Galactic Derelict

Time Traders, Book 2

Andre Norton

★★★☆☆

The second book in the series is a decent adventure story from the anything-goes era of science fiction. Like book three, it handles Native Americans better than I would expect from its contemporaries. (Though I did cringe at the two white guys and modern Apache being spray-tanned to pass as prehistoric Native Americans.)

About a third of it is a quasi-military time travel mission to retrieve an alien spaceship that crashed in the distant past, before it decays to ruins. Mammoths, sabre-toothed tigers, volcanoes, etc. That part goes by too quickly, because Norton is using it to pivot from time travel to space travel. The rest is an outer space adventure as the team is dragged around the galaxy by the ship’s autopilot…in the present day…after the civilization that built it has been dead for millennia.

There’s a lot of improvising and jerry-rigging, with a crew stuck in a spaceship without sufficient provisions, not sure how long they’ll be up there. At times I was reminded of Apollo 13, which of course hadn’t happened yet when Norton was writing this in the late 1950s!

It drags after a while, though. With the ship being on autopilot, it feels like the characters are just along for the ride. They can’t even explore too far when the ship stops along its route, because they can’t be 100% certain when it will lift off again.

Reading Order

I ended up reading the Time Traders series out of order for the simple reason that books 1, 3 and 4 have passed into the public domain, but this one hasn’t. Despite the drastically different circumstances, each gives you enough information that you don’t need to read them in order, though it does help to start with book one, since the rest of the series hinges on the plot twist near the end.