I've never read Norton's work before and I found this book to be well written with interesting characters and plotting. But the ending was very abrupt leaving the story feeling incomplete with no sign of a sequel.
Great Norton, this is the first novel I read by her when I was just a kid...
The novel's hero is Diskan Fentress, mutant son of a high-ranking military official who, feeling out of place in a life that requires a certain bearing and poise (he's pitifully overgrown and clumsy), steals a spaceship and runs off to an uncharted world called Mimir to begin a new life. Norton makes the theft of the spaceship ludicrously easy (it amounts to a variation on stealing dad's keys), but clearly Diskan is not the brightest bulb on the tree, either. Crash landing in a frozen, alien wasteland, with barely provisions enough to survive, Diskan soon encounters strange indigenous beings called the brothers-in-fur. Their ancestors, we learn, inhabited a once-magnificent city named Xcothal, the ruins of which poor Diskan soon finds himself led to. There he meets another human, a girl named Julha Than, and a wounded alien called a Zacathan. He learns that the ruins of Xcothal contain a treasure being sought by a band of outlaws called the Jacks.
This is a classic coming-of-age tale, and a classic Andre Norton story of one person triumphing against all odds.
From back cover: His name was Diskan Fentress, son of one of the most famous First-in Scouts. But fate had dealt him a cruel blow. It had made him a mutant, an outsider among his own people. And when the studied tolerance of his own kind, when the embarrassment of being different became too much to bear, Fentress stole a travel tape and a space ship. Then as an outlaw he sped toward the uncharted planet of Mimir.
There, among the ruins of the great city of Xcothal, Diskan would discover shadows of a civilization more advanced than any in the galaxy. Here, too, he would meet the 'brothers-in-fur', animals with an intelligence that made them seem almost human. And he would meet the others; the alien, the girl, the treasure seekers whould stop at nothing to gain their plunder.
Xcothal was Diskan Fentress' destiny. The place that would allow him to use the strange power inside him... the X factor that would change his life forever.
From back cover: His name was Diskan Fentress, son of one of the most famous First-in Scouts. But fate had dealt him a cruel blow. It had made him a mutant, an outsider among his own people. And when the studied tolerance of his own kind, when the embarrassment of being different became too much to bear, Fentress stole a travel tape and a space ship. Then as an outlaw he sped toward the uncharted planet of Mimir.
There, among the ruins of the great city of Xcothal, Diskan would discover shadows of a civilization more advanced than any in the galaxy. Here, too, he would meet the 'brothers-in-fur', animals with an intelligence that made them seem almost human. And he would meet the others; the alien, the girl, the treasure seekers whould stop at nothing to gain their plunder.
Xcothal was Diskan Fentress' destiny. The place that would allow him to use the strange power inside him... the X factor that would change his life forever.
