Such advanced-tech artifacts could be extremely valuable.Īre long-lived reptilians, a race of scholars. Some of those civilizations had a more advanced technology level than the current one. After that, they quickly spread ever-further to become one of the dominant races with hundreds of thousands (millions?) of colonies throughout the galaxy.Īre ancient space-faring civilizations that went extinct long before Humans took to space. Less than 3 centuries after First Contact, Terrans had already circumvented the limitations imposed upon them and secretly colonized 1000 planets. When they ventured beyond their own neighborhood, they met up with and were adopted in a vast multi-species galactic civilization called Central Control. They also make it difficult to impose a clear chronology on these stories. (See Appendix B for details) Understandably, these inconsistencies have led to disagreements about which books belong and which don’t. Unlike many authors, Andre Norton never resorted to fix-up novels to tie her earlier stories together and 'fix' these problems. While there are many common themes in the F-U stories, there are (appear to be?) also quite a few inconsistencies and even some glaring conflicts between the various stories.She wrote fast-paced adventure stories, and gave them recurrent background elements, but she didn’t worry overly much about being 100% consistent between all those separate stories. She was a writer of shorter pulp-fiction-style stories, not sweeping sagas. Apparently, this was not an issue of great importance to her. Andre Norton never made a statement about her F-U stories 'belonging together.' She never published a timeline and the documents in her estate don't have any information on that either.Unlike those cycles however, the F-U stories always have the same recurrent background themes present, although they may remain just a rather distant background. Le Guin's Hainish cycles, which were also not considered part of a 'universe' until the authors stated that those stories belonged together. There is no over-arching story line that ties it all together in a larger mega-saga as in Isaac Asimov's Foundation Arc. In that regard, Norton's Forerunners Universe is more like Jack Vance's Gaean Reach or Ursula K. The Forerunners theme is a very loose connection, the history line remains quite vague and the socio-political background is generally ill-defined.

Neither nor acknowledge the Forerunners Universe and their listings show many of the F-U stories as stand-alone novels. (F-U) Yet, apparently this has not happened to date. In analogy to Norton’s ‘ Witch World Universe,’ it seems logical to bring all these books together in a ‘ Forerunners Universe’. įorty-five of those stories have the 'Forerunners' as a recurrent background theme. The Forerunners UniverseĪndre Norton wrote 70 'Space Age' stories in 5+ decades.

Star Ka'at by Andre Norton