Android at Arms

by Andre Norton

Awaking from a mind-frozen state, Andas Kastor must discover if he is the rightful human Emperor of Inyanga or an evil android double.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Science Fiction Fantasy, Fantasy, Ebooks

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Andre Norton, born Alice Mary Norton, was a pioneering American author of science fiction and fantasy, widely regarded as the Grande Dame of those genres. She also wrote historical and contemporary fiction, publishing under the pen names Andre Alice Norton, Andrew North, and Allen Weston. She launched her career in 1934 with The Prince Commands, adopting the name “Andre” to appeal to a male readership. After working for the Cleveland Library System and the Library of Congress, she began publishing science fiction under “Andrew North” and fantasy under her own name. She became a full-time writer in 1958 and was known for her prolific output, including Star Man’s Son, 2250 A.D. and Witch World, the latter spawning a long-running series and shared universe. Norton was a founding member of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America and authored Quag Keep, the first novel based on the Dungeons & Dragons game. She influenced generations of writers, including Lois McMaster Bujold and Mercedes Lackey. Among her many honors were being the first woman named Gandalf Grand Master of Fantasy and SFWA Grand Master. In her later years, she established the High Hallack Library to support research in genre fiction. Her legacy continues with the Andre Norton Award for young adult science fiction and fantasy.

Reviews

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is a single protagonist, Andas, who may or may not be an android. This is a bit misleading, nowadays the term we would use is clone. He's a descendant of the first African diaspora from Terra, many of the place names and other terms are based on a mishmash of African cultures.

For the first half of the story it's hard SF, then gets a bit fuzzy. Andas wakes up in a strange fortress with multiple other prisoners. They escape but there's a fair amount of betrayal while doing so. Once he gets to his home planet, he find a much older version of himself, in cahoots with an evil witch!

He does face down the witch and steals her ring of power. While fleeing he stumbles into an alternative world that needs him to step up as Emperor. After some fun twists and turns, everything does get wrapped up in a final battle with the great evil.

A decent read, but there are better Norton novels.

[Melissa Symanczyk · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love me some vintage SF, but this is just bonkers. There are two, maybe three stories' worth of plot here, stuffed into 288 pages, so while there's a lot of action (prison break, android doppelgangers, betrayal, aliens, alternate dimensions, rebellion), it never settles long enough on any one thread to be wholly satisfying. I did appreciate the diversity of the characters, and our main duo forge a strong bond (it's about the only thing that runs through the entire book) that I enjoyed.

I thought the summary on the back of the book was just poorly written, but it turns out it is accurate and it's just trying really hard to summarize a book that keeps going off in totally new directions!

[Marie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Aw, bless.

Classic pulp picaresque adventure, with femme fatals and cat-aliens and space monarchies with elaborate semi-magical rites.

The twist is: our main character just might be an android duplicate of the man he thinks he is. Maybe. Okay definitely. But maybe not.

I thought Norton did a great job with that aspect of this, and I truly found myself unsure which way it was going to go.

But, you know, adjust prose expectations for Golden Age.

[Andrea]

While flawed in many ways, this book moves from a slow start to a compelling ending.

This is a story in two halves. The first half involves a disparate group of prisoners, coming to their senses on an abandoned, automated facility where it appears they've been kept so that they can be replaced by android doubles. The blurb gives away one of the main plot issues with this half of the story, as the prisoners try to work out how to get back to where they belong.

The second half of this story abandons that situation almost altogether, and instead wanders into one of Norton's magic fused with science set-ups and a battle for control of a planet. This half is the more compelling read, but also makes the first half almost entirely irrelevant.

For a book first published in 1971, Android at Arms is interesting for having the main character and a large portion of the cast be people of African ancestry. Very rare for SF at that time (and still rare!). Unfortunately, the gender politics is not one of Norton's better efforts - the antagonist is an evil "Old Woman" god. There's a moment where this is introduced where it looks like Norton's going to do something interesting by having the protagonist realise that he's merely been taught that women's magic is bad, but sadly that moment passes unrealised and instead we have two opposed groups - one where all the characters are men except for the Emperor's valiant wife, and the other side which is all women except for some enslaved men. No points for picking which side is evil and which side wins.

It's sad to read any book where all women except one are depicted as bad, and the divided aspect of the two halves of the tale do the book no favours, so while it did pick up in the end I'd recommend this book mainly for Norton completionists.

[Jack Napier · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first half to two-thirds of this book is pretty great. The jailbreak, reveal of the time skip, picking off of the people from the prison: I was really into all of it. The characters were distinct and all really fun, and everyone had a clear goal that, while I not entirely aligned, was momentarily agreed upon. It could have let to an interesting cast of characters for a caper. Instead, in the last 1/3 that was all tossed aside.

Everything after the [dimensional gate] Andas and Yolyos go through is just frustrating. The first plot line, getting everyone back to their home planets, discovering the nature of the androids, is discarded, in exchange for a weird secondary plot to take down a witch in a mirror world. I wanted to see the other worlds, like Yolyos’s and Elys’s, after the time skip. I wanted Andas quest for the throne in his universe to be resolved. It felt like the second storyline really robbed the resolution of those things from the reader.

If I could give it 2.5 I would, but I guess I enjoyed it enough to give it a 3.

[Jason Bleckly · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s a rip-roaring fantasy space adventure. It starts more in the SF realm. A group of people are whisked away to a prison on a hostile planet (the cover image) from which the escape to make their way back home where they may have been replaced by androids, or they could be the androids and just think they’re human. But by the end of the book where into fantasy having passed through a portal to a parallel universe to battle the magic of an evil sisterhood. This book has it all.

It’s a little episodic, and each new episode re-invents to story and has little back reference to the previous section. But it doesn’t matter one wit as the story is great fun. It doesn’t feel dated at all, apart from a couple of references to tape date storage which are quaint. The writing is vibrant and the pacing rapid.

If you’ve never read a Norton this a good example of her work. It’s not specifically juvenile, but could be read by that age group, yet has enough complexity and interest for old jaded adults like me.

[Jim Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

Andre Norton is a master of action. She’s not so great at character development or presenting logical plots or outdated technology (she loves tapes!). This novel will not surprise her fans—there’s Norton’s common plots and characters—a person who is a double (The emperor of an African-inspired world) who wakes from stasis to find himself a prisoner on another world. He is aided by his companion, a cat-like man who uses both his ESP and a strong sense of smell. They travel to a parallel universe (for the life of me I can’t figure out why she added this complication) to reclaim his throne. There’s also magic, witches, and, of course, because it’s Norton, no sex! The tale is well told, keeping the readers’ attention throughout (although the parallel universe plot gets a bit more tedious and unbelievable as it goes). I kept thinking this would make a great action movie in the vein of Wakanda Forever, but for readers I would put in the middle range of her work, neither great nor terrible.

[Len · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am not often confused by Andre Norton's novels but Android at Arms left me wondering what on earth had been going on. It began so well with young Prince Andas of Inyanga being kidnapped and waking in a prison complex set on an alien world and manned by robots. He finds some fellow inmates, all of whom have been snatched from their own planets, and discovers from their recollections that they were taken separately over a period of many years. Someone mentions the long-banned Psychocrats and their activities of mind control and android construction. And so begins what should have been the main stream of the story: Have the prisoners been replaced by androids planted on their own worlds to change the future? Or, are the prisoners the androids who are being detained until the time is best for them to replace their real selves?

They all manage to escape after a thunderstorm shuts down all the robots - perhaps the Psychocrats weren't quite as omniscient as their reputation suggested. After various adventures they end up on Inyanga with only Andas and a Salariki lord called Yolyos (in the Nortonverse Salarikis are the descendants of feline beings) eventually surviving. Andas meets the middle-aged Inyanga Andas and finds that he has fathered three children. So who is the android: a young man who seems able to bounce back from all manner of life-threatening trials or someone capable of ageing, of going through medical examinations and of producing offspring? Everything is neatly set up for an intriguing story – and then Norton wonders off seemingly forgetting all about androids.

Andas and Yolyos fall through some sort of gateway into a parallel Inyanga where yet another Andas is fighting a losing battle against the powers of evil. That third Andas dies and is replaced by first Andas and the fight back is on. What follows is a truncated typically Norton SF adventure, truncated because half the book has already been used up with the wasted android plot. There are some nice touches of imagination. However, everything is shortened and rushed. There are the horrible monsters called night crawlers. Imagine a blood sucking, genetically altered root vegetable made mobile and with rudimentary hands and an intelligence developed enough to be vindictive and easily led. They remind me of celeriac: tasty, yet the look of the beast always makes me think that it has ambitions far deeper than those a congealed lump of celery should have. All Inyangans fear them and run away. How will Andas respond when they attack? Well, Andas has a weapon called a needler and he and Yolyos kill all four of them in about three minutes. It has to be quick as the story's finale is approaching.

Andas rescues an ancient weapon from an irradiated temple ruin - his survival brings a brief resurrection to the idea of his being an android – then he's off to the Valley of Bones to give the evil Kidaya her comeuppance. Of course good triumphs over evil and Andas wins the hand of the third Andas' lady, Shara. And Shara's is another story that needed to be told if only Norton had given it the time and space. She is the one female in the story who is anything more than a tool of the devilish Old Woman or just a nasty piece of deviousness. She has a backstory yet we learn so little of it and that leaves us with a boys' adventure tale. If only Norton had either stuck with her original android idea or left that behind and concentrated on Andas going through the stargate or wormhole or whatever it was into the great battle between humanity and barbarity. Two opportunities lost and one very mediocre story created.

[Sharon · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the first Norton book I have read in years. It was much more dark than I remember her books being previously. It was very complex with well defined characters. However, it was a difficult read.

[JBJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

This wasn’t Norton’s best book, but it was still pretty fun. The characters were likable and heroic, and the story had plenty of surprises. The ending came on too fast, though, like some of her other novels.

[Kathryn Baron · Rating 2 out of 5]

All the classic virtues and flaws of Andre Norton: Engaging sistuations and characters, plot holes sort-of-filled by mystical hand waving. Fun but more annoying the older I get.

[Doc · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was confused in its direction. So many holes and plot points just muckled. Yes Muckled. As good a word as this book deserves.

[Cheryl]

could count for 'diversity' if I needed something quick or that also met other challenge prompts

[Janice · Rating 3 out of 5]

Always nice to read an Andre Norton. Classic sci-fi.

[Ellis Wasend · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you’re going to read Andre Norton don’t read this one, the first half was good but it got steadily less so as it went on, she has some amazing works this just isn’t one of them

[Kristen · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5
Light, fun read.

[Trenton Hayes · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book deserves to be better known. Initially, it follows the story of a young man who believes himself to be Andas Kastor, a prince of the blood on his homeworld of Ingayana. He finds himself imprisoned with others like himself. Escape, flight and betrayal ensue, and issues of humanity, reality and destiny are handled adeptly in a manner somewhat reminiscent of PK Dick. Norton's love of precolonial African culture suffuses the second act of the book, as Andas deals with imperial court intrigue on his homeworld and his new found outsider status. But the book changes gears again as we are drawn through witchcraft--in what had heretofore been straight science fiction--into an interesting meileu which might be a grim alternate timeline.

I read this in what? Fourth Grade? And i picked it up again a few years ago, and it held up surprisingly well. I thought--again--that it would make a first rate film. the issues are complex enough to be interesting without being so labyrinthine as to rebuff ready comprehension, and the visual tableux Norton creates with words would look good brought to life on the screen.

A great science fiction book for a a middle schooler, and not bad for a slumming adult.

[Valerie]

In the movie DARYL, the statement is made that 'A machine becomes a human being when it becomes impossible to tell the difference'.

By this standard, the androids involved (whichever ARE androids), qualify as people. It's not clear where the Mengians who developed the androids got their technical information from. It's stated that android technology was forbidden, and that known androids were killed by mobs, centuries before. But may some not have survived and gone underground?

One point that struck me the first time I read this, and has stayed with me since: in what African language is 'Andas Kastor' a reasonable name?

[Gary Denton · Rating 2 out of 5]

Book changes from a mystery about people imprisoned on a barely habitable planet to a buddy story about escaping to attacks involving psychic magic to jumping to an alternate world. Episodic and not convincing.

[Heather · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this book in a discard pile in my elementary school library. I never got around to reading it until now. I wish I had read it years ago, because I probably would have liked it a lot better. I'm still going to hold onto it for nostalgia's sake.

[Alicia · Rating 3 out of 5]

this was a pretty thoughtless story. the physical plot doesn't match up with the emotional plot, there is no big conflict to speak of, the concept of evil is only hinted at... but the writing is good.

[Larry Wegman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Once again, Norton gives us a hero out his time, with lots of mystery to uncover. A strange turn leaves us wondering what happened to some of the situations, but with a good resolution for the hero. Pretty good.

[Amanda · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not one of her best.

[Charles · Rating 3 out of 5]

2 and 1/2 stars, I think. Maybe a tad bit better. I enjoyed it.

[Carol]

My copy was missing a cover when I found it.

[Elaine · Rating 3 out of 5]

I almost always like Andre Norton's books; hers were the first SF books I ever read, starting back in elementary school! It's neat to find the old ones again.

[Dreamer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved all Andre Norton books when I was a kid...read this aged 16

[SciFiOne · Rating 3 out of 5]

???? grade B+
1988 grade C+

[Marko]

I have the german edition: Androiden im Einsatz