Key Out of Time - The Original Classic Edition

Travis Fox and crew land on planet Topaz where they must reach inside to their Apache heritage to battle a difficult climate and a Russian team of explorers who likewise dig deep into their Mongol heritage.

It takes place in Andre Nortons Forerunner universe. As humans explore the far reaches of the galaxy, they keep finding the ruins of highly advanced alien civilizations that have vanished. Some planets have not been well explored, some have been colonized, and some are home to aliens.

Even the elements which tend to date these novels add a sort of nostalgic charm that I find irresistable.

This is a new and freshly published edition of this culturally important work by Andre Norton, which is now, at last, again available to you.

Enjoy this classic work today. These selected paragraphs distill the contents and give you a quick look inside Storm Over Warlock:

On the other side of that was a small cut to a sloping hillside, giving on another valley, not as wide as that in which the camp stood, but one well provided with cover in the way of trees and high-growing bushes.

...The path he followed ended abruptly in a cliff drop, and Shann made a face at the odor rising from below, even though that scent meant he could climb down to the valley floor here without fearing any clak-clak attention.

...And he could not have put a name to the new emotion that added so suddenly to his burning desire to make good, not only to hold the small niche in Survey which he had already so painfully achieved, but to climb, until he could stand so in such a group talking easily to that tall man, his uncovered head bronze-yellow in the sunlight, his cool gray eyes pale in his brown face.

...Perhaps it was only his impaired sight, but it appeared to him that the Throg followed an erratic path, either as if the pilot feared to be caught by a second shot, or because that ship had also suffered some injury.

We start with exiles from a warring Earth founding a colony on Astra a habitual planet somewhere in outer space. The exiles find scattered throughout their immediate area of settlement-abandoned cities, remnants of a prior civilization apparently destroyed in an atomic war. A deep distrust of technology and fear of weapons caused to exiles to avoid visiting the cities of Those Others as the natives are called. In addition to developing city destroying weapons Those Others bred a race of mermen - folk who can live both on land and under water. The mermen revolted against Those Others and eventually formed an alliance with the exiles. What starts out as an exploratory expedition by a pair of merman-exile youths turns into a quite entertain and exciting novel when Those Other team up with a new expedition from Earth to reclaim some of there ancient technology.

Nortons Solar Queen stories are told from the viewpoint of Dane Thorson, an apprentice-Cargo Master who is introduced in Sargasso of Space, the first Solar Queen novel, as a lanky, very young man in an ill-fitting Traders tunic. Most of this authors heroes and heroines are young, uncertain of themselves, shy, with a tendency to trip over their own enthusiasms and load themselves up with guilt at the slightest opportunity. They are very likeable and their adventures are narrated in remarkably lean prose with just the right touch of description.

After ten years of schooling, orphan Dane Thorson is assigned via a computer analysis of his psychological profile--not to a safe berth on a sleek Company-run starship that his classmates were vying for--but to a battered tramp of a Free Trader. To say that the Solar Queen lacked a great many refinements and luxurious fittings which the Company ships boasted was an understatement. But she was a tightly-run ship and what she lacked in refinement, she made up for in adventure. Dane soon settles in under Cargo Master Van Rycke and learns to his dismay what large gaps unfortunately existed in his training.

Plague Ship takes the crew of the Solar Queen to Sargol, where the enigmatic feline natives seem very reluctant to trade away their fabulous scented gemstones. When Dane Thorson discovers an herb that the Salariki are willing to swap for their gems, he fears that his eagerness to make a trade breakthrough might have poisoned a native child.

That becomes the least of his worries when the Solar Queen blasts off from Sargol with invisible, undetectable stowaways that would brand the free traders anathema to all inhabited worlds.

"The People of the Crater"
"The Gifts of Asti"
"Plague Ship"
"Star Born"
"All Cats Are Gray"
"The Time Traders"
"Voodoo Planet"
"Storm Over Warlock"
"Star Hunter"
"The Defiant Agents"
"Key Out of Time"
"Ralestone Luck" (historical)
"Ride Proud, Rebel!" (historical)
"Rebel Spurs" (historical)
"Murders for Sale" (mystery)

At the publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied.

Finally available, a high quality book of the original classic edition.

This is a new and freshly published edition of this culturally important work, which is now, at last, again available to you.

Enjoy this classic work today. These selected paragraphs distill the contents and give you a quick look inside:

They never managed it, but nowadays the Lhari give all the Mentorians what amounts to a brainwashing-deep hypnosis, before and after every voyage, so that they can neither look for anything that might threaten the Lhari monopoly of space, nor reveal it-even under a truth drug-if they find it out.

...I want to do what I came here to do, because your father saved my life once when I was young and healthy, and gave me twenty good years before I got old and fat and sick.

...Inside the other one, he still had his Academy ID card which identified him as Bart Steele, and if the Mentorian looked through them to check, and found out he was carrying two sets of identity papers....

...He got them out, and with a feeling as if he were crossing a bridge and burning it after him, tore up every scrap of paper that identified him as Bart Steele of Vega Four, graduate of the Space Academy of Earth.