FIREHAND

Norton revives her 30-year-old Time Trader series with the help of Griffin, her collaborator on Redline the Stars (1993) and various Witchworld stories. The Time Traders—who travel in time, by what amounts to magical means, but don't trade—are epitomized by brash ex-criminal Ross Murdock, whose function is to thwart the invasion of human-occupied space by the alien Baldies. Often a disaster in the present can be averted by prompt, appropriate action in the past. So Ross, with weapons expert Eveleen Riordan and archeologist-turned-medic Gordon Ashe, must travel into the past of the planet Dominion and win a war the history books say was lost, in order to prevent destruction by the Baldies in the present. The authors offer no coherent structure or rationale for dealing with time travel and its effects. The characters and plot are stereotyped (with a predictable and drippy romance thrown in); the aliens are nasty and bald. The action involves considerable galloping about on deer-back. Wretched twaddle. Far better the Time Traders had been left to molder in peace.