Book review: “Voodoo Planet” by Andre Norton

Published sixty-six years ago, Andre Norton’s 63-page novella Voodoo Planet is both caught in the racial attitudes of its time and free of them. And it’s a strange tale for the modern reader.

Voodoo Planet is a simple enough science fiction novel that veers into gothic wizardry, and it ends with a showdown between good and bad magic.

On the one side is Lumbrilo, the chief witch doctor on the fabulously rich planet Khatka, founded by African Blacks who fled a race war on earth. He’s a throwback to an earlier, more savage period of the planet’s history, much different from the “enlightened” leaders of its present-day.

Yet, the more sophisticated, more worldly — more outerworldly? — Khatkans are hemmed in by the magic that Lumbrilo uses to influence decisions on the world. That’s why Kort Asaki, a Chief Ranger of the planet, enlists the crew of the Solar Queen spaceship to test the shaman. Is his magic real or fakery?

So, on the other side of the showdown is Craig Tau, the medic on the Solar Queen spaceship. And, in their clashes, including the one in the final pages, Tau, the “civilized” combatant, wins.

But, of course, the “civilized” one defeats the one who’s power is rooted in savagery. At least, that’s what a reader in 1959 was likely to be thinking.

For a reader today, however, it’s awkward that it’s a Black man who is identified as a savage and as using savage tricks to win power in the more rational world. It seems to smack of racism.

 

Not so simple

Nonetheless, Norton’s story isn’t quite so simple or simplistic.

Here’s what Tau tells Dane Thorsen, the young acting-cargo-master of the Solar Queen, about the Khatkans and their history:

The colony was founded by escaped prisoners — and just one racial stock. They took off from Earth close to the end of the Second Atomic War. That was a race war, remember? Which made it doubly ugly.

One side in the war sought to take over Africa. And, in a Holocaust-like plot, they forced most of the Africans into concentration camps and carried out genocide on a large scale. But some of those in the camps revolted.

They captured an experimental station hidden in the center of the camp and made a break into space in two ships which had been built there.  That voyage must have been a nightmare, but they were desperate.

Those who survived the flight landed on Khatka and thrived.

This narrative counters the racial attitudes of many in mid-twentieth-century America who wanted to see Blacks as inferiors.

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.

 

“His proper place”

Yet, there’re more complications.

The new settlers on Khatka are able to survive but in very primitive ways. And, then, after a time, “people with superior gifts” emerge, form the Five Families and unite into an oligarchy that rules the planet. These oligarchs develop a new civilization and fashion their planet into a hunter’s paradise, making Khatka fabulously wealthy.

The problem with Lumbrilo, according to Asaki, is that he “does not accept his proper place in the scheme of things.”

So, the fighting against Lumbrilo isn’t about his color — the oligarchs are just as Black — it’s about his opposition to the control of the planet exercised by the Five Families.

In going head-to-head with Lumbrilo, Craig Tau is fighting against fake magic, i.e., magic that is used to psychologically hypnotize people and thereby control them. He is fighting for reason against trickery.

That’s what his victory means in Norton’s story.

 

Under the thumb

However, today’s reader isn’t only wondering about racism in the novel. Today’s reader, in the America of Donald Trump of 2025, is very aware of how the U.S. oligarchs, headed by the President, are bullying everyone else in the nation.

For today’s American reader, Lumbrilo can seem like a George Washington trying to help the people get out from under the thumb of the oppressors.

That isn’t what Norton was thinking.

But a lot has happened in more than six decades.

Indeed, a lot has happened in the past year.

***

Voodoo Planet is the third installment in a series of Norton novels on the travels of the Solar Queen:

• Sargasso of Space (1955).
• Plague Ship (1956)
• Voodoo Planet (1959)
• Postmarked the Stars (1969)

 

Patrick T. Reardon

12.11.25