The Time Traders

Andre Norton

★★★★☆

Apparently I’m still a sucker for time travel stories. The Time Traders (1958) is a cold war spy novel, but it’s a temporal cold war – more accurately, it’s a temporal front in our cold war. Both sides have time travel, the “Reds” have been plundering another era for technology, and the west is trying to find the source and shut it down.

I wouldn’t accuse it of being deep. About the only philosophical point is that today’s misfits blend in better with other times. It’s also very rooted in the cold war mentality. But it’s a satisfying adventure through the arctic and bronze age Europe, with characters who have modern knowledge and goals, but are making do with bronze-age technology. There is a swerve toward the end, but it works.