Published by Audiobooks by Mike Vendetti, and available on Audible.com
For their own inscrutable purposes, Audible Inc. purchased rights from me in 2014 to two of these books, "The Defiant Agent" and "Key Out of Time," both by Andre Norton. So now they are free to offer them as sales promotions, etc., without owing me royalties.
I guess they were encouraged, as in June 2015 they requested Bee Audio to have me produced two more Andre Norton books from the same Time Traders series: "Echoes of Time" and "Atlantis Endgame." (These were co-authored with Sherwood Smith). As of this writing, both books have been approved by Bee and sent on to Audible; they should be available soon!
"A Pail of Air" by Fritz Leiber (Apr, 2016)
http://tinyurl.com/apailofairAn errant encounter with a passing star has flung Earth away from its old Solar System into the dark and cold of deep space. With the entire atmosphere frozen as chemical snow dozens of feet deep, one last family struggles to survive. But what are they to think when they see figures moving in the city ruins? Are Earth's dead coming back to life?
"Shadows of Empire" by Lester del Rey (Aug, 2014)
A good Service non-com will keep his nose clean of politics.
And the Sergeant-Major of the 5th Command is a good non-com. When word comes
from Earth that there is a new Emperor and the 5th is being recalled to Earth,
after ten generations on Mars, he knows it's smart to just salute the flag and
follow orders.
"A Texas Ranger" by William McCleod Raine (Jul, 2014)
When a hardened criminal kills guards and breaks out of prison, Steve Fraser, a lieutenant in the Texas Rangers, is tasked with bringing him to justice. From the bowels of a mine, deep underground, to the stone labyrinths of the mountains of Wyoming, Steve follows his quarry. But his chase requires him to befriend people who turn out to be wanted in another killing. How can he justify his actions with his innate sense of honesty, his new friends, and the bewitching woman he meets in their midst?
"The Middle Toe of the Right Foot" by Ambrose Bierce (Jun, 2014)
Criminals should not return to the scene of their crime. Sometimes, it's just too horrible to bear! (Ghost story!)
The Man Who Would Be King" by Rudyard Kipling (May, 2014)
A British newspaper editor in India does some favors for a memorable pair of strangers who confide in him their plan to become kings in Afghanistan. Then, two years later, he has a bizarre return visit - kings they have become, sure enough, but they've found the price of kingly mistakes was very high!
"A Walk in the Dark" by Arthur C. Clarke (Apr, 2014)
Silly, isn't it? The things you think of when a vehicle breakdown makes you walk to the base at night. Creepy, too! But when you're at the outer edge of the galaxy, sometimes your thoughts have something to them....
"The Wounded" by Phillip Jose Farmer (Mar, 2014)
Not every man who carries a violin case excites such passion. But when this one steps into a room full of wounded and healers, he's targeted to become a casualty himself!
"Let's Get Together" by Isaac Asimov (Feb, 2014)
It's bad enough to learn that your historical enemy has developed robots so human-like that it takes an X-ray to detect them. But to learn that a group of the robots is already in the US and planning to detonate a bomb that can annihilate a major piece of a state - that's real motivation! For the man charged with neutralizing them - it's crunch time!
"The Nine Billion Names of God" by Arthur C. Clarke (Jan, 2014)
The invention of computers was a godsend to the obscure monks deep in the Himalayas. Their centuries-long project to write out all of God's names could be sped up by thousands of years. And only they had any clue what would come next!
http://tinyurl.com/living-space-asimovWhen the technology for twisting to other probability patterns was developed, a grateful Earth solved its overcrowding by sending people to live on Earths where plants and animals never got started. Each family could have its own planet, because there was an infinite number of such alt-Earths available, and the computers never assigned the same one twice. Trouble was - someone else had the same idea!
"The Outcasts of Poker Flat" by Bret Harte (Oct, 2013)http://tinyurl.com/outcastsofpokerflat
Bret Harte paints a timeless portrait of undesirables who are forced to leave a self-righteous town, and who, in the face of oncoming winter and in the company of a pair of innocents, learn to become bigger than themselves.
"To Build a Fire" by Jack London (Oct, 2013)http://tinyurl.com/tobuildafire
At fifty degrees below zero, your spit freezes instantly upon hitting the ground. At seventy-five below zero, it freezes in mid-air. If you get wet at that temperature you need to know one thing, and know it very well - how to build a fire.
"I, Mars" by Ray Bradbury (Oct, 2013)http://tinyurl.com/imars-bradbury
Emil Barton literally missed his rocketship when the Mars colonists were brought back to Earth at the start of the nuclear war. After a lifetime alone on the Red Planet - literally the only inhabitant of the terraformed world - Barton gets an unwelcome phone call on his 80th birthday. It's himself, calling from sixty years in the past.
"The Gold Bug" by Edgar Allen Poe (Mar, 2013)http://tinyurl.com/goldbug-poe
A breathtaking piece of luck, coupled with an unlikely coincidence, secured by a piercing intellect and curious nature, lead three friends to believe they might possibly uncover pirate gold! With all the insight and reasoning of a Sherlock Holmes, Poe's William Legrand plucks faint clues seemingly from mid-air and carefully arrives at a conclusion of exactly where in the world to dig.Has he reasoned - and guessed - correctly? Or, will the only gold he sees be the color of his eponymous beetle?
"The Enchanted Island - A Fairy Tale" by F.L. Apjohn (Jul, 2012)http://tinyurl.com/enchantedisland
Inconvenient owners of thrones in the kingdoms of the
Islands of Sunshine have a habit of attracting the attention of an Evil
Magician - and then disappearing!
Prince Daimur, who fortunately has a helpful and caring
disposition, receives some special gifts from a dying fairy. So when he, too,
becomes inconvenient and is "disappeared", he possesses some potent
defenses against spells. On the Island
of Despair, his natural
curiosity and good nature wins him allies as he attempts to solve the puzzles
that await him. And with diligence,
courage, and some good luck - the dispossessed royalty might actually stage a
comeback!
http://tinyurl.com/84gotmv
This is the fourth in Norton's Time Traders series; it immediately follows "The Defiant Agents." (see below)
Ross Murdoch and Gordon Ashe, Time Agents, are joined by a Hawaiian girl and two "enhanced" dolphins on a mission to another of the destinations found programmed into a derelict spaceship. Then their time portal crumbles around them and leaves them stranded in the planet's past!
"The Early History of the Airplane" by Orville & Wilbur Wright (Sep, 2011)
http://tinyurl.com/WrightBrosAirplane
Only two people were in a position to experience all the events leading up to the first flight of a viable airplane, and here in three short essays they report how it came about.
The idea of powered flight was so new that there were not even accepted methods for measuring the forces at play on a machine in flight. The Wright brothers had to develop their own testing methods and conduct experimentation before they finally began to design something theoretically capable of the feat. Most vexing of all was the problem of control - how to conduct a controlled turn when the forces are unbalanced. Without boring you with calculations, they explain how they tested different wing shapes and control vanes and then verified them in hundreds of flights in a glider.
Finally, in December, 1903, they achieved their milestone: "This flight lasted only 12 seconds, but it was nevertheless the first in the history of the world in which a machine carrying a man had raised itself by its own power into the air in full flight, had sailed forward without reduction of speed, and had finally landed at a point as high as that from which it started."
http://tiny.cc/o2mqh
The Communists never have a chance. They are prepared to fight with atomic weapons. The U.S. instead uses... Dolliver Wims, history's first recorded person capable of turning other people accident-prone. Wims is a walking disaster who never gets caught in the shambles he creates! With great good humor, Sabia turns his lens on what might have happened had the Cold War gone hot!
http://tiny.cc/24a69
The Western Conference discovers the Reds have stolen their alien-source data on a colonizable planet...and so must rush their plans for an expedition. When their spaceship crashes on Topaz, Travis Fox and his party of modern Apache Indians, reverted to their tribal ancestral memories, find they have already been beaten there. And they must deal with more than Reds - for the Reds have brought along reverted members of Ghenghis Khan's Mongol Horde!
