Andre Norton

Andre Norton was an American science fiction and fantasy author whose career ran for roughly seventy years and produced well over a hundred novels, making her one of the most prolific and foundational figures the genre has ever had. Born Alice Mary Norton, she legally adopted the more androgynous "Andre" partly to smooth her path in a publishing world that assumed adventure fiction readers wanted a male byline -- a workaround that speaks to how early and how long she was writing in a field that took decades to catch up to her. Her best-known creation is the long-running Witch World series, but her influence extended well past any single setting: she was the first woman named a Science Fiction Grandmaster by SFWA, in 1984, and the first woman inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, in 1997. Generations of later fantasy and SF writers have cited her as a formative influence, particularly for her focus on young, often orphaned or outsider protagonists finding their footing in strange worlds.

In this catalogue, Norton is credited as full co-author on all three novels of the Halfblood Chronicles, written with Mercedes Lackey -- a trilogy about a rebellion against slaveholding high-elf aristocrats that reflects Norton's long-standing interest in outsider characters and genuinely non-human intelligences. She died in 2005, not long after the trilogy's conclusion.