Time Traders by Andre Norton

Started: 20 January, 2013
Finished: 24 January, 2013
Pages: 220

Andre Norton wrote the very first SF novel that I ever read:  a boy's own adventure novel set in space.   I was.....11, 12?   I don't remember it exactly, but it had a big influence on my reading.  I've been reading SF ever since.

Why?  Well, that's an essay for another time, but the short version would be something like "entertainment and ideas".   Like most popular pulp fiction, you can argue about what's entertaining.  But Time Traders has a strong plot with lots of action. It's easy to get caught up in the story of the misfit bad boy who starts life on the wrong foot, but makes good through his cleverness and courage.   As for ideas:  how captivating is the idea that you could somehow travel to another time?  And that the people there would have different religions, and customs, and skills and traditions? Pretty heady stuff when you're twelve.  

Time Traders isn't that first SF book that I read more than 30 years ago.  It's one of a very similar set of novels that Norton wrote in the 50s and 60s.  As a kids book of that era I can no real fault with it, and mocking it would just be mocking the social conventions of that time.

 But although I can credit Ms. Norton with introducing me to a lifetime's worth of interesting reading, I do have a beef.  Norton was an American.  She wasn't very cosmopolitan, and she wasn't necessarily very smart.  And along with authors like Poul Anderson she inculcated me with the subconscious belief that somehow learning a language with native fluency was something that anyone could accomplish with a few weeks' concerted effort.  Fie!  You blighted my language learning efforts, when I first had an opportunity to study French in high school in my unilingual Prairie city.  Somehow, I felt that something was terribly wrong with both my instructor and me when I could barely communicate and hardly understand anyone in Paris after three years of As.  :-)