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The X Factor
The X Factor
Author: Andre Norton
The job of discovering and exploring new planets - that of the First-In Scouts - is pretty much a closed occupation. Scouts make contract marriages with suitable women, which end after the birth of a child or upon the Scout's departure for his next assignment, and any children of the union - nearly always sons - go to the nearest Scout creche to...  more »
ISBN-13: 9780449243954
ISBN-10: 0449243958
Rating:
  • Currently 3.8/5 Stars.
 10

3.8 stars, based on 10 ratings
Publisher: Fawcett
Book Type: Paperback
Other Versions: Hardcover
Members Wishing: 0
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Alison-H avatar reviewed The X Factor on + 54 more book reviews
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.
reviewed The X Factor on + 38 more book reviews
Great Norton, this is the first novel I read by her when I was just a kid...
Piper avatar reviewed The X Factor on
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.


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