The Time Traders

The Time Traders is a science fiction novel by the American writer Andre Norton, first published in 1958 and the first in a series. It was revised by the author in 2000.

The premise is a cold war fought in the distant past. Intelligence services on both sides have evidence that the other is sending operatives backwards through time, and that those operatives are being given weapons and machines that no contemporary nation could have produced. The Americans conclude that there is a third party involved, something or someone unknown to history, and that the only response is to develop their own time-transfer technology, find the source of the advanced equipment and destroy it. The novel follows men who volunteer for the project without knowing what it involves. Norton keeps the science simple and the adventure immediate: the recruits are ordinary and largely expendable, the missions are dangerous, and the historical periods they visit are treated as environments that can kill them.

Norton wrote the book as the first of a series, and the combination of cold war tradecraft and prehistory gave the sequence a setting that later writers borrowed from.