When I was about 11 years old, I wandered up to the science fiction section of a hole-in-the-wall branch of the Jefferson County (Colorado) Public Library. I came away with two books by the author Andre Norton, The Time Traders and Galactic Derelict.
Written in the late 1950s, they are now considered part of the “Ross Murdock series,” also known as the “Time Trader series.” The better-known (?) Witch World series was just coming out, and I did not encounter them until later.
When I discovered later that “Andre” was a woman first known as Mary Ann Norton, I briefly had her confused with the English writer Mary Norton who wrote the “Borrowers” series, which my older sisters had read.
They were both fantasy series, after all, and so perhaps “Andre” was her space-opera pen name and “Mary” was her “cozy” pen name — or so I reasoned. I was totally wrong — they were completely different people.
So last week I was in a nearby city’s public library, looking for an SF title that someone had recommended, and there on the shelf was a newer edition of Time Traders and Galactic Derelict bound together.
Time Traders had been my first encounter with the term, the “Beaker People.” Norton makes this ancient culture (or cultural period) into a “guild of free traders.” (SF writers seem to like guilds of free traders — it’s an enduring meme.)
So if life were a novel, I would have carried that memory forward and become an archaeologist. Didn’t happen.
The plot I did not remember at all, just a couple of images. There are lots of near-misses and close escapes, with language like this: “A white-hot flash of pain scored his upper arm.”
What I did not remember was that the time travelers encounter Neolithic conflict between the religion of the Great Mother, served by priestesses at megalithic sites, and the sky/storm god Lurgha, whose worship is pushing its way in and which is exploited by their Russian counterparts. (There is a Cold War atmosphere, despite the 21st-century setting.)
It’s not a major plot element, but did it plant a seed?
Didn’t she have some connections to the pagan revival?
Are you thinking instead of Marion Zimmer Bradley, who was close to some West Coast Pagans in the 1960s-1990s and who identified as Pagan for a time?
I have met people who liked Norton’s Witch World novels because they were about magic-workers, with various gender issues as well, but I was not aware of Norton herself having any personal involvement with the Craft or other Pagan groups.
Perhaps you’re thinking of Rosaleen Miriam Norton: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosaleen_Norton
Andre Norton was a prolific and influential science fiction and fantasy author who published under several masculine noms de plume. As I recall, I took these noms de plume for individual authors for some years. Some of her works were among the first science fiction I ever read, and I give her credit for nourishing my own fandom.
What most captivated me, probably, was her use of animals, sometimes telepathic or unusually talented, as important characters. Along with some sense of post-atomic apocalypse and/or protagonist growth and becoming. In addition, I liked her panoply of alien races and her concept of forerunner aliens, civilizations, ancient and puzzling artifacts.
The Time Traders books were my first encounter with the Beaker people/cultural complex, as well. I later did, in university, study anthropology. But not because of reading these books.
Myself, I do not think that Andre Norton had much influence on my Pagan appreciation of the world, even though she did draw on themes of magic and psychic powers. I never took them for anything occultural.