Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen - H. Beam Piper

   1965; 215 pages.  Book 1 (out of 8) in the “Lord Kalvan” series.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Classic Sci-Fi; Multiverses.  Overall Rating : 7*/10.

 

    It had to be some sort of time-machine.  One minute Corporal Calvin Morrison of the Pennsylvania State Police was leading a raid on a farmhouse where an escaped murderer was holed up, the next minute some dude in a flying saucer popped up and zapped Calvin into some other time and place.

 

    Check that.  Some other time, obviously, but not some other place.  Calvin grew up in this area.  Things like trees and houses are different in the world he's been transported to, but the basic terrain – the mountains, cliffs, rivers, etc. – are still where they always were.

 

    So that flying saucer thingy must’ve been a time-machine.  The farmhouse he was sneaking up on has now disappeared, and Calvin finds himself alone, out in the sticks.  The first thing he needs to do is find some civilization – assuming it exists – and see what year it is.  Right now, he can’t tell whether he got zapped into the future or into the past.  Until he figures that out, he’ll call this place—

 

    Otherwhen.

 

What’s To Like...

    Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen was published in 1965, and was intended to be the start of a series featuring the then-newly hypothesized concept of multiverses.  The countless array of parallel worlds are monitored by the dimension-hopping Paratime Police, and they occasionally screw up.  Alas, the book was published posthumously, H. Beam Piper having taken his life a year earlier. The remaining seven more books in the series were written by John F. Carr, sometimes by himself, sometimes with a co-author.

 

    We follow Calvin, later dubbed Kalvan, as he acclimates to the world he’s just been dropped in.  He surmises correctly that he has little prospect of returning to his home world.  I liked that Calvin’s first order of business is to learn the local language.  No magic translating gizmos here.

 

    Otherwhen has attained a sword-and-musketry level of technology, where the key compound needed to fire projectiles, gunpowder, is in extreme demand.  The process to make the gunpowder is a carefully-guarded secret,  developed by a sinister quasi-religious group called Styphon’s House.  Luckily, Calvin apparently has a chemistry background and knows all about the three main ingredients needed to make gunpowder – sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter.  More luckily, Calvin knows a more powerful ratio of mixing those three components, much to the distress of Styphon’s House.

 

    The book felt well-researched to me for a 1960’s sci-fi novel.  Calvin may be in an alternate time-line, but the technology to make a metal ball explode out of the end of a musket is the same.  I also enjoyed the Eastern Pennsylvania setting: it’s H. Beam Piper’s home turf, and just north of where I grew up.

 

    The world-building shows its age in places.  Most notably, there’s a lot of smoking going on, without any social stigma.  Heroes do it, so do baddies.  Men do it, so do women.  Drinking is equally acceptable, and I was amused that the Paratime Police had developed a handy medication for dealing with hangovers for when they’re fraternizing with the natives on a parallel world.  It’s called the “First Level Alcodote-Vitamin Pills”.  The brief mention of the Pennsylvania Dutch and one of their signature dishes called “scrapple” resonated with me as well.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Antiphonally (adv.) : sung or played by two groups in turn.

Others: Nitriary (n.); Fluviatile (adj.); Auto-da-fé (n.).

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.7/5 based on 276 ratings and 94 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.20/5 based on 1,380 ratings and 58 reviews

 

Excerpts...

    The masters complained that the journeymen and apprentices were becoming intractable, meaning that they’d started thinking for themselves.  The peasants objected to having their byres invaded and their dunghills forked down, and to being put to unfamiliar work.  The landlords objected to having their peasants taken out of the fields, predicting that the year’s crop would be lost.

    “Don’t worry about that,” he told them.  “If we win, we’ll eat Gormoth’s crops.  If we lose, we’ll all be too dead to eat.”  (pg. 47)

 

    “Kalvan, this is General Klestreus, late of Prince Gormoth’s service, now of ours.”

    “And most happy at the change, Lord Kalvan,” the mercenary said.  “An honor to have been conquered by such a soldier.”

    “Our honor, General.  You fought most brilliantly and valiantly.”  He’d fought like a damned imbecile, and gotten his army chopped to hamburger, but let’s be polite.  (pg. 137)

 

 

“The gods would do what they wanted to without impertinent human suggestions.”  (pg. 173)

    The quibbles are minor and mostly inherent with any science-fiction work written in the 1940s-60s.

 

    There’s not a lot of cussing in Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen, just nine instances in the first 50%.  When H. Beam Piper wants to simulate cussing, he often makes phrases up, usually based on the names of the local deities.  Some examples here are: “Dralm-dammit”, “Great Galzar!”, and “Galzar only knows!”  I love it when authors do this.

 

    The ending is okay, but way too convenient to be believable.  Everything goes just too perfectly for Kalvan and company.  But keep in mind that the target audience for sci-fi books in 1964 was teenage boys, who didn’t mind an ending lacking twists, as long as the white-hats triumphed.

 

    Lastly, it should be noted that there is lots of verbiage devoted to lots of battles. Even YA readers will most likely get tired of all the minutiae H. Beam Piper imparts to the fighting scenes.  Several other reviewers at Goodreads felt the same way.

 

    None of that kept me from enjoying Lard Kalvan of Otherwhen.  Writing a sci-fi tale set in multiverses surely was a groundbreaking task back then, and in that regard H. Beam Piper does an admirable job.  It may not be on  par with Star Wars or even the author’s Little Fuzzy novels, but it’s a better-than-average effort from the heyday of science-fiction.

 

    7 Stars.  Some plot threads remain unresolved at the end.  Calvin may be “Lord Kalvan”, but uneasy rests the head that wears the crown.  Styphon’s House has had its proverbial nose bloodied, but they are still very much a threat.  And the Paratime Police are certainly capable of tinkering with the time-line some more.  None of that is a criticism, though.  That’s why the rest of the series exists.

Paratime - H. Beam Piper

    1981; 295 pages.  New Author? : No.  Genre : Classic Science Fiction; Anthology.  Overall Rating : 5½*/10.

    Ah, multiverses!  They're such a wonderful new device for writers of science fiction, particularly those who want to explore what alternate timelines would entail.  And modern-day Quantum Physics predicts such a thing, although, since we can theoretically never detect them, much less travel to them, their existence or non-existence is rather moot.

    And since they’re such a hot new sci-fi topic, the question arises: who was the first author to incorporate them into a science fiction novel, and how long ago did it happen?

    Well, Wikipedia indicates the concept was first proposed by Erwin Schrodinger, he of the cat fame, in 1952 during a lecture in Dublin.  And who are we to argue with Wikipedia?

    So it is curious that, as far back as 1948, H. Beam Piper was writing short stories and novellas featuring multiverses galore wherein a few of them (well, only one of them, to be exact) had succeeded in finding the trick jumping from one dimension to another.

    H. Beam Piper had his own word for this phenomenon; he called it Paratime.  And just like the Prime Directive in the Star Trek series, rule Number One is: Don’t ever EVER let the less-technological universes (which is all the other dimensions) know that such a thing as Paratime exists.  Cuz if you do, the Paratime Police will be called in, and you don’t want to mess with them.

What’s To Like...

    The book is actually an anthology of five short stories, ranging from 25 to 112 pages, that H. Beam Piper wrote in the 1948-1955 years, all set in his Paratime multiverse.  This is “pure” dimension hopping; there’s no time-travel or geography-jumping.  You can land in another timeline, but you’ll still be at the same spot on Earth, and at the same time it is now.

    H. Beam Piper divides the infinite alternate universes into five “levels”.  Level One is where the Paratimers originate from, and our dimension is a Level Four universe.  Which means we’re one step up from the bottom rung of the civilization ladder.

    Briefly, the five stories are:

    “He Walked Around The Horses”.  (1948).  Epistolary in style, and based on the historical Benjamin Bathurst incident.  See below.

    “Police Operation”.  (1948).  Introduces two recurring characters - Tortha Karf and Verkan Vall.  Also includes a Venusian nighthound, which you can see on the book cover above.

    “Last Enemy”.  (1950).   An interesting look at reincarnation, and introduces the other main recurring character, Hadron Dalla.

    “Time Crime".  (1955).  The longest story in the book, it focuses on slave trading and has the most detailed look at the Paratime’s First Level world.

    “Temple Trouble”.  (1951).  The Paratime folks exploit Uranium deposits on a different universe using the cover of a religious sect.

    My favorite story was “Time Crime”, which is also the longest one.  There is a general introduction to the book at the very beginning, which I found to be quite skippable.  But the shorter introductions at the beginning of each story were fascinating.  The details in the stories reveal their age.  Cigarette-smoking is a common habit, “futuristic” videos still need a projector and a screen, and the slave-trading in alternate dimensions only involve white overseers and black slaves.  Just once I’d like to see that color combination reversed.

    Despite the slavery, the stories are essentially G-rated, with the lone other exception being the use of the word “phallic”.  It helps to remember that the target audience for 1950’s science fiction was almost exclusively juvenile-YA boys.  The stories are all standalones, and apparently all appeared in various sci-fi journals way back when.

Kewlest New Word...

Antiphonally (adv.) : in a musical manner which consists of two semi-independent choirs in interaction, often singing alternate musical phrases.

Excerpts...

    In November 1809, an Englishman named Benjamin Bathurst vanished, inexplicably and utterly.

    He was en route to Hamburg from Vienna, where he had been serving as his government’s envoy to the court of what Napoleon had left of the Austrian Empire.  At an inn in Perleburg, in Prussia, while examining a change of horses for his coach, he casually stepped out of sight of his secretary and his valet.  He was not seen to leave the inn yard.  He was not seen again, ever.

    At least, not in this continuum...  (pg. 14, and based on a historical occurrence.  Wiki him.)

    “At least, you’ll be getting away from police work.  I don’t suppose they have anything like police on the Dwarma Sector?”

    “Oh, no; they don’t even have any such concept,” Bronnath Zara said.  “When somebody does something wrong, his neighbors all come and talk to him about it till he gets ashamed, then they all forgive him and have a feast.  They’re lovely people, so kind and gentle.  But you’ll get awfully tired of them in about a month.  They have absolutely no respect for anybody’s privacy.  In fact, it seems slightly indecent to them for anybody to want privacy.”  (pg. 156)

“What sharp, furry ears you have, Mr. Elbraz!”  (pg. 245)

    There are a couple quibbles.  First, there are a slew of annoying typos – heresies/hersies; They/Then; into/inot; chained/cahined; and so on.  But this is the publisher’s fault (Ace Science Fiction), not H. Beam Piper’s.  I haven’t seen such atrocious editing since the last “Tor” book I read.  Maybe Ace Sci-Fi was an earlier incarnation of Tor.

    Second, Piper seems to like to inject his personal viewpoints on various topics into the stories, and it is, quite frankly, clunky.  He was apparently anti-socialism, anti-ACLU, and anti-pot-smoking.  None of which fit very well in science fiction tales.

    Finally, the storylines themselves are neither complex nor twisty, and to be honest, they didn’t hold my interest much at all.

    But it should be remembered that these stories were written in a different era.  The late 40’s and early 50’s were at the height of the Cold War and McCarthyism, and we wouldn’t want little Timmy exposed to anything leftist whilst he’s reading a sci-fi story.

    5½ Stars.  Science-Fiction has come a long way since its heyday in the 40’s and 50’s.  Some stories from way back then have worn relatively well over the years, such as those by H.G. Wells and Andre Norton.  Alas, these H. Beam Piper ones have not.  But this is not his best stuff; for that it's best to stick with his Little Fuzzy novels, reviewed here and here.

First Cycle - H. Beam Piper and Michael Kurland

1982 (and 1964); 201 pages.  Genre : 50's Science Fiction.  New Author : Yes, and No.  Overall Rating : 7*/10.

    Hetaira and Thalassa are twin planets in a foreign - yet strangely familiar - solar system.  First Cycle is their history, from Day 1 (literally) until the present.  And the present is just a cosmic eyeblink since they discovered sentient life on each other.

What's To Like...
    Hetaira and Thalassa may be twins, but they're not identical twins.  One of them (Thalassa) got the lion's share of the available water when they formed, and this influenced both planets' evolutionary patterns.

    There are other differences as well.  One uses gods and magic to guide them; the other relies on reasoning.  One has a centralized government; the other is just a bunch of decentralized clans.  And the beings on one have five fingers (just like us); while the natives on the other planet have six (a kewl extra opposable thumb).

    What is impressive is the even treatment of these differences.  As communication between the races improves, mutual incomprehension increases.  In the end, their actions - whether imparted by deities or derived from logic - are remarkably similar.

    Despite being only 200 pages long, this is an epic tale.  We start with the planets' formation, and their long paths of evolution are recounted.  Interesting, but it comes at a cost of a slow start and most characters appearing only briefly before blinking out.

Kewlest New Word...
    There were none that floated my boat.

Excerpts...
    They had no gods, and the very concept of a supreme being was incomprehensible to them.  They asked questions, and they accepted nothing on faith.  They asked:  What is it?  What holds it up?  How far away is it?  What is it really like?  They of Hetaira had escaped the two blind alleys of religion and magic; they had already learned that things of nature had natural causes, and that if one were smart enough to ask the proper questions, nature would not withhold its secrets.  (pg. 29)

    "But their attitude, and their behavior; I don't know how long I can stand it.  They have no sense of shame or morality.  They degrade women by letting them do men's work."
    "They do seem to have complete equality of the sexes," Skrov-Rogov said.
    "Disgusting!" the priest said."And have you seen how they behave toward each other?  Running around naked; both sexes bathing together.  And they certainly like to bathe - they're the cleanest beasts I ever saw."  (pg. 170)

"They riot for bread - and they begin by destroying the bakeries!"  (pg. 111)
    There are joint authors.  First Cycle was published in 1982.  H. Beam Piper is listed as the author, but he died in 1964.  Michael Kurland "expanded and editied" it from an outline found in Piper's papers after the latter's death.  It is a nice balance between Science and Fiction.  It is also very ambitious and complex, so if you view it as 50's Sci-Fi, it is decades ahead of its time.

    First Cycle has a more serious than Piper's "Little Fuzzy" series.  It has a lot to say about religion, government, science, philosophy, etc.  It even takes a prehumous (as opposed to "posthumous") poke at the efforts of the SETI folks.

    Life evolves, and so does Literature.  There are science fiction books today that are more "epic" than this, but none do it in only 200 pages.  First Cycle is one of the few books that can be called a "Short-Winded Saga".  7 Stars.

Fuzzy Sapiens - H. Beam Piper

1964; 235 pages.  Genre : Classic Science Fiction.  New Author? : No.  Overall Rating : 7*/10.
.
Fuzzy Sapiens is the sequel to Little Fuzzy (which is reviewed here).  The Fuzzies have been declared sentient, which means you can't kill them, skin them, and/or eat them.  They now have certain rights to their planet, even if all they want to do is snuggle up to the humans and eat their Extee-3 rations.
.
But a planetary governemnt has to be established, the Fuzzies need to be protected, and a stable economic system needs to be implemented.  Who knew that these mundane issues would turn out to be so complex?
.
What's To Like...
This is "hard" science fiction (meaning 'realistic') from before there was such a sub-genre.  What little thrills-&-spills action there is comes late in the book, and half of it is off-stage.
.
Instead you get to help solve a number of real-world issues.  The Fuzzies' Infant Mortality Rate is excessive to where they will be extinxt in a couple generations.  They only eat land prawns and Extee-3 and the planetary supplies of those is such that they'll starve to death before they become extinct.
.
The Fuzzies are amenable to be "adopted" by humans, but the demand outstrips the supply.  Will a black market spring up?  Their homeland is ripe for mineral exploitation, and sentient or not, humans are coming by the thousands to colonize the planet.
.
For a change, chemists - and even large corporations - are given a fair shake.  Some of the Bad Guys from Little Fuzzy become Good Guys,  and some of the Good Guys from Little Fuzzy develop character faults.
.
Kewlest New Word(s)...
I'm tempted to go with Nifflheim, which Piper uses as a euphemism for 'Hell', except that towards the end he just up and uses the h-word anyway.  So instead, we'll go with : Mumchance (adj.) : mute, not speaking.
.
Excerpts...
And this red upholstered swivel chair; he hated that worst of all.  Forty years ago, he'd left Terra to get the seat of his pants off the seat of a chair like that, and here he was in the evening of life - well, late afternoon, call it around second cocktail time - trapped in one.  (pg. 8)
.
Titanium, he thought disgustedly.  It would be something like that.  What is it they called the stuff?  Oh, yes; the nymphomaniac metal; when it gets hot it combines with anything.  (pg. 153)
.
    "Miss Tresca, can't you keep your bench in better order than this?" he scolded.  "Keep things in their places.  What are you working on?"
    "Oh, a hunch I had about this hokfusine."
    Hunch!  That was the trouble, all through Science Center; too many hunches and not enough sound theory.  (pg. 158)
.
"Last war's enemies; next war's allies."  (pg. 127)
To a certain degree, H. Beam Piper ignores the greater issues of humans colonizing an already-inhabited planet.  The Fuzzies are migrating, and in droves, but nobody bothers to ask why.  The full impact of overwhelming hordes of humans descending on the Fuzzies habitat is not assessed.  Nobody asks what the Fuzzies ate before they got hooked on Terran Extee-3.
.
But I think this misses the point of Fuzzy Sapiens.  There may be some significant issues to be faced, but the target audience is still Young Readers.  To fully address "the big picture" would mean perhaps a 1000-page opus.  Instead, Piper presents only a slice of it, and takes less than 250 pages to do so.  He thereby subtly entices Young Readers to consider becoming chemists, and to explore what we call the Scientific Method.  I think that's kinda kewl.  7 Stars.

Little Fuzzy - H. Beam Piper

1962; 174 pages. Genre : 50's Sci-Fi. Laurels : nominated for the Hugo Award in 1963. New Author? : Yes. Overall Rating : 7½*/10.

.

Q. : If you landed on another planet, and encountered something that, say, looked like a Wookie or an Ewok, how would you know whether to make friends with it or shoot it for its meat and fur? A. : By determining whether it's a sapient being.

.

Fair enough. But how would you define "sapient"? Well, the Zarathustra Company uses the guideline of whether it can talk and build a fire. And they have a charter to develop and exploit the natural resources on one particular planet, provided it has no sapient beings. That's an important clause, because if sentient creatures are found, they are the rightful owners of the planet, and Zarathustra Company's charter instantly becomes null and void. And wouldn't you know it, Jack Holloway has just crossed paths with a family of Hoka-looking "Fuzzies".

.

What's To Like...

Little Fuzzy is a short, cute, easy-to-read, Sci-Fi story from the early 60's. Its target audience is young boys, yet it addresses some serious issues. Is it okay to do environmental damage to an ecosystem, as long as the creatures in it are non-sapient? How is sapience determined, and who makes that decision? What if a species is "almost" sapient? Are there any consequences if you kill a native creature prior to its sapience being determined? If something is good for the company that employs you, but unethical, can you still do it?

.

For adults, the storyline might be a bit unbelievable and simplistic. Faced with a suit-&-countersuit, a judge decides to simply hold both trials simultaneously. And there's no need to determine whether a witness is telling the truth, we have a handy-dandy, infallible, lie-detector-type thingy called a Veridicator. How convenient.

.

All characters are either black or white, and the story shows its age by the fact that drinking and smoking cigarettes are portrayed as normal daily activities for all adults, good or bad. Not the sort of thing you want influencing a kid reading this.

.

Kewlest Word...

Colloquy : a formal conversation or conference.

.

Excerpts...

"They don't talk, and they don't build fires," Ahmed Khadra said, as though that settled it.

"Ahmed, you knw better than that. That talk-and-build-a-fire rule isn't any scientific test at all."

"It's a legal test," Lunt supported his subordinate.

"It's a rule-of-thumb that was set up so that settlers on new planets couldn't get away with murdering and enslaving the natives by claiming they thought they were only hunting and domesticating wild animals," he said. "Anything that talks and builds a fire is a sapient being, yes. That's the law. But that doesn't mean that anything that doesn't isn't." (pg. 36)

.

"They will have a nice, neat, pedantic definition of sapience, tailored especially to exclude the Fuzzies, and they will present it in court and try to get it accepted, and it's up to us to guess in advance what that will be, and have a refutation of it ready, and also a definition of our own."

"Their definition will have to include Khooghras. Gerd, do the Khooghras bury their dead?"

"Hell, no; they eat them. But you have to give them this, they cook them first." (pgs. 97-98)

.

If you don't like the facts, you ignore them, and if you need facts, dream up some you do like. (pg. 15)

Little Fuzzy's straightforward plotline won't challenge an adult reader, but that wasn't the target audience. OTOH, at the end of the book, H. Beam Piper launches into a 5-page diatribe giving his own definition of sapience (it was a subject near and dear to his heart), which will probably be over the heads of young readers.

.

So what? This was a delightful, light story that will nevertheless leave readers of all ages pondering issues such as corporate greed, destructive environmental practices (even when they're NIMBY), animal rights (sapient and otherwise), gun rights, and capital punishment.

.

Little Fuzzy is one of those rare books that I thought should have been twice as long as it is. 7½ Stars.