Daybreak 2250 A.D. - Andre Norton

   1952; 191 pages.  Alternate Titles: “Star Man’s Son” and “Star Man’s Son, 2250 AD”.  New Author? : No.  Genres : 50’s Sci-Fi; YA; post-apocalyptic.   Overall Rating: 8/10.

 

    Fors's father, Langdon, was a highly regarded Star Man.  He had roamed the ruined lands around the Eyrie extensively, drawn maps of it, and brought back precious loot.  And even though Langdon was now dead, it was natural to assume that Fors would follow in his father’s footsteps.

 

    But his mother was of an alien race, one could tell that just by looking at Fors.  Which made him a half-breed, a mutant.  And when it came time for the yearly Choosing ritual at the Star Hall, the Council’s opinion was that Fors’s genes were more important than his training or his father's fame.

 

    Five years Fors had been nominated to be a Star Man; five years he had been rejected.  Five years was the limit; a sixth nomination was forbidden.  Fors would be relegated to the status of a commoner, suitable for working in the fields.  Nothing more.  All because of his looks.  And there's nothing he can do about it.

    Is there?

 

What’s To Like...

    Andre Norton (real name: Alice Mary Norton, b. 1912, d. 2005) was a prolific and popular sci-fi/fantasy author; Daybreak 2250 AD is one of her early works.  We follow Fors as he travels into the ruins of a post-apocalyptic world with his companion cat, Lura (see cover image).  In a land where nuclear war has annihilated almost all of civilization, Fors encounters various beasts and humans, which at best, distrust any stranger passing through their territory, and at worst, want to kill and eat them.

 

    The target audience is YA boys, which was true of all sci-fi novels written in the 1950s.  Therefore there is lots of adventure here, and absolutely zero booze, drugs, adult situations, and/or cussing.  When the latter seems called for, Andre Norton delightfully resorts to phrases like “by the great horned lizard!” and “forest filth!”.

 

    In amongst all the exploring and adventuring, the author subtly weaves some keen insight about several serious themes.  The book was published in 1952, just seven years after the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  This introduced a new global dread: a massive, life-ending nuclear holocaust.  Andre Norton uses that scenario as the setting for Daybreak 2250 AD.  She also offers some provocative opinions, for that era, on racial bigotry (the southern tribespeople are dark-skinned) and feminism (one of the clans is led by a woman).  Plus, there is an overarching theme of the futility of war.  Pretty awesome for 1952!

 

    It was fun to comb through the ruins alongside Fors searching for long-lost gadgets and artifacts.  The rusted, derelict automobiles, both the nuclear-powered and the older gasoline-burning ones, are ignored; the technology for making their fuels has long been lost.  Store mannequins scared and mystified Fors because at first he thought they were petrified victims of the nuclear blasts.  OTOH, finding pencils, especially the colored ones, and a ream of paper, cause him to rejoice.  So do foodstuffs preserved in cans and jars that are still sealed.  Ordinary forks are also valuable finds.

    The ending is satisfying and heartwarming, albeit pretty straightforward and not very twisty.  Given several choices for a tribe that will accept him, and mutant though he is, Fors opts for the obvious one.  The book screams to be developed into a series chronicling Fors’s further adventures, but that has never happened.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.5*/5, based on 58 ratings and 34 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.02*/5, based on 2,539 ratings and 163 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    They might have forgotten about his night sight and too-keen hearing.  He could have concealed those as soon as he learned how wrong it was to be different.  But he could not hide the color of his close-cropped hair.  And that had damned him from the day his father had brought him here.  Other men had brown or black, or, at the worst, sunbleached yellow, covering their heads.  He had silver white, which showed to all men that he was a mutant, different from the rest of his clan.  Mutant!  Mutant!  (pg. 6)

 

    “Mountains—man made—that is what we see here.  But why did the Old Ones love to huddle together in such a fashion?  Did they fear their own magic so that they must live cheek to cheek with their kind lest it eat them up when it was loosed—as it did?  Well, they died of it in the end, poor Old Ones.  And now we have a better life—”

    “Do we?”  Fors kicked at the loose stone.  “They had such knowledge—we are groping in the dark for only crumbs of what they knew—"  (pg. 70)

 

“Only a fool tries to teach the otter to swim.”  (pg. 157)

    There’s very little to quibble about in Daybreak 2250 AD.  As mentioned, there is nothing even remotely R-rated here.  One reviewer felt that the storyline was anti-feminist because Fors chose not to accept the female leader’s offer to accept him into her tribe.  But this novel came out in 1952.  Feminism was not yet an issue back then.  Personally, I was impressed that it portrayed an army of men as being willing to have a woman lead them into battle.

 

    The big problem was with the editing.  Typos abounded: tained/tainted; mid-dile/middle, horrow/horror, scatered/scattered, and a host of others, numerous enough to be a distraction. But again, this book came out in 1952, when spellchecker and word processing programs were just a figment of the imagination.   So I’m forced to cut the editing staff some slack.

 

    Daybreak 2250 AD kept my interest from the start to finish, which was a bit of a surprise, since I am not part of the target audience.  The text did not seem “YA-ish” at all, and the action, if not particularly realistic, did feel “balanced”—the baddies (aka “the Beast Things”) were capable of holding their own, using tricks and strategy to thwart the good guys.  1950s sci-fi can sometimes feel out-of-date.  I’m happy to say that wasn’t the case here.

 

    8 Stars.  Daybreak 2250 AD was a re-read for me, although it’s been about 60 years since I first read it.  It was one of two books that had a major impact on my literary preferences as a kid, the other being Evan Hunter’s Danger: Dinosaurs!  The latter sits on my Kindle, waiting to be read again.  I hope it delights me the second time around as much as Daybreak 2250 AD did.