Customer Reviews

Defiant Agents (Ross Murdock Series, No 3)

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Andre Norton's books from the fifties and early sixties with a cold war background have not worn as well as her far future stories. I do not want to suggest though that she had a simplistic "us" versus "them" attitude.

In this near future book the US is in a race with the Russians to use alien technology scavenged from crashed spaceships to colonize planets outside our solar system. Because they feel that they are in dange of losing this race, men working for the United States government have decided to use a group of volunteers from the Apache tribe as subjects in an experiment without their knowledge. By use of the Redax, the volunteers will be made to think and act as Apaches of the 18th and 19th centuries would respond. It is hoped this would help them better adapt to life on a primative planet.

However, the spaceship they are traveling in crashes on the planet of Topaz. Travis Fox escapes with a group of the surviving volunteers. In exploring the planet he learns that they are not the only group on the planet. The Russians using their own version of the Redax have Mongol nomads as their subjects.

There is a definite feeling in this book that governments, each with their own goal would use whatever means are available to achieve that goal, no matter how it might affect the individual. This is occasionally mistaken for a paranoia about technology, but in reality it is a distrust of human altruism.

This is a good adventure story-- and the crashed alien ships yielding technology is going to be even more familiar to the X-file generation than it was to the original reader in 1963.