The Defiant Agents

, #3

eBook

Published Oct. 26, 2022 by Standard Ebooks.

No rating (1 review)

The space race has gone interstellar! Western and Soviet agents vie for control of the strategic alien world of Topaz and the lost technology it conceals.

Agent Travis Fox awakens on Topaz after a crash landing, his memories a confusing mix of his own and those of a 19th-century Apache ancestor. His fellow agents have all been subject to the same experiment, some more thoroughly entangled in the past than others. Driven by his present-day memories and aided by a pair of mutant coyotes, he sets out to explore the landscape and finds Mongols of the Golden Horde who have escaped from the Russians’ colony. Despite suspicion and scrambled memories on both sides—and a Russian mind-control device—Fox is determined to unite the Apache and Mongol tribes against their common enemy and keep Topaz’ secrets from falling into Russian hands.

The third novel in Andre Norton’s Time Traders series continues her …

9 editions

An enjoyable space western with Apaches as the good guys

No rating

An enjoyable space western with Apaches as the good guys, wrapped up in the cold war and tossing in the Golden Horde, a lost alien city and Russians with a mind-control ray.

Third in the Time Traders series, it stands alone pretty well even though it appears much more closely linked to the second book (which I haven’t read) than the first (which I have), largely because the setting has moved from Earth’s past to a distant world in the near future.

It’s kind of a mish-mash, but as an adventure it moves quickly. The characters’ memories are all scrambled, mixed with those of their ancestors (this is how the western and Mongol Horde tropes are brought into the future). But they’re still distinct characters, and when alliances shift they’re actually for character and cultural reasons, not just plot contrivances.

All that said, I’m a white guy reading a book …

Subjects

  • Fiction
  • Space and time
  • Science fiction
  • Time travel
  • Space colonies
  • Apache Indians