http://www.cnn.com/2005/SHOWBIZ/books/03/17/obit.norton.ap/index.html
— Alan
Not only did I not know who this was, but I had no idea he was a chick.
In fact, I clicked on Alan’s link thinking ‘Ha ha, the guy who did that bloated annoying Norton Anti-Virus thing is dead’.
-Tom
You philistine :)
I’m not even sure Peter Norton actually does anything anymore (he had nothing to do with Antivirus anyway).
— Alan
One of my favorites as a kid. But I also was shocked way back then to discover “he” was a women. BTW, 93 is a little past the “chick” stage! :)
RIP.
:cry:
I looked at the article and picture yesterday before Tom’s post, and when I came back today I was surprised to find out that was a chick.
I knew the name, but never read the author’s works. I didn’t know she was female, either.
As a kid I didn’t have access to a decent library until high school, where they actually had a pretty good sci-fi and fantasy collection. Andre Norton’s The Beast Master was the second book I read from that library, after Asimov’s The Gods Themselves. RIP.
Bummer. I remember enjoying a bunch of Andre Norton’s as a kid. Although, to be honest, I’m amazed she was still alive – that’s a good run.
He’s been busy rebuilding his summer house on Martha’s Vineyard, which burned down a few years back. Well, all right, he’s not rebuilding it personally–he has contractors doing it. We’ve been watching the progress when we go out there each year, though–it’s a fascinating project. The original house was easily the one of the coolest houses on the island, built around the turn of the century. After it burned down, Norton decided to build an exact reproduction of the original house, using the original plans. When we were out there last August, they were almost done. It’s eerie; if you didn’t know that the original burned down, you’d never know that this wasn’t it.
It’s apparently an enormously costly project, and Norton had no insurance on the original house, so it’s all out of pocket. Karen and I chatted with the head contractor when we were taking pictures last year, and as he put it “When god needs to borrow money, he asks Peter Norton.”
Sucks about Andre Norton, too. I didn’t realize he was that old.
Yesterday would have been her 107th birthday. I read many of her books as a teen, both her science fiction and quite a few of her Witch World books. The Portalist has a nice piece about her with some pics:
She legally changed her name from Alice to Andre on the advice of her publisher, because she started out writing juvenile fiction for boys.
She also worked for some time in the Cleveland Public Library system:
Norton was also partially responsible for introducing some now-iconic sci-fi and fantasy books, then considered trashy, into Cleveland’s library system. Later in life, she recalled: “Each month the librarians would receive a book to review. If there was some objection to the book, and we still wanted it, we would have an opportunity to defend it. I remember getting The Hobbit and nobody had heard of Tolkien, so I had to argue for it like mad.”