The Time Traders

By -


The Time Traders, by Andre Norton 

As we found out last year, I am pathetically ignorant of Andre Nortons's works.  I didn't know what the Time Traders were or anything; I just had this book.  I lucked out -- this is the first volume in a long series of time-travel intrigue books!   It was published in 1958.

Ross Murdock, hardened juvenile delinquent, figures he can outsmart anybody, but he got caught this time.  To his surprise, the judge offers him a choice: jail time or volunteering to be part of a government experiment of some kind.  Ross picks the mystery experiment, assuming he can easily escape.  But the next thing he knows, he's in the Arctic, living on a base and learning new skills.  What are these people even up to, anyway?

Ross discovers that time travel is possible, and that the US is playing a giant game of spot-the-spy-bases all over pre-history.  The Soviets are up to something, and they want to find out what it is.  So Ross becomes a Bronze Age trader, posing as a Beaker man -- who has freedom to wander around.  Bronze Age life, with spies and proto-Vikings and Arctic bases and ....aliens?? proves to be exciting and difficult enough to humble even a cocky punk like Ross.

This was so much fun.  I want to read the rest of this series!  It is kind of bonkers.  Great stuff.


A funny thing is that the antagonists are the Soviets, who have found some sort of technology that the US wants too.  They're never, ever called Soviets or Russians though; they're always the Reds.  Then there are the other antagonists, the aliens whose tech the Soviets have been plundering.  They're not too thrilled either, but they're still a mystery.

NB: The Kindle edition in the link is really the first two volumes together, and I only have the first one.  Also, Norton apparently edited the story in 2000 to bring it up to speed, so I'd like to check that out too!

Comments

  1. mudpuddleJanuary 22, 2021 at 10:47 AM

    Norton is very readable. i don't know who wrote more sci fi books, her or Asimov, but she wrote a lot: one of the supports of my youth, haha...

    ReplyDelete
  2. reeseJanuary 22, 2021 at 4:25 PM

    I own this & I've never read it. Alright, maybe I should!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Jenny @ Reading the EndJanuary 23, 2021 at 5:32 AM

    THE REDS! I think I read some of Andre Norton's books when I was in middle school and first discovering fantasy, but I don't thi...ink I was that wild about her? On the other hand, I love time travel, so I might pick this up and see how I feel about Norton as an adult.

    ReplyDelete
  4. mudpuddleJanuary 23, 2021 at 2:01 PM

    yet another collection to the deathless (haha) agglomeration...

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more