Alice Mary Norton is a strange phenomenon in sf. The whole structure and setting of her stories is thirty years out of date. It's as if you took all those raging blood and thunder stories in science fiction of the late thirties and the decade of the forties and combined them into, say, a Sunday edition of The Galactic Times. You would have plenty of headlines and loads of stuff to fill pages and pages of your newspaper. But, what about that little 'human interest' story for the Sunday supplement or the long quiet piece about everyday life you need for a filler on page 96? Well, Miss Norton has striven mightily over the last two decades to fill in all those little byways that must be in the background of Asimov's First Galactic Empire or Heinlein's Future History.

Miss Norton now has over forty sf novels and no...