These two novels appear together here simply because both were recently chosen by the Classic Science Fiction forum (https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/ClassicScienceFiction/info - there is one 30+ year old and one modern book chosen for discussion each month)
With the exception of the Janus books, I had read very little of Norton's works until quite recently, and The Beast Master (first published in 1959) was new to me.
The story has a bold and dramatic start – with the Earth
being burned to a cinder in a war with the Xik, and the surviving humans being
dispersed around the galaxy. One of these is Hosteen Storm, a Navaho, a former
commando and a beast master: someone who is able to connect mentally with
genetically modified animals. He travels with his animal team to Arzor on a
long-planned revenge mission, but finds on arrival that the circumstances are
not what he expected, and he is tested to the limit in battling unexpected
enemies before reaching an optimistic conclusion.
It has been noted by other reviewers that Norton had a
penchant for setting stories in rural or wilderness areas rather than cities,
and that native tribes often feature. Both are true of this book, which also
shows what I am coming to recognise as her tightly-plotted adventures, with
rich descriptions and, for the period, good characterisation. She was a very
competent story-teller, and I finished this book in two sessions. However, the
story did not seem particularly memorable to me, and did not capture my
interest in the same way as her Janus novels, which are among my favourites.
I note that there was a sequel, Lord
of Thunder, published in 1962, then three more co-authored by Lyn McConchie
no less than four decades later: Beast
Master's Ark (2002), Beast Master's
Circus (2004), and Beast Master's
Quest (2006 – the year after Norton's death). There was also a US film, The Beastmaster, made in 1982 and a
Canadian TV series, BeastMaster
showing 1999 to 2002, but neither stuck to the original story.
*************************************
The Fifth Season by N.
K. Jemisin
The people of this world appear to be mostly human, with
exceptions: one variety of human has a special and spectacular talent, the
ability to sense the structure of the ground beneath their feet and by an
effort of will to draw energy from around them to stop – or trigger – tectonic
events (echoes here of Orson Scott Card's A
Planet Called Treason). These orogenes are widely mistrusted and are
controlled by the Fulcrum, a paramilitary organisation whose Guardians train
and discipline the orogenes. There is also another and very different form of
humanoid life – the mysterious and highly dangerous stone eaters who rarely
interact with people.
The structure of the story follows the current fashion of
starting with separate plot threads which at first appear to be unconnected but
are pulled together in the latter part of the tale. Jemisin adds her own twist
to this as is apparent early on, in that she starts with a catastrophic
incident close to the end of the story, and the various threads take place at
different times; some before and some after the incident. So the first thread
starts with Essun in the comm (community) of Tirimo, a middle-aged woman who is
secretly an orogene. Then we start to follow the life of Damaya, a lonely young
girl, from the time that her orogenic ability is discovered through the early
part of her training in the Fulcrum. The final major thread follows a few years
in the life of Syenite, a female orogene, and her relationship with Alabaster,
a senior orogene with whom she works and who has a curious link to Antimony, a
stone eater. The chapters follow each of these threads in rotation.
The story is cleverly constructed and well-written. One
unusual feature is that it is told in the third person except for Essun's
chapters which are related in the second person – the identity of the narrator,
who refers to Essun as "you", does not become apparent until the
end. I found it slow to get going and
didn't really become engaged with it until about half-way through, when the
action accelerates to the point that I was eager to return to the book each day
to discover what happened next. The story does not disappoint, but I admired it
more than I liked it. The author has a habit of killing off not just characters
but entire comms after describing them well enough to make the reader begin to care
about them, the overall effect being rather depressing.
The Fifth Season
is the first book of The Broken Earth trilogy.
The sequel, The Obelisk Gate, is
already available – and won the Hugo Award in 2017.
