I’m still on my treasure trove of Andre Norton. I have been procrastinating on this so long I’ve read five and a half books since my last Andre Norton post. I guess I should title this “The Andre Norton Discussion, Part II” but since there wasn’t any discussion on part one it felt too ironic.

I decided to read the Ross Murdock series because I liked the cover of the second book in the series, Galactic Derelict. The one I have has the last cover shown on that page, the 1972 cover. The colors are brighter on mine though. Mammoths, naked savages and a big spherical space ship – how could anyone resist?

There are seven books in this series. I read the first four. In The Time Traders delinquent Ross Murdock is recruited by a secret government agency whose mission is to go back in time to find ancient alien artifacts before the Soviets find them. In this first book the time agents go back to prehistoric Europe where they have exciting adventures involving primitive tribes, the Soviets, scary aliens and a mind controlling alien space suit.

My favorites in the series were Galactic Derelict and The Defiant Agents. In Galactic Derelict we meet Travis Fox who is an archaeologist and an Apache Indian. The time agents first go back to the age of mammoths and sabre tooth cats then in the “present” they accidentally take off in the derelict space ship and visit several planets where they find evidence of dead civilizations. In The Defiant Agents Travis Fox along with a group of other modern Apaches are sent to colonize the planet Topaz. Once there they find that the Soviets have also sent colonists and that both governments have given their colonists a drug that’s supposed to awaken their ancestral memories and primitive instincts.

In Key Out of Time the time agents are marooned in the past on the tropical ocean planet Hawaika and become involved in the war that apparently destroyed that world’s civilization.

A while back Jaquandor of Byzantium’s Shores reviewed The Zero Stone so I decided to read that next. I finished it a few days ago and I’m now well into the sequel, Uncharted Stars. I like these the best of all my Andre Norton reads so far. Click on the link for a good review.

These books are all much shorter than those I’m used to reading. I am attracted to long books with complex stories and lots of detail but these are the kind of books that originally got me interested in science fiction in the first place and reading them is like returning to the place where you grew up and finding that it hasn’t changed. It’s not a place where I want to stay forever but it’s nice to go back there once in a while.