Witch World

Witch World is a speculative fiction project of Andre Norton, inaugurated by her 1963 novel Witch World and continuing more than four decades. Beginning in the mid-1980s when she was about 75 years old, Norton recruited many other writers to the project, and some books were published only after her death in 2005. The Witch World setting is one planet in a parallel universe where magic long ago superseded science; early in the fictional history it is performed exclusively by women. The series began as a hybrid of science fiction and sword and sorcery but for the most part it combines the latter with high fantasy.

Witch World begins with what is now called the Estcarp cycle. These describe the adventures of Simon Tregarth from Earth, his witch wife Jaelithe, and their three children Kyllan, Kemoc and Kaththea.

The series was expanded greatly with the High Hallack cycle, starting with Year of the Unicorn in 1965 and its sequels Jargoon Pard and Gryphon in Glory. The Dales of High Hallack are on a different continent from Estcarp and its neighboring lands.

Mostly these cycles are organized by continent, Estcarp and its neighboring countries being situated on an eastern continent and High Hallack on a western one, with a wide sea between.

The Turning sequence is about events which convinced conservative witches that men could handle magic responsibly. The Secrets sequence brings many of these story lines to a climax. Both deal with worldwide events. Except for the last Secrets book, most of these were written in collaboration with Norton's fans. The Witch World series can be considered the first romantic fantasy series, both because of the content and because these books were a primary inspiration to later romantic fantasy authors like Mercedes Lackey.

On the Witch World, magical ability is considered to be exclusively female and exercised only by virgins, with the sexual act depriving a witch of her power. Estcarp's male-dominated enemies consider rape as a convenient way of neutralising captive witches. The advent of Simon Tregarth, a man who turns out to possess some magical power and who forms a magical link with the witch Jaelithe after she becomes his wife, poses an uncomfortable challenge to the conservative witch hierarchy, which is by slow degrees forced to accept that males - and females who have relationships with them - can and do possess magic power.

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