Lost Lands of Witch World

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.

However, just as they set up the time gate, a storm blows up and disaster strikes. Murdock is flung through the gate and into the planets past. The time gate is destroyed. Murdock is left to try to cope with the different and aline world he finds himself in, where it seems there is currently a three way struggle going on even without the presence of the mysterious aliens who have dogged the Time Traders from the start.

"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.

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.

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.