One of my all-time favorite sf stories, in the sub-genre in which there are a multitude of timelines and a culture or cultures with means of traveling between timelines. Lord Kalvan is actually a branch off a more extensive series of "Time Patrol" stories about the group charged with policing the inter-timeline interactions. In this story, however, the focus is not so much on the time cops themselves as on Calvin Morrison of the Pennsylvania State Police, who is accidentally picked up by a passing time cop (whom he manages to shoot before the time cop shoots him) and then is dropped off in the Aryan Transpacific Sector in which the Indo-Europeans migrated into North America (say 1500 BC?) and by this time have divided the region into a series of rather weak "great kingdoms" and subkingdoms. The one in the equivalent of his part of Pennsylvania takes him in when he join in fighting off a raid by a neighboring kingdom. It turns out that in this timeline gunpowder making was the sacred secret of the priesthood of the god Styphon, who used it to be the power behind all the thrones. His local kingdom (Hostigos) had refused to give the priesthood sulfur springs it wanted, so the priesthood of Styphon was backing the rival kingdom of Nostor annd cutting off powder to Hostigos. Calvin (or Kalvan) knows how to make (better) gunpowder, and helps Hostigos fight off Nostor; eventually as the stories go on Hostigos overruns Nostor and some of its allies and becomes a great kingdom in its own right; Kalvan marries Rylla, the beautiful, intelligent and brave daughter of the king of Hostigos (they meet cute when she shoot him by mistake in his first skirmish). Meanwhile timecops and scholars from the timetravelling culture have moved in to study the branching off the the new timeline Kalvan's intervention has started. ( )

I picked up this volume because it was mentioned in Armageddon: There Will be War volume VIII. Pournelle cited Piper as a great influence on his own work, especially his Janissaries series, and included in volume VIII was a sequel to Piper's trandimensional adventure story written by John F. Carr and Roland Green. That story was pretty good, so I picked up the original to see what it was all about.

I'm glad that I did. Piper told a great story, full of humor and action, but it is clear that he knew a great deal of history and science as well. Calvin Morrison is a Pennsylvania State Trooper who finds himself accidentally transported into an adjacent timeline by an industrial accident of a more advanced civilization, in the same place but another when. He immediately finds himself embroiled in a war between princes, and makes himself useful due to his interest in chemistry, military tactics, and industrial organization. He fights. He loves. He wins.

For a nerd like myself, this is a fun kind of counterfactual speculation: how could you shape the world differently if you knew all the secrets of modern science in a pre-modern world? There are a lot of ways to do this kind of story. Twain decided to go with a rather cynical satire. This is straight-forward adventure with a heavy dose of history and engineering. In addition to Jerry Pournelle, S. M. Stirling is a modern example of this same kind of story, which is immensely fun, and I also find very educational.

For example, I wondered once what kind of civilization you could rebuild following a technological disaster like the Carrington Event. Nearly all of our advanced technology could be destroyed by a sufficiently powerful solar storm. It turns out that Stirling's novels of the Change have asked almost exactly that question. I wish I had read Stirling sooner, I would have found some answers I was looking for.

This is hard scifi at its best. You take an insight about how the world really works, and you follow the implications in some interesting and otherworldly setting. In this case, it happens to be the Fourth Level, Aryan-Transpacific sector, Styrphon's House sub-sector. Since Piper lived and died at the height of American civilization, the gifts he brings are the first-fruits of industrialization, plus a boundless confidence in the methods of sociology and anthropology, unleavened by any fears of ecological or cultural collapse. If you want to try the latter, Stirling has explored that space pretty well.

While you can clearly see the influence of Piper on later authors, there are interesting differences as well. Religion plays a very different role on Tran than it does in the Stryphon's House sub-sector. Each author has their own take on what really makes the world work, and I've enjoyed them all so far.

I was saddened to learn that Piper took his life shortly after he wrote this book. It is a cracking good yarn, and I would have liked to enjoy more stories of Lord Kalvan. John Carr and Roland Green wrote several more books following on this one, one of which is the short story that brought me here in the first place. I'll pick up the sequels, with the expectation of a homage, true to the spirit of the original. ( )

My reaction to reading this novel in 2002.

This was a fairly engaging book.

Its battle sequences were clearer than the action sequences of some of the Paratime stories in Piper’s Paratime. I didn’t really try to keep track of the corresponding geographical locations in our world as Lord Kalvan aka Calvin Morrison of the Pennsylvania State Police builds an empire along this alternate version of the Atlantic coast of America. (Piper does, at one point, give a geographical listing which would make such a reconstruction at least partially possible though no maps are given. I kept thinking I was missing some in-jokes like some of the battle sites were fought on the site of American Civil War or Revolutionary War sites. I suspect Nostor is the same as Georgia since there is a song called “Marching Through Nostor” which sounds suspiciously like “Marching Through Georgia” from our world.)

While this is certainly far from the first work of military sf or even, probably (though I don’t know for sure), the first sf work where a man displaced from his time or dimension builds an empire with his technological and historical knowledge, I suspect it was influential on Piper’s friend Jerry Pournelle and others.

The book comes off as a more cynical version of L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall. Its protagonist prevents the decay of a society and introduces democracy and other things. Lord Kalvan builds an empire amongst medieval style states and introduces religious war, abides torture, suggests executing enemy priests at the mouths of cannons a la the British during the Sepoy Rebellion (and an awful pun is made about “cannon-ized martyrs”), institutes auto de fes and a secret police.

In Kalvan’s defense, he is taking steps to wipe out the oppressive Styphon’s House cult which has a gunpowder monopoly before he arrives and modernize his new home. I like Piper’s observations that governments’ decisions are only ratified on the battlefield, that states borrow time on credit and have to pay via war. It’s obvious Piper knew a lot about warfare, particularly the wars of Gustavus Adolphus which form so much of an inspiration. I kept thinking that many of the battles were modeled on historical ones, but am unsure (though Adolphus’ Battle of Lutzen is mentioned in connection with Kalvan’s Battle of Fyk) of which ones exactly.

Of course, there is a lot of wish fulfillment here. Kalvan gets to use his historical knowledge to build an Empire, knows the use as well as the theory of edged weapons, and marry a princess. And, of course, he learns the language implausibly fast. I found that a flaw in the novel (though a flaw of convention).

The other one was the description, by Paratime Cop Verkan Vall, of Kalvan as a genius. If he was such a genius and liked soldiering, why didn’t he stay in the U.S. Army (he’s a veteran of the Korean War) rather than become a policeman?

Piper clearly sides with the great man theory of history in this novel. ( )

To start I love this book. What I enjoy the most is the demonstration of how an individual might influence the world around him. Calvin Morrison is thrown into an alternate time-line, "Aryan Trans-Pacific", and has to deal with a seventeenth century society. So much to do, so little time!
I'm really so sorry that Piper was taken from us so quickly. Not the best decision by a mind that was otherwise so clear. Well if I ever get the Chrono-mobile up and running, this is one of the calls I plan to make!
I noted reading this 4 times, but it's like Forester's "The Gun", you can't put it down once opened! ( )

Storiella banalotta e sempliciotta sul solito tema della dislocazione temporale, un poliziotto ex-militare viene sbalzato in una sorta di mondo medioevaleggiante e qui, grazie alle sue conoscenze, diverrà un signorotto potente. Ma le implicazioni sono molteplici e subdole.
Leggibile e tutto sommato carino ma veramente niente di che. ( )