H. Beam Piper (1904–1964)

Adventures in an advanced civilization that travels to and exploits alternate time lines
This volume combines several paratime police stories starring Verkan Vall and Tortha Korf with "Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen", the latter being a novel length story of 16th century warfare set in the paratime universe. I first read "Lord Kalvan" years ago, probably in high school, when I was interested in adventure and war stories, and re-read parts of it after I bought this volume two weeks ago. This is typical 1950's science fiction, with unconflicted male heroes, smoking pipes, drinking cocktails, and drawing their guns to shoot clearly evil gangsters. The plots are resolved usually in a rapid few pages when the good guys suddenly reveal how they outsmarted the bad guys, and shoot them dead. Paratime is explained usually in a few pages of dense expository writing disguised as a conversation, and I never quite understood the structure of levels, sectors, and other divisions in the timelines, and could not visualize the police headquarters and props. I enjoyed the break from serious literature.… (lisätietoja)

Interesting socio-political though experiment more than it is a novel. Looking at in broad strokes, with some occasional microscoping in at key events, two species first evolving then slowly developing culture and technology on sister worlds. The two are vaguely stand-ins for the US/USSR, though there are some pretty serious deviations from both, and it eventually leads to post-ww2 era nuclear stand-off and nuclear annihilation (other than some survivors off planet).
If you're looking for a good narrative driven scifi novel, you might want to skip this as there are barely characters let alone a 'story' in the traditional sense, but it *is* a good read as long as you know what you're getting in to.
Its got a lot of what you'd expect from a 50s/Heinlein era sf writer in terms of glorification of a really strange (definitely not modern) sort of libertarian-ism that still sees value in community and community building. As well as a lot of fear of certainly not real form of communism that inevitably leads to totalitarianism. But they're both such caricatures here in service to the overall fable it feels a lot less out of place.
Also, as others have noted, it was unfinished manuscript of notes after Piper's suicide, finished by Kurland with rather limited changes.… (lisätietoja)