Black Gate

When I was growing up in the seventies, the most represented science-fiction author in the children’s section of my local library was Andre Norton. Her books took up more shelf space than either Robert Heinlein or Isaac Asimov. Maybe the children’s librarian was a fan.

And then there were the Andre Norton books on my father’s bookshelf. As cool as the cover of Daybreak – 2250A.D. looked, I never read it. For the next forty years, I managed to avoid anything by Norton.

Then two years ago, as I was getting my Swords & Sorcery blog up to speed, I pulled out my copies of Lin Carter’s Flashing Swords series. There in the second volume was “Toads of Grimmerdale” by Andre Norton.

Carter’s enthusiastic introduction was enough to make me give it a shot. Since I knew many of Norton’s novels were young adult, I wasn’t expecting a story about revenge. Woven from strands of darkness and shards of ice, it’s a haunting introduction to Witch World that I strongly recommend.

“Toads” was enough to make me root through the boxes of my dad’s old books, hunting for other Witch World stories. Since then, I’ve read the first three novels in the series — Witch World (1963), Web of the Witch World (1964), and Three Against the Witch World (1965) — as well as two collections of stories: Spell of the Witch World (1972) (reviewed by me at my site) and Lore of the Witch World (1980). It’s the third novel I will speak of here.

In Witch World (just reviewed here by Matthew David Surridge), Norton takes ex-U.S. soldier and blackmarketeer Simon Tregarth and tosses him through a dimensional gate. He must adjust to a world of super-science and magic, and quickly at that, for he must choose sides in a war. Simon is immediately caught up in the affairs of the witches of Estcarp and their ongoing struggle against the thuggish realm of Karsten. He joins a group of exiles and settlers from other dimensions and plunges into battle on and under the sea, in the air, and into far dimensions.

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I didn’t know anything about Philip K. Dick when The Best of Philip K. Dick was released in 1977. That was the year Star Wars came out and I was more interested in trying to make a light saber out of my sister’s hair dryer.

I wasn’t alone (about Dick, not my obsession with my sister’s hair dryer). Philip K. Dick was a midlist paperback science fiction writer in the mid-70s, with few awards and only a handful of successful novels to his name, largely unknown except inside the genre. As Robert Silverberg observed in his famous comments on full-time SF writers, “Phil Dick was a full-timer, but lived at the poverty level.”

Dick was an unusual choice for Lester del Rey’s Classics of Science Fiction line for another reason. If you’ve been following the entries so far (see below for a complete list of the titles we’ve covered), you know that a typical volume consists of long out-of-print pulp stories by a writer who later achieved some measure of fame, usually for their novels.

The most recent story in last week’s entry, for example, The Best of John W. Campbell, was “Cloak of Aesir,” originally published in 1939. Similarly with The Best of Henry Kuttner (most recent entry from 1946), C.L. Moore (1946), Stanley Weinbaum (1936), and others.

By contract, the earliest story in The Best of Philip K. Dick, “Beyond Lie the Wub,” originally appeared in 1952. He’d barely been published for two decades by the time this book arrived, which didn’t fit the profile of Del Rey’s other choices at all. In fact, in many ways Dick was the most contemporary subject Del Rey chose for his select line of collections.

I can only conclude that Del Rey saw something special in Dick’s short stories. He wasn’t the only one, either — by the late 70s, the brilliant work being done by Dick at short length was becoming obvious to his fellow writers, even if wider recognition still eluded him. The blurbs on the inside cover reflect this. Here’s Norman Spinrad:

He has produced the most significant body of work of any science-fiction writer.

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