LORD KALVAN OF OTHERWHEN
H. BEAM PIPER
Pequod Press
99¢ ebook editions, available now
Rating: 4.9 nostalgic stars of five
The Publisher Says: The Paratime Police patrolled the vast number of alternate time dimensions. Their aim was to keep the existence of the alternative Earths a secret and prevent these Earths from mixing and destroying each other.
But the Time Police made mistakes, and they made a big one when a seemingly ordinary Pennsylvania State Trooper named Calvin Morrison was accidentally switched into the Aryan-Transpacific sector, Styphon's House subsector.
In just a few weeks, Morrison was being hailed as Lord Kalvan, and was masterminding a campaign that could blow the whole Paratime secret sky high!
My Review: It has been said since there were people to say it that you have to leave home to find yourself. It was never more truly said than with Corporal Calvin Morrison, Pennsylvania State Police. He had to leave Earth as he knew it in order to feel at home at last.
Calvin, you see, ran afoul of a glitch in an alien (though still Earthly) technology, was swept into a temporal conveyor, and despite being thrust into a unique environment, still managed to defend himself against a fellow cop's energy weapon (versus Calvin's .38 revolver), and escape from the unknown but self-evident threat of that weird place.
But where in the world was he? It looks like the same spot he just left, only...not.
He comes to discover that he's traveled laterally in timespace, he's in the same geography as the Pennsylvania he left, but the people in this place aren't like him in culture or language. They're early-Renaissance level of technology, polytheistic Aryans from Asia. And their kingdom, Hostigos, is about to be swatted like a mosquito by the Big Baddies: the priests of the House of Styphon, the Gunpowder God. Thus does Calvin morph into Kalvan, the war leader, the bringer of miracles, the architect of a complete shift in this world's future history.
Now remember that alien-but-Earthly technology? Those Earthlings are from a different time-stream from thee and me, and from the Hostigos (called “Aryan-Transpacific” which specifies the direction of the ancient migration) time-stream. They developed high technology long before we did, and consequently used up the resources of their own Earth before we have. The Paratime Secret, which is the existence of aliens who can't be told from the natives, is policed by the Paratime Police, now headed by Tortha Karf who's designated Verkan Vall as his successor, and whose observation of Kalvan was supposed to be an elimination until some bright academic realized Kalvan was a rare case of a man out of time who was IN his new element, more so than he was in his native time-stream.
And so is born the Kalvan Subsector, a set of adjacent time-streams that define a new direction in history. It's a priceless chance to see how one exceptional individual can change the course of the world.
I bought my first copy of this book, published in 1965, from The Book Stall on Burnet Road in Austin, Texas, in 1970. It was a dime, and my mama blew a fuse. She had given me the dime to buy two National Geographics, and was furious I chose mind-rot over edification. As a result of this tantrum on her part, I treasured that little book until it finally and definitively disintegrated in 2006.
I loved the parallel universes in the book. I eagerly looked into strangers' faces, hoping one of them would be a Paracop and whisk me away from the life I didn't much like into a romantic, exciting life hopping the time-streams. (Not long after this, I encountered The Warlord of the Air by Michael Moorcock, and my fate was sealed...I was a chrononaut/Paracop Without Portfolio, and still am.)
I loved every pulpy, overheated sentence of the book. I said things like “yesterday at the latest” and “Dralm dammit” so often that Mama finally blew a fuse and took the book away. I didn't know then, though I strongly suspected it, that Piper was a crappy writer with a gift for the cliché. But hell, who gives the ass of a rat when you're swept away into a world different from and better than your own?
I feel the same way today. It's just that, at mumblety-*cough*, I know it's not good writing. But I still don't care, if the story can sweep my considerable intellectual and physical avoirdupois off my aching, elderly feet.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
ROLAND J. GREEN and JOHN F. CARR
Pequod Press
$2.99 ebook editions, available now
Rating: 3.5* of five
The Publisher Says: Great Kings' War was first published in paperback in 1985 by Ace Books. This 2nd Edition is a revised and expanded version of the long awaited sequel to H. Beam Piper's Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen, chronicling the further adventures of Calvin Morrison, Pennsylvania State Policeman—forcibly retired.
This new edition is revised and expanded (over 60,000 words) by the authors with new maps, including Hostigos Town, Hostigos and the Five Kingdoms, and a new dramatis personae.
Calvin Morrison was a pretty good cop in Pennsylvania—until he was scooped up by the cross-time flying saucer and transported to Styphon's House Subsector, a 16th Century equivalent parallel time-line. Here the Indo-Aryan invasions went east across Asia and down the Aleutian Islands into North America, where they have stagnated for thousands of years. Dropped off into the middle of a local dispute, Corporal Calvin Morrison comes face to face with warriors armed with pikes and broadswords, not petty criminals. Lord Kalvan, as the locals call him, transforms the petty Princedom of Hostigos into a fearsome warrior Kingdom by inspired leadership and advanced military knowledge.
Now, after having created and saved his new nation of Hos-Hostigos from destruction by Styphon's House, a tyrannical theocracy that holds sacred the secret formula for gunpowder, Kalvan, now Great King of Hos-Hostigos, faces his greatest challenge—keeping what he has won.
The Holy Host of Styphon and the Royal Army of Hos-Harphax, two of the greatest armies in the history of the Five Kingdoms, are on the move and Kalvan will once again have to call upon his knowledge of military history to save his family and friends. This time it's personal!
My Review: Really more of a four-star read, rounded up because I'm a sucker for military SF/fantasy that really knows what the hell it's talking about, and I will (with reservations explored below) read on; but the structural infelicities really do bother me enough that I have to take that half-star off as fair warning to others.
Sequel to Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen by H. Beam Piper, in the Paratime Universe (see the Complete Paratime series for details).
A novella-length book, the last written by its mentally ill author (who probably starved himself to death because of some absurd sense of "honor"), spawned a series of sequels exploring in detail (see the author of this work, and successive ones, at his website Hostigos) the accidental transposition of a man out of time on his own world, into a world exactly suited to his strengths. "The Road to Hostigos" section at the website explains this with admirable brevity.
This first sequel is the story of the first year after Kalvan's metamorphosis from Corporal Calvin Morrison, apostate Presbyterian clergyman and Korean War veteran, into Great King Kalvan of Hos-Hostigos. We're in the Many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Kalvan is the rare survivor of cross-time contamination and, in the view of the academics at Dhergabar University on First Level, is a Dralm-sent opportunity to test paratime theory's self-evident but ordinarily unexplorable real-world action. Will Kalvan, whose arrival from nowhere makes his ideas and knowledge and opinions reek of Divine Intervention, succeed in staving off the doom slated to fall on Hostigos for its impious defiance of the local theocrats? Will the multitudes of fates altered by this uncontaminated-by-planning accident change enough about the multiverse to rank as a Subsector? Is the Great Man Theory right after all?!
One thing Author John F. Carr gets absolutely right is that academics are bloodthirsty political infighters. This book contains a good bit of that world. It also contains passages from the points of view of people who were merely names in the original novella. It also contains points of view absolutely unique to the expanded world. It contains, in fact, a lot of words that I don't entirely agree are necessary to tell a cracking good yarn set in this multiverse. Points of view of the vile theocrats? They're reinforcing what I already knew: They're unbelieving con artist scumbags. ::shockhorror:: Points of view of minor players in the battles, I get; they can realistically and without obvious infodumping clue us in to important action. But all of this comes at the expense of a cohesive narrative for the two parties I came to this bar to talk to: Kalvan and Verkan Vall, the newly minted king and the Paratime Police leader whose interest in Kalvan's ability to beat out a trained, technologically advanced security apparatus and then set himself up as the new power in the Earth he's landed in, is what's keeping him alive.
The players are many; the action is constant; but the problems are real. Kalvan's impending fatherhood is the only thing that's prevented his Great Queen from leading an army to defend what was, until he arrived and changed everything and won her heart, her future realm. It is her difficult pregnancy (ie, because she's a Girl) that keeps her pinned down. Her own mother having died in childbirth, Kalvan suffers some sleepless nights wondering what the hell he'll do if she dies too. But folks: SHE WAS THE HEIRESS TO THE THRONE UNTIL HE GOT HER PREGNANT AND SHE "HAD TO RETIRE." She's already proven herself an able politician and a brave commander of men. And now she's going to be a wife and mama?
Well, as it happens, no. She's royalty. The child she bears has a wetnurse from the word go, and within a month, The Great Queen Rylla's on horseback and bringing her husband supplies and men at a siege (along with a mentioned-on-page entourage for childcare). Much to his Our Time Line 1960s-cop distress. But Author Carr did us a solid, and an unusual one considering this book was written in the SFnal universe of the 1980s. Kalvan *listens*to*Rylla* and acts on her advice. They have a bruising fight...they reach an understanding...and they roll over the opposition, in tandem, partners.
I was not expecting that. I'm glad I got it.
A lot more "of its time" is the dismissive homophobia and the gratuitous fatphobia. I don't like it, but it's there, and it's not foregrounded. I guess I like the candy of multiverse-battle-politickin' enough to screw up my eyes and wrinkle my nose at the frankly-coulda-been-worse social attitudes we don't hold with anymore.
This series has been chugging along now for almost sixty years. Wargamers took to it with cries of glee. (The maps...!!) The incels and Proud Boys see it as Aryan enough to make them happy, and while the evidence doesn't support a full patriarchal view of this world, when has that stopped them from ignoring what they don't care to see. It's not a series I will be warbling my fool lungs out to beg you to pick up, because most people will bog down in the battle scenes and the tactical details that make my geekly heart go pitty-pat.
But if you like 1632 and its myriad follow-ons, or Warhammer 40,000 et alii, this is another option for the moments you're feeling a bit done with what has held your attention a minute too long.
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