Time Traders II: The Defiant Agents/Key Out of Time

LOST IN TIME
Exploring space and time is a dangerous business, and no one knows this better than Time Agents Travis Fox and Ross Murdock. So when both men are stranded on far-off planets with no hope of rescue from Earth, they must rely on their wits and their training to survive.
But survival is only the beginning. To better handle the rigors of the alien world of Topaz, Fox and his crewmates have been implanted with the memories of their Apache ancestors -- but the Opposition has sent its own team with the reawakened memories of their Mongol ancestors!
Meanwhile, Murdock is trapped in the ancient past of the water world of Hawaika, facing terrifying wizards in a kingdom he knows will soon be utterly annihilated by an alien empire that is bent on the conquest of the entire galaxy.
The fates of two worlds, and possibly the galaxy itself, will be determined by the actions of these castaways in time -- and whatever happens, the lives of Time Agents everywhere will be changed forever....

Reluctant agents for the U.S. government's secret expeditions into the past, Travis Fox and Ross Murdoch seek out history's anomalies in order to protect the future. As part of Operation Retrograde, Fox and Murdoch explore the mysteries of the Bronze Age and ancient Polynesia in search of signs of alien visitors to Earth's distant past. The latest addition to veteran sf author Norton's classic "Time Traders" series brings together two out-of-print novellas of time-travel into one volume suitable for most libraries' sf collections.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Baen revives more of Norton's Time Traders yarns (Time Traders [BKL N 1 00] contained the first two resuscitees). In The Defiant Agents, American agents, who have received treatments that cause them to revert to ancestral behaviors that will enable them to survive in more primitive conditions, are dispatched to the past. They encounter Russians who have been backdated to resemble Tartars and whom they can overcome only with a weapon alien to the period. In Key Out of Time, the agents venture to a ruined planet revealed by a long-lost map. There they find a device that lets them see into the past and defeat the aliens responsible for the planet's demise. Originally written in the early 1960s, both books needed and got a certain amount of technological and political updating, so that, for instance, the Russian opponents aren't Communist but newfangled Russian imperialists. The books bear revamping better than most of their contemporaries might because they were better written in the first place by one of sf's hardy perennials. Roland Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved