Creator / Andre Norton

Dont be tricked by the name! She's been a lady all along.

Andre Alice Norton (born Alice Mary Norton, February 17, 1912 – March 17, 2005) was a prolific Speculative Fiction writer. She was dubbed "Grande Dame of Science Fiction and Fantasy" by her biographers, fans, and peers, and has an award comparable to a Nebula for young adult speculative fiction named after her. She was also the first woman (and sixth person) to be named Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America. She published her first novel in 1934 when she was 21 and her last posthumously in 2006.

Norton is well-known for her "soft" Science Fiction, Science Fantasy, and Fantasy novels, although she also wrote such things as spy stories, Westerns, and gothic romance. Her most famous works are probably the Witch World series and her Beast Master novels, the latter of which were later adapted (sort of) to film and a tv series. Her work greatly influenced many modern authors, including Mercedes Lackey and David Weber. A number of female authors were encouraged to write on finding out that Andre was a pen name, and she was a woman.

Works with a page on this wiki:

• Android at Arms
• The Beast Master series
• Catseye
• Dread Companion
• The Halfblood Chronicles series, with Mercedes Lackey
• Ice Crown
• The Prince Commands
• Solar Queen series
• The Time Traders series
• The Trillium series, with Marion Zimmer Bradley and Julian May
• Warlock Series: Storm Over Warlock, Ordeal in Otherwhen, and Forerunner Foray.
• The Witch World series
• The Zero Stone series

Selected other works:

• The Central Control series, actually two books only related by the interstellar government being called "Central Control"
• The Forerunner series
• The Janus series
• The Moon Singer series
• Quag Keep — published in 1978, the first book is considered the first Dungeons & Dragons novel. Norton wrote it after playing a session of the game with Gary Gygax himself. The sequel novel Return to Quag Keep was completed only after she died by her co-author Jean Rabe.
• The Star Ka'at series, with Dorothy Madlee
• The Sword series (spy stories, set in World War II and the years just following)

Stand-alone works:

• No Night Without Stars
• Rogue Reynard
• Sea Siege
• Shadow Hawk (adventure in Ancient Egypt)
• Star Man's Son (a.k.a. Daybreak - 2250 A.D.)
• Scarface (can be thought of as Son of Captain Blood)

Full list here. (Even The Other Wiki had to split the bibliography into a page of its own.)

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Tropes in her other works:

• Advanced Ancient Humans: In Operation Time Search, the fabled civilizations of Mu, Atlantis and others really existed and had highly advanced magitek. In the original timeline they were all destroyed as a result of the evil actions of Atlantis, but the intervention of an accidental time traveler changed history so they still existed in the present.
• After Action Patch Up: In A Brother to Shadows, once inside after the assassination attempt, Zulzan insists Jofre take off his shirt and then treats the burn he suffered.
• After the End:
  • Breed to Come is set in a post-human world in which the disease that wiped out the humans led to the rise of several other intelligent species, among them the protagonist's. His eldest surviving relative has spent his life studying the remains of human civilization and acquiring any technological advances that might benefit his people.
  • The short story "The Gifts of Asti" opens just as Memphir, the protagonist's homeland, is falling to a barbarian invasion. She — the last priestess of a mostly-forsaken religion — follows a standing order about what to do After the End (which was mentioned in prophecy), and takes a prepared escape route. She ends up on the far side of a mountain range to find a vast plain that was glassed in a now-forgotten war.
  • No Night Without Stars opens several generations after The End of the World as We Know It, which appears to have been due to a Colony Drop.
  • Sea Siege opens on a small Caribbean island that is having trouble with mutant sea creatures — just before World War III.
  • Star Man's Son (a.k.a. Daybreak - 2250 A.D.) opens generations after World War III. The protagonist is suffering from his culture's prejudice against mutants.
• All of the Other Reindeer:
  • In Star Man's Son, a young mutant tries to get himself accepted as a Star Man despite the flagrant proof of his mutation, his hair.
  • In The Stars are Ours!, those of "Free Scientist" blood flee Earth into interstellar space.
  • Humanity is treated like this in Star Guard by alien races.

• And the Adventure Continues: Star Gate ends with the heroes having built another Cool Gate to find yet another Alternate Universe, and the very last words are:
  Sometimes he thought that an endless quest had been set them for some purpose, and that the seeking, not the finding, was their full reward. And it was good.
• Antlion Monster: In Judgment on Janus. Niall/Ayyar falls into a pit dug by a kalcrok (a large spider-like monster). The kalcrok skillfully fashioned the pit walls to be unclimbable, so after killing it he must crawl though its nest to find an exit.
• Asian Fox Spirit: Fox spirits are mentioned in both Imperial Lady (co-written with Susan Shwartz) and The White Jade Fox. In the former, Silver Snow's maid is a kitsune, while in the latter it's left ambiguous as to whether any of the characters are literally kitsune, but the trope is at least toyed with.

• Auto-Kitchen: No Night Without Stars. Sander lives in a Post Apocalyptic world. During the novel, he finds an underground installation from the Before Days, the civilization that existed before the Dark Time. While exploring it, he finds a box with knobs on it. When he presses certain knobs, the box produces food.
• The Beforetimes: No Night Without Stars. The story takes place in a Post Apocalyptic Earth. The period before the Dark Times that ended the world is called the Before Days.
• Casual Interstellar Travel: Several of her science fiction books feature Free Traders, who travel from star to star carrying trade items. Their ships use a FTL drive that allows interstellar travel in a few days.
• Cat Folk:
  • The People in Breed to Come are a race of sapient cats descended from modern Earth cats.
  • The Salariki, introduced in Plague Ship as primitive Proud Warrior Race Guys with a fondness for the Earth substance called "catnip", went on to appear in several other novels.
• Cold Iron: Steel Magic. Cold iron is defined as being any metal "forged by a mortal in the world of mortals", so the three protagonists end up using their stainless steel picnic cutlery as weapons; respectively a spoon, fork and knife. Fortunately the cutlery develops unusual properties in the magical world (such as changing size) and is pretty dramatically lethal to any magical being it touches.
• Changeling Fantasy: At the end of Scarface, Justin Blade is revealed to be the son of Sir Robert Scarlett.
• The City Narrows: The Dipple, a refugee camp in the planet Korwar's capital city of Tikil, appears in several novels, e.g. Judgement on Janus.
• Commonality Connection: In Dragon Magic, four boys each find a jigsaw puzzle, make one corner — and so one dragon — of it, and get shifted to an ancient era to experience something related to it. This, and their attempts to research the facts, draw them together at the end.
• Deceptively Human Robots: The android duplicates in Victory on Janus were instantly detectable by the Iftin (and canine) sense of smell, but were otherwise externally identical to specific Iftin and human individuals, down to imitating their voices. The first android "corpse" encountered was torn apart by guard dogs, revealing that the androids didn't bleed and were obviously mechanical.
• Dem Bones: In Quag Keep.
• Demythification: "Pendragon: Artos, Son of Marius" — one of the quartet of stories in Dragon Magic — is set in post-Roman Britain. It ends with an explanation of the later legends of Arthur's death: he was secretly buried in such a way as to give his followers hope of his eventual return.
• Derelict Graveyard: In space! In Forerunner, the desert north of Kuxortal holds a field of Forerunner spacecraft contaminated with radiation.
• Dreaming of Times Gone By: In The Opal-Eyed Fan, the heroine dreams of a centuries ago Human Sacrifice on the island where she was shipwrecked.
• Earth All Along: In Star Rangers, a decrepit patrol ship from a decaying human-dominated galactic empire finally breaks down for good far from the galactic core and its civilizations. The faraway fringe world on which our heroes are stranded seems almost too perfect to the human crew members, though...
• Earth That Was: Star Rangers (a.k.a. The Last Planet) has Central Control scout ship Starfire crash-landing on an unknown world located far off the star charts. Guess where...

• Evil-Detecting Dog:
  • In Victory on Janus, the garth guard dogs can distinguish the Deceptively Human Robots from true humans and true Iftin by smell.
  • In "All Cats Are Gray", Bat the cat alerts her owner Steena to the presence of a hostile, invisible alien lurking on the ship she's trying to salvage, allowing her to shoot it before it can attack. Steena later explains that the alien was using Chameleon Camouflage. Since Bat is a colorblind cat, this resulted in a Glamour Failure, allowing him to see it normally. The twist comes from the fact that Steena is also colorblind. She couldn't see the creature as clearly, but Bat's reaction was more than enough to compensate. A rare example of someone actually listens to the Evil Detecting Cat.
• The Fair Folk:
  • Here Abide Monsters. A Speculative Fiction novel including flying saucers. Nevertheless, the people of Avalon — the Alternate Universe into which the protagonists stumble via a Cool Gate — are the Fair Folk.
  • In the short story "The Long Night of Waiting", Lizzie's description of the people in the Alternate Universe in which she and her brother were trapped clearly indicates The Fair Folk, although they seem well-intentioned.
• Fantastic Ghetto: The Dipple on the planet Korwar in Judgment on Janus. It was filled with war refugees no one wanted to deal with.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • In Star Guard (Xenophon's Anabasis Recycled In Space), Terrans are looked down on and virtually enslaved as cannon fodder by the humanoid rulers of Central Control, but get along fine with nonhumans such as the Zacathans. There're also scenes in that book where Terran soldiers refer to the humanoids of one planet as "fur faces."
  • In the chronologically later Star Rangers, humans rule Central Control — and many call nonhumans "Bemmies."
• Fantastic Slurs: Star Rangers had "Bemmy"—apparently derived from the movie slang B.E.M., "bug-eyed monster"—as a generic insult for nonhumans. She got Anvilicious with it to the point of including "Bemmy-lover" as an insult for any human who hung out with them.
• Flowery Elizabethan English: Rogue Reynard from beginning to end.

• Holding Out for a Hero: The Crossroads of Time offered this as part of the explanation for the Wardsmen's non-interference directive: "We must not lend crutches and so produce cripples."
• Home Sweet Home:
  • In "The People of the Crater", the first novella of Garan the Eternal, after some initial understandings the male protagonist settles down with the People of the Crater.
  • In Perilous Dreams, the surviving protagonists of the first two stories learn that they are permanently trapped in an Alternate Universe. However, they find that their new life has much to offer that the old did not, and live Happily Ever After.
  • In Star Man's Son, the hero gets several offers for places he could stay, but chooses to return home to face charges of theft and sacrilege. The people he stole from decide he did so well at their job that they dismiss the charges and recruit him to be a new leader.
• Humans Are Psychic in the Future:
  • The Moonsinger series used this: in the first book, narrator Krip wonders suspiciously if the fellow he's talking to is esper — but doesn't seem to think it's at all odd to probe with his own esper powers. In the second book, someone takes a reading and comments that Krip's psychic ability level is seven; the people who knew him are startled, because he was "only" a level five a fairly short time ago. The phrasing, by the way, makes clear that five is considered pretty high.
  • The main character of Star Rangers comes from a planet where, apparently, the average level of psychic power was "six point six." This is implied to be almost scarily high. It may have contributed to politicians/bureaucrats from a less-gifted world deciding to blast the hero's homeworld.
• Humans Are Warriors: Central Control series. Upon making first contact with the rest of the galaxy, humanity was deemed too savage to be allowed free run of the place. Instead, humans are only allowed to go off world as sort of Space Hessians.
• Human Shield: In the climactic battle in Star Man's Son, the hero is used as this, tied to the barricade the mutant Beast Things have set up for their Last Stand. He manages to get loose and crawls to rescue another fellow in the same situation, but finds the man already dead.
• I Kiss Your Foot: A variant in the historical novel Shadow Hawk: the hero Rahotep, at an audience with Pharaoh Kamose, was about to kiss the ground in front of the ruler's feet in accordance with protocol. But Kamose slid a foot forward, granting Rahotep the special honor of touching the royal person. Particularly impressive to the witnesses as the hero had just recently been under suspicion of treason.
• Inertial Impalement: Judgment on Janus. After Niall falls into a kalcrok's trap, the kalcrok jumps at him to try to pin him to the wall. It is impaled on his sword, which he happened to be holding in front of him, killing it.
• Intelligent Gerbil: The Zacathans (Lizard Folk) and Trystians (Bird People) in Star Rangers.
• Intrepid Merchant: Her Free Traders, who appear in almost all her Science Fiction.
• La Résistance: Specifically, the Dutch Resistance from World War II, in the first and third books of the Sword series.
• Light Is Not Good: In the Janus duology, the heroes are members of a nocturnal, forest-dwelling people (moonlight is okay), and their enemy rules the daylight and the sun-scorched desert.
• Lizard Folk:
  • The stand-alone short story "The Gifts of Asti" featured Non-Human Sidekick Lur, a good guy example; he doesn't walk upright, and speaks only through telepathy.
  • Quag Keep, which is set in the world of Greyhawk, featured a Lizardman named Gulth as one of the protagonists.
  • Norton's Zacathans turn this trope upside down and inside out. Yes, they're reptiles. They're also highly intelligent, extremely civilized, and tend to be top-level Intelligentsia (having very long lifespans gives them lots of time to learn a lot of stuff). And they're still outstanding fighters if they have to be, due to reptile hide and very long teeth. (Oh yes, and the highest known psi rating in the galaxy, which they keep a Deep Dark Secret.)
• Lost Roman Legion:
  • From the prologue of Star Rangers:
    There is an old legend concerning a Roman Emperor, who, to show his power, singled out the Tribune of a loyal legion and commanded that he march his men across Asia to the end of the world. And so a thousand men vanished into the hinterland of the largest continent, to be swallowed up forever. On some unknown battlefield the last handful of survivors must have formed a square which was overwhelmed by a barbarian charge. And their eagle may have stood lonely and tarnished in a horsehide tent for a generation thereafter. But it may be guessed, by those who know of the pride of these men in their corps and tradition, that they did march east as long as one still remained on his feet.
  • Norton later co-authored Empire of the Eagle, a fantasy involving enslaved men of Crassus' army who're displaced into another universe after being given to a Chinese emissary after being taken prisoner at the Battle of Carrhae.
• Made a Slave: In Judgment on Janus, Niall sells himself to buy enough drugs for his mother to have a peaceful death.
• Mercy Kill: In Star Guard, every Terran soldier carries a special dagger whose sole purpose is to "give Grace" to a direly wounded comrade. The main character uses his at the specific request of a severely burned man.
• Mirror Universe: In Star Gate (1958), the human colonists of Gorth, seeking an Alternate Universe version of their beloved adopted planet that has no native intelligent life, accidentally stumble into a version in which their own counterparts have used their advanced technology to enslave the inhabitants.
• Modern Mayincatec Empire: The Crossroads of Time briefly mentions an alternate timeline with a hybrid Celtic-Germanic-Mayincatec civilization. Its sequel, Quest Crosstime, features a timeline with a (different) modern Mayincatec empire.
• Mysterious Antarctica: In "People of the Crater" and its sequel "Garan of Yu-Lac", Earth was colonized by a super-advanced civilization, the remnants of which still exist in Antarctica.
• New Eden: In the short story and novella "Outside", humanity sealed itself into domed cities when the surface of Earth became too polluted to support life. An epidemic later wiped out the adults. At the beginning of the story, the Rhyming Man — who looks like an old man — has begun luring some of the smallest children away. The older brother of a missing girl learns that they have been taken outside, which has fully recovered in the absence of people.

• Nuclear Mutant:
  • Star Man's Son had mutant creatures in a post-apocalyptic world.
  • No Night Without Stars. A dog/wolf hybrid large enough to ride, for example.
• One-Product Planet: In Star Guard, Earth, a poor backwater latecomer to a galactic civilization, exports soldiers for combat on primitive or more advanced worlds (the military units are referred to as "Archs" and "Mechs" respectively).
• Our Dragons Are Different:
  • Dragon Magic has only two actual dragons, featured in different short stories: Fafnir (from Norse Mythology) and sirrush-lau (a swamp monster captured by the men of Meroe). The latter is nocturnal, has to be kept in water, and eats only plants (although it kills in a scary way when startled or angry).
  • Quag Keep is a Dungeons & Dragons novel set in the world of Greyhawk; the Golden Dragon Lichis appears briefly, acting as a consultant to the adventurer protagonists.
• Our Elves Are Different: The Iftin of the Janus series are both Space Elves — they are (or rather, were) the original native intelligent species of the planet Janus — and Wood Elves. They were wiped out long before the arrival of human colonists, but set traps to create changelings so that their race would continue. Messing with any of the traps causes the person handling it to fall ill with the Green Sick, after which one is physically Iftin — green-skinned, pointy-eared, and bald — and carries some memories of an original Ift person, generally those memories geared toward survival skills, such as recognizing edible plants. The Janus novels play the trope straight — the traps cause the victims to become xenophobic toward their former kind; they theorize that this was at least partly intended to keep them from trying to resume their former lives.
• Parental Abandonment:
  • Lavender-Green Magic: When the kids' Disappeared Dad went missing in action in The Vietnam War, their Missing Mom had to take the best-paying nursing job she could get, which meant leaving the kids with her husband's parents.
  • Octagon Magic and Red Hart Magic: The female protagonist in each was being raised by her grandmother, who has become ill; she has now been turned over to an aunt. In the latter book, Nan's mother is alive but has a job requiring a lot of travel. Red Hart Magic also features Chris, Nan's new stepbrother, who seems to have been putting up with his Disappeared Dad's job all his life.
  • Both kids in the Star Ka'at books are orphaned; at the beginning of the first book, Jim was living with foster parents, while Elly Mae was living with her grandmother. Jim's foster home is a bit cool and unwelcoming to him, and Elly Mae's grandmother dies, so both children are not too sorry to leave Earth with the Ka'ats when offered the chance.
  • Steel Magic: The three kids' parents are on a trip to Japan; the kids have been left with an uncle.
  • The X Factor: Diskan Fentress' mother suffered Death by Childbirth after his Disappeared Dad (a Scout) was sent out on an exploratory mission, leaving Diskan to be raised in a creche intended to train the next generation of Scouts - a job Diskan wasn't suited for. Subverted in that Renfry Fentress' return just prior to the opening of the story has turned the now-grown Diskan's life upside down.

• Pirate: Scarface is a non-sf historical adventure set in the age of piracy.
• The Plague:
  • Breed to Come: The story opens After the End; the plague that wiped out the humans (called the Demons in-story) led to the development of intelligence in several other species, including that of the protagonist.
  • Dark Piper: The planet Beltane, a lightly settled planet dedicated to biological research, developed some biological weapons, as some would-be invaders learn to their cost.
  • The novella and short story "Outside": All the adults died years ago.

• Precursors: She wrote a lot of space opera novels featuring relics of various lost civilizations, collectively called "Forerunners". She was one of the early developers of the abandoned-gateway-between-worlds idea that the Stargate films and TV series are based on; one of her Forerunner cultures left behind such a network, which younger species, including humans, have started to explore.
• Private Military Contractors: Terran soldiers in Star Guard are described as mercenaries, but in fact they're conscripted by Earth's puppet government on the orders of the extraterrestrial super-government Central Control and hired out to various planetary wars.
• Psychic Powers:
  • In the short story "The Gifts of Asti", the protagonist's people learned mindspeech from Lizard Folk; she acknowledges freely that her Lizard Folk companion is much more adept than she at the art.
  • Moon of Three Rings: The Moon Singers have mindspeech, which they can also use with animals. As part of their training, at some point they swap minds with an animal, which can go badly wrong.
• Reptiles Are Abhorrent: Subverted in Operation Time Search, when a young man from 20th Century America is flung back in time to the war between Atlantis and Mu, and is surprised, though he doesn't say it aloud, to find that his Murian hosts revere snakes. A nine-headed serpent motif is often used in jewelry — and the Emperor's crown.
• Reptilian Conspiracy: The Zacathans secretly have the highest Psi rating out there.
• Revenge by Proxy: At the end of Scarface, Captain Cheap reveals that Justin Blade is the son of his old enemy Sir Robert Scarlett, and now he has his Revenge, having assured that the boy would hang as a Pirate. At which point it is revealed that Justin had already had his case remanded on new evidence, and won't be executed.
• Robot War: In Andre Norton's Victory on Janus, THAT WHICH ABIDES begins using Deceptively Human Robots that are replicates of specific Iftin and human individuals during the winter hibernation of the Iftin, to drive a wedge between the two groups by making it look as though Iftin are preying on humans. In The Reveal, THAT WHICH ABIDES is discovered to be the computer system of an ancient crashed colony ship; it has been attempting to terraform the planet all along on behalf of its colonists, and dealing with the Iftin as a perceived threat accordingly. The original planet-bound Iftin culture never had the technical background to understand this, let alone deal with it effectively, and was wiped out in consequence.
• Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: In Star Rangers, Terra's whereabouts have been forgotten, and it's said to be far from the centers of galactic civilization. The man who sent the ship on its last mission is in charge of Deneb, approximately 1400 light-years from Sol. But the villain is from the highly civilized Arcturus system, which is ... only 36 light-years away from the forgotten boonies — not all that great a distance when a small scout starship can cover some 1400 in a few years (with exploratory landings along the way). And the ship is "Vegan registry" - Vega is a mere 25 light-years from Earth.
• Short Title: Long, Elaborate Subtitle: Scarface: Being the story of one Justin Blade, late of the pirate isle of Tortuga, and how fate deal justly deal with him to his great profit.
• "Shut Up" Kiss: "Long Live Lord Kor!" has a variation at the end: Lord Kor isn't babbling or rambling, but deliberately teasing the young lady to whom he's just proposed by starting to detail the political reasons it would be a good match. The final sentence is:
  Then he stopped talking, for a good reason.
• Single-Biome Planet:
  • The Forest Planet Janus in Judgment on Janus and Victory on Janus.
  • The Ice Planet in Secret of the Lost Race.
• Soiled City on a Hill: Operation Time Search. Atlantis fell under the control of evil rulers and was destroyed. The actions of the hero prevent this, and as a result history is changed and Atlantis survives to the present day.
• Space Police: The Patrol in the future history that includes the Solar Queen series.
• Species Loyalty: A villainous motivation in Secret of the Lost Race. An alien race can interbreed with humanity — and in fact must to reproduce — and this is greeted with revulsion and accusations of disloyalty by many humans.
• Stay with the Aliens: In Star Ka'at, aliens have been living on Earth disguised as domestic cats. When they decide that humans are about to destroy the world in a war, they all leave; one of them has gotten fond enough of the orphaned boy who's his "owner" that he takes the boy with them, to the disgust of his fellow aliens.
• Stranger in a Familiar Land:
  • The short story "The Long Night of Waiting": Two nineteenth century kids were accidentally swept into Another Dimension through a Cool Gate. They returned to find that roughly ten years had passed for every day they spent on the other side, and it was now the late twentieth century. They went back through the Cool Gate, since it was closer to the life they were used to and they now had some friends there.
  • Judgement on Janus: After recovering from the Green Sick, Ashla attempts to contact her beloved younger sister, but learns that the physiological and psychological changes wrought by the illness are such that her sister no longer recognizes her, and that she cannot see her old home as home anymore.
• Trapped Behind Enemy Lines: Star Guard.
• Truce Zone: Moon of Three Rings. On the planet Yiktor, during trade fairs all violence is strictly prohibited within the area of the fair.
• Waking Up Elsewhere: In The Stars Are Ours, Dard Nordis wakes up and immediately asks "Where is here?" The attending human praises him for coming up with an alternative to "Where am I?"
• War Refugees: In Judgement on Janus and other stories, the Dipple is the dumping place for people evacuated from their planets during an interstellar war.
• We Have Become Complacent: In Dark Piper.
  "So be it—" That was Lugard once more, but he sounded very tired. "'And when Yamar lifted up his voice, they did not listen. And when he cried aloud, they put their hands to their ears, laughing. And when he showed them the cloud upon the mountains, they said it was afar and would come not nigh. And when a sword glinted in the hills and he pointed to it, they said it was but the dancing of a brook in the sun.'"
  The Cry of Yamar! How long had it been since anyone had quoted that in my hearing? Why should anyone on Beltane? Yamar was a prophet of soldiers; his saga was one learned by recruits to point the difference between civilian and fighting man.
• Which Me?:
  • Star Gate (1958): All the human colonists on Gorth evacuate the planet at the beginning of the book because the native intelligent species of Gorth (who call them the Star Lords) isn't ready for the humans' much more advanced technology. Some opt to search for an Alternate Universe in which Gorth never developed intelligent life. They accidentally wind up in a Mirror Universe in which their counterparts enslaved the natives rather than helping them. The Half-Human Hybrid protagonist refers to the Mirror Universe counterparts of the Star Lords as the Dark Ones, the Dark Lords, or (in the case of individuals, such as Lord Dillan) "the false Lord X" or "the Dark Lord X" to distinguish them from the "true" Lord X. The eldest of the Star Lords has the hardest time adjusting to it when he finally sees the Dark Lords, because although he knew intellectually what they were, it hit him very hard to see (apparently) several people among them who in his universe were long dead and had meant a great deal to him. He had to be restrained from going to them until he got himself under control.
  • Victory on Janus (1966): Big Bad THAT WHICH ABIDES creates android duplicates of the Iftin and of some human colonists - not as Evil Knockoffs, but to frame the Iftin for apparently attacking the colonists. The Iftin refer to the android duplicates as the "false Iftin", and can tell them apart from the true ones by smell. The worst problem the protagonist has is when duplicates turn up, not of himself, but of an old Love Interest and an old friend, both probably, but not certainly, long dead.
• World War III:
  • Sea Siege (1957) is set on a small island in the Caribbean. They survive World War III (between NATO and the Warsaw Pact) at about the midpoint of the story, but have only sketchy information from radio broadcasts about what happened (mainly a list of major cities around the world that had been nuked early on). They eventually help rescue the survivors of a Soviet submarine because by then, both sets of survivors have bigger problems than worrying about who was responsible for the war.
  • Star Ka'at has the titular race of alien beings, who have been living among us disguised as pet cats, leave Earth because they predict World War III is imminent; and they take two orphaned human children with them. The children (the point of view characters) pay very little attention to talk of war on the radio, and leave their unhappy homes without much regret — so the implied destruction of the human race is quite casually dismissed (the Ka'ats certainly don't care about us).
• Wretched Hive:
  • The Dipple, a barracks for people who can't return to their homes because those have been destroyed or, more often, ceded to the enemy in the aftermath of a major interstellar war. (The name probably derives from D.P.L. for "Displaced Persons Lodging.")
  • In Operation Time Search the city of Atlantis is described like this. It's a Not-So-Safe Harbor ruled by evil demon worshipping priests, and the hero goes to a Bad Guy Bar for information.
• Xanatos Gambit: In Victory on Janus, THAT WHICH ABIDES executes a gambit to weaken its age-old enemies, the Iftin, by deploying android duplicates of specific Iftin and human individuals in staged "attacks" outside human settlements. If a staged attack succeeds in persuading a human settlement to open its gates to let in a "human fugitive" pursued by "Iftin", the settlement can be wiped out, thus depriving the real Iftin of potential recruits and allies; if the tactic fails, the Iftin are made to look like monsters, and the humans are likely to wipe them out.
• Year Outside, Hour Inside:
  • Here Abide Monsters: You Can't Go Home Again from the Alternate Universe on the other side of the Cool Gate, in effect, and if you ever got the chance to do so, you wouldn't want to because of this trope. The gates rarely seem to flow from their world to ours, and time on one side has little discernable relationship to time on the other. The contemporary (1970s) heroes meet with World War II-era refugees for whom only four years have passed, as well as encountering medieval-era and Mongol refugees.
  • In the short story "The Long Night of Waiting", Lizzie and Matt are swept through a Cool Gate and spend, from their point of view, 11 days among The Fair Folk. They return to discover that roughly ten years have passed in our world for every day in the other world. The title comes from the stone erected by their parents on the spot where they were seen to disappear.
• You All Meet in an Inn: Quag Keep doesn't have them all meet there, but the viewpoint character and one other (who are both roleplayers magically transported into the world and bodies of their characters) do.
• You Can't Go Home Again:
  • In Here Abide Monsters, the protagonists are swept into Another Dimension through a Cool Gate, and learn that they are Trapped in Another World, called Avalon. Such refugees from our world fall into two groups: those who accept an offer by The Fair Folk to be assimilated, and those who persist as rootless wanderers and are treated as prey by various creatures.
  • In Wraiths of Time, the protagonist changes places with her Alternate Universe counterpart, who dies in the process. Since she has no strong anchor to take her home, she cannot go back. In addition, the titular characters — the victims of a Mad Scientist — are in their wraith-state due to a similar problem.

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