WLS played the real stuff: the protest songs, the things that had been banned from many radio stations, such as Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, and the Weavers—in 1963 McCarthyism was making its last gasp, but it was still there.

The big movie of the year was
Lawrence of Arabia
, which starred an unknown fellow by the name of Peter O'Toole. It aired in what is now “the director's cut” so long it required an intermission.

Not even science fiction writers envisaged PCs, CDs, VCRs, DVDs, or the the Internet. We were more afraid of ICBMs than disease—plague was a thing of the past, and no one could imagine that there would ever be another disease that science couldn't find a cure for. But on the pessimistic side, the Cuban Missile Crisis had only just been sorted out, and
On the Beach
and nuclear holocaust seemed not only likely, but probable; many of Andre Norton's books took place in a post-nuclear-war world. Many science fiction authors were in the Ban the Bomb movement and wrote openly antiwar stories. Unlike those in more visible
genres, their activism was ignored. After all, “everyone knew” that science fiction was nothing but escapist trash read by bespectacled boys in short pants.

Transistors were the highest tech available. Man had not only not gone to the moon, he had barely taken the first steps into orbit. My father worked on one of the first commercial computers—it occupied the space of a ten thousand-square-foot building and produced the computing power of one of today's credit-card-sized calculators.

This was the year that Sylvia Plath published
The Bell Jar
and Betty Friedan produced
The Feminine Mystique
, but neither book, so seminal to the budding Women's Liberation movement, made any impression in the suburbs where I lived. Far more important to the housewives where I lived was the new program on National Educational Television (not yet called PBS),
The French Chef
, with Julia Child. What went on the dinner table and could be used to impress Father's business colleagues was supposed to be more important that what Mother or Sister might be thinking or feeling. I had vaguely heard of
The Feminine Mystique
but only because comedians on the Johnny Carson show made jokes, calling it
The Feminine Mistake
. I had never heard of Sylvia Plath, and I doubt if I could have gotten my hands on a copy of either book.