Estcarp is bordered on all sides by more patriarchal lands and its foreign relations are often … tense. The woman he rescued hails from a realm called Estcarp, which is ruled by magic-wielding women. It takes some time to get past the language barrier, but eventually Simon finds that he has been transported to a world much like Earth, although its geography and history differ. There are lots of worlds where women exist purely to be rescued this is not one of them. The rest of the ruffians are taken out by the woman herself, who calls down lightning on her enemies. Simon’s pistol makes short work of some of the pursuers. No sooner does Simon arrive but he comes across a woman who is being stalked by riders and hounds. This new world, the Witch World of the title, at least offers adventure if not security. He will be cast from our world into one that Petronious promises will be more appropriate for an oddity such as Simon. Having little to lose, Simon agrees to be Petronius’ next subject. Thanks to the plethora of people desperate to flee post-war Europe (or indictment at the Nuremburg Trials), he has made a fair living proving that he can at least make people vanish. Petronius has rediscovered a method by which people can be transferred from one world to another because the journey seems to be one-way, Petronius has never tried it himself. Jorge Petronius’s research into world-hopping. Luckily for Simon, his predicament makes him the perfect test subject for Dr. Also, the end of his life … as soon as hit-man Sammy catches up to Simon. Now, having crossed one mob boss too many, Simon is facing the end of his second career. He segued into what appears to have been a noteworthy criminal interlude. Having read it now, I can see how this could have been a formative experience for a young reader, especially in the context of the early 1960s.Īnd readers did like it: not only did this novel become the seed of a long-running popular series, it was nominated for a Hugo, sharing the ballot with such classics as Way Station, Glory Road, Dune World and Cat’s Cradle.Ī momentary lapse of judgment on Simon Tregarth’s part ended his military career in post-war Europe. Oddly enough, while I have read the other books in the series (Ellen Asher or Andrew Wheeler, then my shadowy masters at SFBC, must have liked them - or perhaps the books just sold well), I’ve never read this particular book. It is also the first novel in her long-running (later collaborative) Witch World series. After this novel, fantasy was an increasingly large fraction of her output. 1963’s Witch World marks Norton’s shift towards fantasy.
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