Father Geek reporting in with sad news... Science fiction and fantasy authoress Andre Norton, who wrote the hugely popular "Witch World" series, has died at the age of 93 in historic Murfreesboro, just outside Nashville, Tennesse.
Father Geek here first fell in love with her work in high school thru those beautiful little (and cheap, 40 cents each if memory serves) Ace editions of some of the "Witch World" series, which delt with a strange and mysterious life on an planet reachable only through various secret gateways and I still have a handful of those old paperbacks stashed somewhere around Geek Headquarters here in Austin. I think they're out in our Screening room - Library. That series grew to include more than 30 novels, and I regret having never got thru, or even seen them all.
Ms. Norton requested before her death that she not be given a funeral service, but asked instead to be cremated along with copies of her very first novel, "The Prince Commands," published in 1934 and set in a mythical European kingdom, and telling the tale of a young man who returns from exile to stop a communistic takeover of his country, and her last novel "Three Hands of Scorpio," set to be released this April... (she received her "proof" copy just before her death)
Born as Alice Mary Norton on the 17th of February in 1912, in Cleveland, Ohio, she ended up writting more than 130 novels in several genres during her career of close to 70 years. Like many of the female writers of her generation and before she used a male pen name because she expected her writing interests would mostly be for young boys (not so as it turned out) and she thought a man's name would help increase the sales somewhat.
In 1977 she was the first woman to receive the Grand Master of Fantasy Award from the SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America), and she won the highly coveted Nebula Grand Master Award in 1984.
Her spirit of life and adventure will live on thru her surviving works and the writings and films of the many she inspired to follow in her footsteps. I know that here at Geek Headquarters in our minds she will never really be dead...
