<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Andre Alice Norton (b. Alice Mary Norton February 17, 1912 – March 17, 2005) began her prolific career writing young adult science fiction and historical adventure novels but switched primarily to fantasy starting in the 1960s, most frequently in her Witch World series set in an alternate universe where magic works. Although she began writing short speculative fiction in the 1940s, it was 1952 before her first SF novel appeared, and Star Man's Son (also published as Daybreak 2250 AD) remains one of her most popular works, the story of a young man surviving in a post apocalyptic world where rats have become more intelligent and competitive. Most of the novels that followed were space operas like Star Rangers (1953, aka The Last Planet), Star Guard (1955), and the "Solar Queen" series.

During the late 1950s, she began writing novels in various separate series. The Beast Master (1959) was the first of two adventures of Hosteen Storm, a young ex-soldier trying to make a new life for himself. The Time Traders (1958) and its three sequels mixed time travel and other worlds adventures following the discovery of a damaged alien spaceship on Earth. The second title, Galactic Derelict, skillfully evokes the reader's sense of wonder about the universe. Crossroads of Time (1956) and its sequel explored worlds where history took a different course, and Storm Over Warlock (1960) and Ordeal in Otherwhere (1964) explore a world where an alien race has almost-magical powers. In some of these novels, humans are able to establish a mental rapport with one or more animals, a device she used much more frequently in her fantasy fiction. Many of her later SF novels shared common elements--the existence of an apparently extinct star traveling race known as the Forerunners--but most of these were otherwise unrelated to each other. The best of her nonseries novels are Star Guard (1954), which anticipates several of the tropes of military SF, and Sea Siege (1957), an entertaining story of adventure directly following a nuclear war.

Norton's SF began to contain ambiguous magical references during the 1960s, notably Judgment on Janus (1963) and The Moon of Three Rings (1966). Witch World (1964) described the conflict between a world where science and technology held sway with one in which magic worked, although subsequent volumes moved closer to mainstream fantasy themes. The Witch World series includes two dozen novels which Norton either wrote alone or in collaboration with other writers. The series dominated her career from the 1970s until her death.

In recent years, new novels have been appended to Norton's early SF adventure series, ostensibly collaborations with writers like Lyn McConchie, Sherwood Smith, and P. M. Griffin. She also allowed other writers to place stories within the Witch World setting, editing a series of shared world anthologies during the 1980s. Norton was only a casual short story writer, and few of her stories are particuarly memorable.