Lord of Thunder

By Andre Norton

The sequel to The Beast Master. 

Hosteen Storm, former Beast Master for the military during the war against the Xik, has started to settle into his new holding on the planet, Arzor, when he is approached by two men wanting to hire him. They need to go into territory held by the indigenous natives, the Norbies. The Norbies are  not human and their technology is at a stone age level. Basically they are analogous to the native American tribes at the time of the European expansion to the Americas. The problem is two-fold, though. First, it is the hottest, driest time of the year, when it is dangerous to travel through the back country. Second, the area they want to enter is forbidden to non-Norbies and will create bad relations between the Norbies and non-Norbies, maybe even leading to war. 

Storm at first refuses to lead the two, explaining that it is just too dangerous. However, the one man is looking for his son, whose space ship has crashed in the forbidden zone and the man will not let anyone stop him from trying to rescue his son. And the other man, who works for the government, wants to gather intelligence on the activities of the Norbies in the forbidden zone, to see if the Norbie tribes are planning to start a war with the non-Norbie colonists.  

Storm agrees to serve as guide for the expedition, helped by his Norbie friends. But as they get closer to the forbidden area, Storm loses control of the expedition when the first man leaves on his own after drugging Storm and the others. Storm sets off after the man but he falls into the hands of a hostile cannibal tribe of Norbies. He manages to escape and he discovers that these Norbies are using some dangerous and unknown alien tech. But the true master of this technology turns out not to be one of the natives. The one the Norbies call the Lord of Thunder, who can call down lightning and fire from the heavens turns out to be a human man who has mastered the technology of the old ones, those mysterious beings whose purpose and origin are hidden in depths of time.

This was an OK read. To me, the Norbies are just too derivative of First Nations peoples of the Americas. It felt like the author couldn't be bothered to create a really different alien species with a stone age technology and so just basically made Native Americans with a couple of biological differences. Similar tribal structure, similar hunter/gatherer lifestyle, even similar religious beliefs and the use of drums in ceremonies, it was all just too familiar. 

Here is a review by Kirkus Reviews.