I'm giving this 3 stars because other books by this author are so much better but I will say that the boys loved it and want me to immediately start the next in the series. They just love to listen to Andre Norton books. I love AN too but honestly this one was not her best. I believe it is a pretty early book. The writing style is very convoluted and it is difficult to read out loud. I always get the feeling that the boys might have forgotten the beginning of the sentence by the time I get to the end. Something about it seemed to move slow and it seemed as if not a whole lot happened plot wise. The style that AN has in which the magic elements are rather vague and not extremely concrete seems to be worse here. I'm not really saying this is a bad thing. If you read AN you know how "wispy" feeling her magic stuff is. But that it seems that she hasn't quite got a handle on it here.

All that being said, we liked the book. I am always appreciative when the boys beg me to read to them at night. All our read out loud choices do not elicit this reaction. Also I am glad that a) they like sci fi/fantasy and b)they can appreciate a more difficult read with denser more interesting sentence structure. ( )

Norton, Andre. Forerunner. Forerunner No. 4. Tor, 1981.
Andre Norton is certainly one of the most prolific grandmasters of science fiction and fantasy. I know that I have read more of her work over the years than I remember, but Forerunner was new me. A look at Wikipedia showed me that the series was written over three decades with years between each installment, and it had the honor of being the first book Tom Doherty published under the Tor imprint. Its original cover art also stands out with a dramatic picture of its heroine—with blue-black skin, long white hair, and a no-nonsense expression. The story is mainstream fantasy space opera. The forerunner universe very much resembles the Humanx Commonwealth universe created by Alan Dean Foster. Certainly, our heroine Simsa and her telepathic flying pet are meant to remind us of Foster’s Pip and Flinx. Both have connections to Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy and more distantly to the work of Rudyard Kipling. (One could argue that if it were not for the work of Edward Gibbon, Rudyard Kipling, and C. S. Forester, there would be no space opera.) Simsa is a humanoid orphan, who looks like no one else on the planet, living in the ruins of the ancient Forerunner race. She hooks up with a human agent from the current galactic civilization and helps him search some desert ruins for his missing brother. Along the way, she discovers why she is more special and powerful than she could have imagined. It is standard stuff for the most part, but a bit transgressive for its racial and gender themes. I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. ( )

Simsa was unusual even to the denizens of the Burrows of the great trading city of Kuxortal, with her skin colour and hair of silver but Ferwar had rescued her as a babe and seen to it that the youngster was able to survive in the harsh world of the Burrows. When her protector died, Simsa was forced to move on and her attempts to trade some of the lesser pieces of Ferwar's hoard to the crew of a planeted Free Trader bring her into the orbit of Thom T'Seng who seems only to be interested in castoffs of the ancient past but soon entangles Simsa and her zorsals in a quest deep into the desert heartlands of the continent in search of his missing brother. In that blasted country Simsa finds the secrets of her inheritance and Thom finds an illegal trade in Ancient tech.Will they be able to survive their revelations? The book leaves this question hanging, Almost as if Ms Norton was planning a sequel but never got round to it - although written quite a while before her death, Norton was quite ill for a while. Apart from that rather sudden ending, though, it's quite a decent book and though there are mystical overtones, they aren't laid on too heavily so if you like your science fiction fairly hard, you won't be disappointed. ANd it's illustrated, at least in my edition of the paperback! ( )

...Despite all the negatives I did enjoy Forerunner. It is not a memorable novel but certainly a lot better than my first encounter with Norton's writing. Simsa is a character you can really root for, even if she is too stubborn for her own good sometimes. If you are willing to overlook Norton's prose and the occasionally illogical plot in favour of a good adventure, this book might be a good read. Norton published a sequel named Forerunner: The Second Venture in 1985. I won't rush to the nearest book store to get it but I won't rule out reading it at some point either.

Full Random Comments review ( )

In a place far away, Simsa, a young orphan, fights to survive in an intergalactic ghetto. But she was different than any of the others around her.
Then the Star Men came, and she learned that perhaps she was far more than she had ever believed ( )