Book review: “Postmarked the Stars” by Andre Norton

There is much to dislike in Andre Norton’s 1969 novel Postmarked the Stars, the fourth of her novels about the interstellar tramp freighter Solar Queen, featuring assistant cargo master Dane Thorson as the central character.

And that’s surprising since the other three, all written at least a decade earlier, were fun and interesting works, and one was among the best Norton novels I’ve read.

Here are the three with some quotes from my reviews:

• Sargasso of Space (1955): “The traders of the Solar Queen have set a trap for some hardened criminals who are hiding on the planet Limbo.  One of the bad guys gets out of his crawler, a Jeep-like vehicle, to investigate something, and, then,….‘A stone thudded against the helmet of the would-be investigator, sending him off balance to clutch at the tread of the crawler for support.  Dane slammed another in his direction and then aimed for the driver of the machine.’…I can’t help but smile to see that Andre Norton, writing initially as Alex North, has this key episode in her 1955 Sargasso of Space turn on the ability of her hero Dane Thorson and his fellows to throw rocks — like any Neanderthal of the distant past.”
• Plague Ship (1956): “Andre Norton’s Plague Ship is a rip-snortingly inventive yarn that’s one of her better novels, a combination of medical mystery, anthropological adventure and space gallop.  And it features a rare guest appearance by the Earth, or Terra as Norton, like most sci-fic writers, calls it.”
• Voodoo Planet (1959) tells a complicated story that reflects and counters the racial prejudices of the era when it was published. “In Voodoo Planet, Blacks are shown as strong, capable and skilled enough to carry out a rebellion and a flight to a new planet in the face of racist genocide.”

 

Adventures strung together

The complications of Voodoo Planet are nothing compared to the layers and layers of complications that Norton brings into Postmarked the Stars.

In her 200-plus novels, over a career that spanned seven decades, Norton often told stories in which various adventures would be strung together, one after the other.

When it worked, it was exciting, and the reader never knew when the next twist in the plot would send Norton’s characters down an alien tunnel or up into a tree with a sentient bird or caught in a foul-smelling — a rank odor was always a tip off of a bad alienness — mire.

When it didn’t, it was a drag.

Reconstituted alien creatures

In Postmarked the Stars, she has several interesting elements, such as creatures called brachs, who, because of an odd box of radiation, go through a backwards evolution to an earlier time when they were an intelligent species. That same hot box turns the bird-like lathsmers into dragons of a sort, and there’s a giant ant that attacks Dane.

But Norton doesn’t seem to know what to do with the reconstituted alien creatures, and, seemingly from page to page, there’s one plot turn after another, and a host of characters who keep getting caught in bad situations.

For instance, three times, Dane rides a flitter — a kind of helicopter — and, three time, the flitter crashes. And Dane isn’t that strong of a presence in the novel to pull together all the disparate pieces.

There’s more to complain about, but I’ll leave it at that.

Norton, it would seem, wasn’t very excited to take another go at a Solar Queen story. It wasn’t for a quarter of a century that she again took up this set of characters, and, then, only with a co-author: Redline the Stars (1993), with P. M. Griffin; Derelict for Trade (1997), with Sherwood Smith; and A Mind for Trade (1997), with Sherwood Smith.

Oh, I will add one more complaint. As a title, what the heck does Postmarked the Stars mean?

 

Patrick T. Reardon

4.26.26