Andre Norton
10 books
- If you like your time travel scrappy rather than tidy, Ross Murdock stranded in an alien planet's past, with a Polynesian diver and two trained dolphins for company, is good fun. Norton keeps it fast and a little pulpy, and the veiled Foanna give it a nice eerie edge.
- Dane Thorson and the Solar Queen crew trade catnip with cat-like aliens on Sargol, then start dropping unconscious one by one and get branded a plague ship nobody will let land. Old-fashioned pulpy fun, brisk and earnest, good when you want a light adventure that doesn't dawdle.
- If you want a lazy-afternoon adventure, this delivers: three broke siblings move into their crumbling Louisiana plantation and hunt for a lost family sword, with swamps, hidden passages, and a rival claimant thrown in. It's early Norton, pulpy and dated in spots, but cheerfully so.
- Early Andre Norton, before Witch World: brisk pulp adventures like The People of the Crater, lost races and strange lands. Apprentice work, honestly, but her lifelong pattern is already forming, the outsider proving out far from home.
- Vintage 1950s adventure, brisk and a little pulpy, but it earns its keep: Dalgard scouting alien ruins with his telepathic merman friend Sssuri, while an Earth pilot slowly realizes the colonists went native for good reason. Short, fast, and oddly thoughtful about who deserves a planet.
- A quick pulpy one: a disgraced pilot plants false memories in a drifter kid, Vye, to fake an heir on a safari planet, and then the planet itself starts pulling strings. Thin on character, honestly, but the paranoia and alien weirdness make a fun afternoon.
- You get a brisk, old-school frontier adventure through Shann Lantee’s eyes, with Warlock’s dangerous landscape and uneasy human dealings with its native people doing much of the work. The characters are sparely drawn, but the survival tension and strange planetary atmosphere stay with you.
- Travis Fox wakes on an alien world with his memory scrambled back toward his Apache ancestors, and Norton takes that setup seriously, questions of who you are when your past is weaponized. Old-school pulp adventure on the surface, but thoughtful underneath, and it moves fast.
- Ross Murdock starts as a petty criminal dodging rehab and ends up posing as a Bronze Age trader in a Cold War race for lost tech, and watching him grow a spine is half the fun. Fast, pulpy 1950s adventure, so don't expect deep prose, just momentum.
- A quick, pulpy hour with Dane Thorson and the Solar Queen crew, this time on a safari world where a witch doctor's illusions are the real danger and Tau, the ship's medic, finally gets his moment. Slight even for Norton, but fun if you already like the series.