Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen

I like Piper's stories of the Paratime Police, and this is the last of them; although here the Paratime Police are used mainly to frame and comment on the main story, which is the story of a displaced person.

Calvin Morrison is a man from our world, or one like it, who is accidentally transported (by the Paratime Police) to another version of Earth with an alternative history: one in which North America was settled by Aryans crossing over from Siberia long ago. Morrison arrives in the alternative version of Pennsylvania to find himself among a people calling themselves Zarthani, speaking a language he doesn't recognize and worshipping pagan gods; they have a mediæval level of society and technology.

He's an ex-soldier and a student of military history, and his experience and knowledge turn out to be particularly useful in his new home, where he becomes known as Lord Kalvan. He quickly learns the language, becomes a military leader, wins a couple of short wars, and marries a princess.

Kalvan's story could be regarded as a wish-fulfillment fantasy for armchair generals. However, I've read accounts of real wars, and I think Piper did a good job on the military aspects of this story, which have an air of authenticity—at least for me. I have no personal experience of war; and I suppose no-one these days has any experience of the sort of horse-and-musket war described here.

Kalvan encounters some difficulties and minor setbacks, but overall he succeeds in everything he does, so this is a cheerful and upbeat book.

That being the case, it seems odd that the book was published posthumously: Piper killed himself at the age of 60, apparently because he had financial problems and wrongly thought that his career had stalled. I see no trace of suicidal intent in this book, so I guess it was something he decided on and acted on relatively quickly, rather than something that had been on his mind for a while.

Piper was an old-school writer of science fiction. His writing style and characterization are plain and unsophisticated, and the behaviour of his characters is dated. The Paratime Police, Kalvan, and the Zarthani all smoke tobacco, as almost everyone did in the mid-20th century.

It's hard to explain why I've reread this book so often; I don't entirely understand it myself. I suppose I'm a bit of an armchair general (I've been a wargamer in the past), I like alternative-history stories, and I like stories that are cheerful and upbeat.

However, there is one sentence that makes me boggle. When Morrison arrives in his new world, but before he meets the Zarthani, he thinks that he may have travelled into the past, and he wonders to himself whether he'll have the opportunity to take part in the Civil War. “That would be more fun than Korea had been.”

Surely you'd have to be insane to describe as ‘fun' the idea of fighting in the American Civil War; although I've come to the conclusion that all human beings are insane in some way or other.