[snip]

: Though I don't dispute your right to not like a book, it might
: be time for both of us to re-read it. I don't remember "a ship
: from our world" in this one, though the original Sulkar people
: were discribed as having arrived in a ship from another world.

I don't recall any ship from our world either, but the theme does sound familiar. I don't know why.

: I do have an explanation for how the book 'is'. Andre Norton
: was combining all of the Witch World stories and tying up as
: many loose ends as she could. Juanita Coulson did a WW time
: line with character thumbnail sketches - 500 pages long. Andre
: Norton combined the life lines of hundreds of characters, many
: of these characters developed by other people.

WARDING, unfortunately, comes across exactly as a book which is tying up loose ends. It's like a clips episode from a television series in some ways, because it revisits so many old threads which had formerly had entire books devoted to them.

Classic Norton fiction takes 1-5 characters and focuses on them. WARDING took a mob of characters whose lives really hadn't touched each others' before and joined them all together. It seemed very un-Witch World like to me. The writing was good Norton writing, but the story was no longer really Andre's. She was too constrained by what she'd permitted other writers to do in her world to really let everything flow the way I think it would have gone had she written ALL the Witch World stories.

And I'm not saying I have a vision of how I think Andre would have written the books. I'm saying it just doesn't feel like pure Norton because it's not. If Andre had not invited other authors into the world, no matter what changes she would have introduced herself, they would still have come from her hand and would have felt that way.

Witch World seems so large to me, mostly, because there are so many stories set in it which have no apparent connection to one another. This is where Norton surpasses someone like Tolkien. All his histories are connected, because they essentially "survived" through one library, so to speak. Norton's histories are simply tales from various parts of another world. You know there is a connection in the background because of various events or peoples referred to, but until the last few books, they weren't all coming together.

I sort of miss the older, broader Witch World where you'd buy a book and have no idea of whether it was really connected with anything else until you had read it.
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