The Colors of Space - The Original Classic Edition

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.

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

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.

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.

Its a rollicking good ride with a hero thats a human hero, a bit risque for 1960, and chock-full of imagination.

You wont find the stories of four or five (or forty or fifty) people weaving through one immensely long never-ending publishing buffet. Instead, its told through the eyes of only one man, and told well.

The story is exactly what I expected - classic pulp science fiction. It is well-written and has a vivid and interesting world. Is it great literature? No.

But it was a great way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

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

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

It lay white and windswept, a barricade of emptiness; to one side the spaceport and the white skyscraper of the Terran Headquarters, and at the other side, the clutter of low buildings, the street-shrine, the little spaceport cafe smelling of coffee and jaco, and the dark opening mouths of streets that rambled down into the Kharsa-the old town, the native quarter.

...Even after six years behind a desk, my neat business clothes-suitable for an Earthman with a desk job-didnt fit quite right, and I still rose unconsciously on the balls of my feet, approximating the lean stooping walk of a Dry-towner from the Coronis plains.

...It had been six years; six years of slow death behind a desk, since the day when Rakhal Sensar had left me a marked man; death-warrant written on my scarred face anywhere outside the narrow confines of the Terran law on Wolf.

...It had been Rakhal who first led me through the byways of the Kharsa, teaching me the jargon of a dozen tribes, the chirping call of the Ya-men, the way of the catmen of the rain-forests, the argot of thieves markets, the walk and step of the Dry-towners from Shainsa and Daillon and Ardcarran-the parched cities of dusty, salt stone which spread out in the bottoms of Wolfs vanished oceans.

We know so little about intra-atomic forces, that this story, improbable as it will appear in spots, will read commonplace years hence, when we have atomic engines, and when we have solved the riddle of the atom.

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.