The two acknowledged masters of mainstream SF for young readers are André Norton and Robert A. Heinlein. Despite their almost parallel careers and their comparable status, their achievements have wide differences in style and manner. André Norton's strength lies in atmosphere. She gives a tangible quality to the most improbable invention by clothing it in vividly imagined detail, and her highly charged style—admittedly a little hard to digest in large quantities—evokes with equal success the terrors of darkness and the blinding glare of light. Hers is an astonishingly complete vision; she describes the topography and the sociology of new worlds as if from the life, giving them a kind of actuality rather like that of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings—although in no other way does she approach the breadth and range of his achievement.
André Norton tells a good tale, too, but here she is a shade derivative. For all the wonder of the settings, the action of her stories might almost be that of a Western. The strange worlds are often divided neatly into goodies and baddies, and the latter, after great hazards, bite the dust as convincingly as if they were redskins or rogue cowboys.
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