Category Archives: Reviews

Gunpowder God

Gunpowder GodGunpoweder God by H. Beam Piper
Series: Paratime
Published by Sphere on 1978
Genres: Type III - Soft
Pages: 189
Format: Paperback
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five-stars
Series Rating: five-stars

First Published as: "Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen" 1965

Premise - Point of Divergence (POD)

Aryan-Transpacific line (Aryans move east rather than west, eventually settling the Americas)

The Story

The Paratime Police patrolled the vast number of alternate time-dimensions, the worlds which had branched off at every crucial point in history. Their job was to keep the existence of the alternate Earths a secret. And to keep them from mixing and destroying each other.

But even the Time cops could make mistakes. They made a big one when Calvin Morrison, an apparently ordinary State Trooper from the Fourth Level, Europo-American / Hispano-Columbian subsector was accidently switched through the dimensions into the Aryan-Transpacific sector, Styphon's House subsector.

In a mere few week, Morrison was being hailed as Lord Kalvin. Even worse, he was masterminding a local war that could blow the whole Paratime secret sky-high.

The Review

OK – I have to admit that this is one of my favourite books of all-time, and I must have read it at least ten times over the past 20 years. But what else do you need in a book other than:

  • a pretty, intelligent, and unattached princess;
  • a hero whose skills are not terribly useful on his own line, but who finds himself ideally suited for the new line he gets dumped into;
  • a fight worth fighting against the House of Styphon; and
  • a well set out alternate history.

As Verkan Vall tells the Chief of the Paratime Police on his return from investigating Kalvan Morrison’s accidental transfer to the Styphon subsector timeline:

“Look what he has, on his new time-time, that is old one could never have given him. He’s a great nobleman: they’ve gone out of fashion on Europo-American, where the Common Man is the ideal. He’s going to marry a beautiful princess, and they’ve even gone out of fashion for children’s fairy-tales. He’s a sword-winging soldier of fortune, and they’ve vanished from a nuclear-weapons world. He’s commanding a good little army, and making a better one of it, the work he loves. And he has a cause worth fighting for and an enemy worth beating.”

The only problem is that the book is no longer in print!

five-stars