Andre Norton is a significant name in her field, and an early female presence. She is worth sampling for that reason, and I was long overdue doing so. This novel kicks off one of her many series, a cold war novel about the Russians and Americans trying to one-up each other with time travel and alien technologies. Unfortunately the story is in too big a hurry to spend much effort on character development, and the science is mostly hand-waving in favour of getting to the next action scene more quickly. I can't credit that action with much excitement, and too much happens offstage or is deferred to the sequels. I was disappointed, but it wasn't wasted time. ( )

The first book in another great series from Andre Norton, with the original books written in the late fifties/early sixties and a further number of books co-written with younger authors. This has led to a number of discrepancies as real life diverged (in some ways) from that originally envisaged by Ms Norton.

This is the start of 'The Time Traders' series featuring Ross Murdock and Gordon Ashe. This series is set pretty much at the turn of the 21st century, or almost 40 years after the book was written. In this future, the world is still split into two power blocks - the Capitalist West and the Communist East and, rather unusually and fairly presciently, the dream of space had failed after a few missions to the moon and a failed space station. The governments of East and West had developed a fairly experimental form of time travel and the Reds were using this technology to introduce technologies that should be available to them. America, in it's attempts to keep up was casting around in time to find this secret resource, But it's Murdock, caught up in the Project when his criminal record catches up with him, and Ashe, out on Murdock's graduation exercise, that inadvertently find themselves in the middle of the Reds' secret. Poor Murdock is battered and beaten by human and alien enemies but manages to survive in a rather battered fashion. ( )

Narration was main problem.

Ross Murdock, is about to embark upon the adventure of his life. In order to avoid prosecution, he reluctantly joins Operation Retrograde, whose members are exploring various time periods.
Their goal? To find out where - and when - the 'Reds' are obtaining certain scientific breakthroughs, in order to maintain the balance of global power. An outsider in his own time, Ross becomes an outsider in other times as well, and faces one challenge after another. Will he succeed? Or will he inadvertently alter time forever.

FROM AUDIOBOOKS.COM: If it is possible to conquer space, then perhaps it is also possible to conquer time. At least that was the theory American scientists were exploring in an effort to explain the new sources of knowledge the Russians possessed. Perhaps Russian scientists had discovered how to transport themselves back in time in order to learn long-forgotten secrets of the past.

That was why young Ross Murdock, above average in intelligence but a belligerently independent nonconformist, found himself on a "hush-hush" government project at a secret base in the Arctic. The very qualities that made him a menace in civilized society were valuable traits in a man who must successfully act the part of a merchant trader of the Beaker people during the Bronze Age.

For once they were transferred by time machine to the remote Baltic region where the Russian post was located, Ross and his partner Ashe were swept into a fantastic action-filled adventure involving Russians, superstitious prehistoric men, and the aliens of a lost galactic civilization that demanded every ounce of courage the Americans possessed. [summary taken from gutenberg e-text] ( )

After the slog that was The Scarlet Letter, this was a real refreshing romp. The bull-headed scoundrel Ross Murdock gets force-recruited into a secret American time-travel unit that tries to uncover where the Russians have all that fancy new technology from they display so openly. The assumption is that an advanced civilization has lived on Earth long before humankind crawled out of their caves, and that the "Reds" have found their leftovers. Ross and his boss Gordon Ashe are sent back to 2k BC only to discover that their outpost under the disguise of prehistoric traders has been bombed. The locals believe that the wrath of their gods has manifested and shenanigans ensue, resulting in a series of near-death-experiences, surprising discoveries and mad dashed through time and space.

The contrast between prehistoric hunter-gatherer culture (that seemed plausibly described to a non-expert like me) and the far advanced technology was one of the charmes of this novella, but I also like the protagonists - Ross, even if he's sometimes a bit of a Gary Stu with all his miraculous new skills (American training methods are really remarkable) and the way sheer stubborn willpower takes him through all and every situation) and Gordon Ashe with his stoic experience. There was some handwaving and some plotholes (you don't have time pressure when you have time travel at your disposal), but all in all this was much better than most of this kind of pulp fiction. ( )

Good book by Norton. I'm not into her Fantasy but I do like her SF, like this one, when I can find it. Originally I gave this book 3 stars. The story stuck with me so it was better then I first thought. ( )