Star Born - The Original Classic Edition

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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:

This had been a long day, and one with more snarl-ups than he cared to count, keeping him on a constant, dogged trot between the ship and the fitting yard where riggers labored with the slowest motions possible to the human body-or so it seemed to the exasperated acting-Cargo-Master of the Free Trader.

...Since the captains cordial welcome extended only to his guest, Dane regretfully descended to the mess cabin to make unskilled preparations for supper-though there was not much you could do to foul up concentrates in an automatic cooker.

...Somehow they made it out here to the rim and set down on Khatka without power enough to take off again-and by then most of them were dead.

...So there is that within you which can even now be awakened to remember eldama in his might when he was king of the herd and need fear nothing save the spears and cunning of small, weak men.

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

But, the first of the little humanoids (Fuzzies) discovered knows nothing about charters and the law. Little Fuzzy joins Pappy Jack, and discovers a whole new world, a world full of fun and adventure. These are the adventures of Little Fuzzy, and his turning upside-down of a whole world!