Tales of Paratime

Paratime Police

by H. Beam Piper

H. Beam Piper's first stories set in the parallel worlds of Paratime, including the stories that introduce the Paratime Police and Verkan Vall. This collection includes:

GENESIS: The fascinating origins of the advanced technology that allows future Earth inhabitants to journey between parallel universes. This story from H. Beam Piper's popular Paratime series tells of the Martian colonists who settled on Earth hundreds of thousands of years ago. Originally appeared in Future Science Fiction, September 1951.

HE WALKED AROUND THE HORSES: Set in 1809, based on the actual disappearance of English diplomat Benjamin Bathurst in Perleburg, Prussia, during the era of the Napoleonic Wars; he walked around some horses in the courtyard of an inn and was never seen again. Piper describes the event through letters and official documents, and unlike most such tales, he breathes such life into the documents to make it all feel contemporary, clear, and vivid. "He Walked Around the Horses" does not mention Paratime, but the Fortean concept clearly was percolating in Piper's mind. The paratemporal process behind the Bathurst disappearance is discussed in other stories, one of which alludes to Bathurst's own situation. This is a little classic. Originallly appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, April 1948.

POLICE OPERATION: This novelette introduces Verkan Vall of the Paratime Police. The story is set in a world-line that may well be ours. A team of a State Policeman and a game-warden are tracking a very dangerous beast that got away from a paratimer, a Venusian nighthound. Edd Cartier's illustration of the fearsome nighthound from Astounding make a great addition to "Police Operation". In this adventure we're given the basic explanation of Paratime and how it works. Originallly appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, July 1948.

LAST ENEMY: This novella is a fast-paced science-fiction adventure that combines the reality of reincarnation in an advanced civilization; a professional society of assassins; rival political parties based on different theories of reincarnation; an impressive gun-battle inside a country mansion; and the very competent Verkan Vall of the Paratime Police and his sometime wife, the smart, lovely and rather explosive Hadron Dalla. Originally appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, August 1950.

TIME CRIME: Again, this novella is a police procedural, but this one has much rich detail about the Paratime-travelling "First Level" civilization and its Paratime Police, and why they're necessary. A very solid story about slavery and different levels of civilization, and anti-slavery. Piper develops some of the scarier ramifications of his concept. In "Time Crime" we see more of the ethical side of Piper's hero Verkan Vall, of his lady Hadron Dalla, and the Paratime Police. Originally appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, February 1955.

TEMPLE TROUBLE: Crooked Paratimers masquerade as religious leaders in a vulnerable timeline. Piper's dislike of superstition and false idols comes across strongly. Originally appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, April 1951.

This edition includes a linked "Table of Contents" and the original illustrations from the stories' magazine publications.

Genres: Science Fiction, Alternate History, Fiction, Time Travel, Short Stories, Collections, Anthologies

280 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

Henry Beam Piper was an American science fiction author. He wrote many short stories and several novels. He is best known for his extensive Terro-Human Future History series of stories and a shorter series of "Paratime" alternate history tales.

Reviews

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

This volume collects four of Piper's Paratime stories (the ones not previously collected in Lord Kalvan), as well as He Walked Around the Horses, which was thematically similar. The three novelettes and two novellas were all originally published in the late 1940s and early '50s in Astounding Science Fiction magazine, edited by John W. Campbell. They are police stories, involving time travel and interdimensional travel, and are very cleverly constructed adventure puzzles for the most part. Of course, they are also very much the product of their time, so some of the technology and social conventions are on the creaky side, but I believe they're still fun and thought-provoking. Ace purchased the rights to all of Piper's (who killed himself in 1964) science fiction work around 1980 and published the volumes with lovely Michael Whelan covers and interesting and insightful introductions by John F. Carr.

[Wanda Pedersen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Piper's work is surely dated--everybody smokes without any twinge of guilt, women are very rare in meaningful roles, and colonialism is rampant in many (if not all) alternative time lines. That said, Piper has created some very vivid and well thought out alternative histories. I enjoyed the fact that our time-line was not the one which figured out Paratime, but one of the less-advanced civilizations that the Paratime Police are protecting.

The technology employed in the stories is also showing its age, but for its time I'm sure it was very impressive. Piper was a smart guy with a good grasp of the nature of history. I wish he had stuck around to write a few more good yarns before giving up on this time line. His suicide was a tragic waste. (I hope that he had better luck in some other sector and continued to produce interesting science fiction there).

[Charlie · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting set of long and short short stories about a multidimensional universe in which people in just one strand have developed the technology to traverse dimensions. Since some dimensions have developed faster than others, dimension travel essentially equates to time travel in many instances too. The paratime police are there to make sure that no one from the level capable of interdimensional travel (level 1) gives the secret away to anyone else. This is not as easy as it sounds as the level 1 peoples rely on production from other levels for their economy having wrecked their planet achieving the technology to paratime travel.

I found the naming of characters in this book rather irritating as they sound like random sounds plonked together rather than something people might actually use, but apart from that it was a very readable and enjoyable book. I particularly liked the fact that the single law "don't give away our sectret" led to all sorts of moral and ethical choices such as 'don't move slaves between dimensions' and 'don't crush other world's economies'.

[Derek · Rating 3 out of 5]

You can divide the stories in about half, starting with "He Walked Around the Horses", "Police Operation", and "Last Enemy". These are interested in exploring the concept of paratime itself, and how the Paratime Police have to protect a timeline or the Home Time Line.

The second set, "Time Crime" and "Temple Trouble", are more about the Home Time Line itself, which starts to reveal elements of imperialism and 1950's male chauvinism. And this is where the wheels start to come off.

Clearly Piper has things to say about imperialism and is showing the cracks in the enlightenment of a civilization whose method of operation is parasitical. The scope he proposes doesn't hold true and is limited by the writer's 1950's mindset, which is focused on servitude (in the form of Proles, stone-age cultures recruited by the Home Time Line as servitors and laborers in some form of indentured servitude) and material wealth (agriculture, natural resources, and manufactured goods imported from other timelines). But there's no reason to import agricultural products or natural resources from inhabited timelines if you have an infinitude of uninhabited ones to despoil or cultivate. And there's serious risk in walking away with manufactured goods in worthwhile quantities if the manufacturing civilization might eventually notice their absence ("Hey, where did those 10,000 tractors disappear to?").

I think Piper had a better direction with "Police Operation" and "Last Enemy": the true use of paratime travel boils down to tourism, or culling technology and ideas from advanced cultures (why buy the tractor when you can walk off with the blueprint?), or acting in self defense: destroying or absorbing timelines on the verge of paratime travel.

And, ultimately, the infinite story settings of Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen and the like.

[Charles · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked this up mainly because I wanted shortstory audiobooks. I'd heard of the author, but never read him.

Seems like pretty standard old school SF. Stereotypical weak female characters, a main character who always seems to be the smartest guy in the room.

Plot was not that interesting.

I think the main point of the stories was the presentation of the world/SF idea.

[Kristoffer · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book had some pretty good stories, but some others weren't all that great. I will just review each story.

He Walked Around the Horses was an interesting story that dealt with the world suddenly being not as the person knew it. The story was not very long or detailed and didn't really give an explanation of what was going on. It also didn't talk about Paratime. I think it would deserve maybe 2.5 stars.

Police Operation was a story that did deal with Paratime, but it wasn't very long or interesting. It dealt with a mysterious animal killing things in a rural American town and a person with a unique gun who was hunting it down. The story deserves maybe 2 stars.

Last Enemy was a really interesting story about a world where everyone believes in reincarnation and assassinations were common. A person from the Paratime timeline came to research reincarnation and caused problems with findings they published about how the reincarnation process works. This story deserves 4 stars.

Temple Trouble was a mildly interesting story about the Paratime people interfering with some religions on a world where people tended to go from god to god based on how the god was affecting them. The story deserves maybe 3 stars.

Genesis was a story about people crashing on a planet and trying to survive. I think it may have been about the origins of the people who various timelines started to be created from because a previous story mentioned that people came from another planet and timelines were based in levels related to what knowledge carried on or whether humans even survived. The concept portrayed in the other story was interesting, but this story didn't have very likable characters and was kind of boring. It deserves maybe 2 stars.

Time Crime was about a conspiracy going on from within the Paratime timeline and affecting other timelines. It was really interesting and would have gotten 5 stars, but I felt like it didn't have much of a conclusion and so deserves just 4 stars.

Overall, this book should get maybe 3 stars I think. I felt the read was worth it but wish some of the stories had been better. Also, I went into this book thinking it dealt with time travel but quickly realized it dealt more with parallel timelines and worlds that stopped developing at certain points in time. If you are into books about parallel worlds, you may enjoy this book. If you are into time travel and want that from a book, I would not suggest this. Still, this book was enjoyable and may be worth a read if you so choose.

[Dale Lehman · Rating 3 out of 5]

First, I'm embarrassed to say that it took so long for me to read any H. Beam Piper. In a long-ago era (probably somewhere in the early to mid 1980's) an editor to whom I'd sent a short story told me I needed to study Piper on "parallel world themes." And I didn't. But now I've read at least this collection of Piper's "Paratime" stories.

I wanted to like them more than I actually did. Not that they are bad, but they are from a different era of science fiction. Piper tragically committed suicide when I was just a young lad of about 5. My father might have known of him, although I don't recall any Piper books in Dad's collection. The idea behind them is certainly clever: history advances along a huge number of alternate timelines. On one of them, the secret to traversing timelines has been discovered, and this advanced civilization is judiciously exploiting other timelines for trade and resources. Of course, they can't let lesser civilizations know this secret, and thus the Paratime Police are on patrol to stop anyone attempting to violate the rules.

One could have endless fun with this kind of world, and Piper probably did, but it's quite complex. There are apparently no timelines on which people have names anything like our own, and naming conventions vary from one timeline to the next. The result is a wash of weird monikers, some difficult to pronounce, that become a froth of confusion for those like me who can't even remember that their new colleague's name is John Smith. The primary character uniting these stories is a Paratime Police official named Verkan Vall, Mavrad of Nerros (whatever that's supposed to mean). At least he's around a lot, so I got his name down.

But that's a minor issue. More distracting were the frequent and sometimes fairly massive info dumps filled with techno-babble, paratime history, and detailed plans for how dicey situations will be handled. This may have been par for the course at that time in science fiction history, so I'm not sure I should fault Piper for it. Granted, readers need a certain amount of information to feel grounded in an alien world. But for me, it was overkill.

Stripped of that, the stories themselves were good ones. I just found them a tough slog because of these issues. Your mileage may vary, I suppose.

[Leigh · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’d be very interested to hear what someone who knows a lot more about history and politics (particularly World War II and the period immediately after) than me thinks of these stories.

Piper had some cool ideas but I feel like there are so many more interesting applications than what he decided to go with. I loved the perpendicular time travel. I loved the possible societal ramifications of volitional reincarnation. But in all Paratime’s possible timelines, Piper doesn’t create a single one without misogyny. I can only assume this is due to either a sad lack of imagination or some serious devotion to the patriarchy. I know he was writing during the 50s. I don’t care. Maybe I’d be more lenient if the whole set of stories didn’t deal with the various ways society could have evolved.

And don’t even get me started on the slavery stuff. There’s a ton to unpack with this book and I have neither the time or energy to take a scalpel to it. I think this would be a great book to dissect in a class.

[Cybercrone · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting stories, and fun to see how different imagined technology is from the real thing 60 years later.
Of course women's roles were different - I especially liked the policegirls that worked with the policemen - and the attitude was much like the old detective noir stories - though he does give the 'girls' the honour of having good ideas occasionally and even, in one story, mixing into the physical action by hitting a bad guy with her purse!
And everybody smoked, all the time.
I would have loved to see what he would have done as the years went on and the imagined possibilities blossomed.
It's just such a shame that so many of our brightest and best are cut down by the demon depression.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really cannot Review Anything by H.Beam. Piper because I love everything he wrote as much as RAH I mean take the story about Freya I love the Terran Federation Story the Lord Kalvan story and I think there was a third Published in ANALOG magazine he is excellent in everything he writes in my opinion and I wish he had not killed Himself and had written more because Cosmic Computer, Space Viking and all the Terran Federation stories are so great I wish he had lived to continue Space Viking and also the Terran Empire stories even books like 4 day Planet and Uller Uprising are Masterpieces!!!!!!!!!!
And the Fuzzy Trilogy is a Classic but I reread them all every 5 years or so but there are parts of Little Fuzzy that still make me cry!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Tom Britz · Rating 4 out of 5]

H. Beam Piper was a fine writer. I loved his Little Fuzzy. Paratime is a collection of stories dealing with his Paratime Police, a sort of god-like force that maintains the many different timelines of the many alternate Earths. I should have devoured these stories, however his penchant for weird names for each and every character in these stories, made it difficult to keep the characters straight. I knocked off half a star.

[Shanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Five episodes involving time-travelers and parallel worlds. Each episode is a contained story, but they overlap characters and events, coming together to make a complete picture of various intricacies and depths of the time-travel. The stories are interesting with lots of adventure and some intrigue. The idea is that there are parallel worlds, which represent all the possible paths of probability. That part is a little complex, but I enjoyed the story without worrying too much about the details of the time-travel. People travel back/across time for recreation, business, criminal activity.

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Solid stories with interesting concepts. Sometimes they get a little long winded. The second and third stories were my favorites by far.

[Ken Selvia · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF. Narrated by Craig Allan. Allan has such a lisp I was afraid his dentures would fall out at any moment. A freelancer should re-record this.

[Benjamin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great collection save for one dud. “He Walked Around the Horses” is simply a masterpiece.

[Alex MacKenzie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Selection of five Paratime stories by the best storyteller in SF.

[Jonathan Palfrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve read these stories many times since I first bought this collection in 1981, so I feel that the collection as a whole deserves a four-star rating, although it contains five stories with some variation in quality.

“He walked around the horses” is a classic short story, perhaps the best of this collection, although it’s the odd one out, being the only story to make no mention of the Paratime Police. It deals with the disappearance of Benjamin Bathurst while travelling through Prussia in 1809. He was a real person whose disappearance is a fact of history, although most likely he was murdered and robbed in a mundane fashion. Instead, this story shows him transferred to a parallel world with a different history, and what happens to him there.

The other four stories describe a vast (possibly infinite) number of parallel worlds, on one of which a method of travel between worlds has been developed, and has been used for a long time to exploit the other worlds in various ways—quietly. The world with the secret of travel wishes to keep that secret, and it employs the Paratime Police to maintain law and order among travellers in paratime, but above all to ensure that the secret remains a secret.

The stories describe four different problems tackled by Verkan Vall of the Paratime Police.

“Police Operation” (a novelette) introduces the Paratime Police and its context.

“The Last Enemy” (a novella) is about the political implications of research into reincarnation on one of the more advanced worlds.

“Time Crime” (a longer novella) is the best of the four, about a large-scale criminal conspiracy enslaving people on one world and selling them on another.

“Temple Trouble” (a novelette) is adequate but not very interesting; it’s about rivalry between two companies wishing to exploit the resources of a relatively primitive world.

The Paratime Police also appear in a novel, Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen.

All of these stories are old-style sf, first published from 1948 to 1955, so of course they’re dated in style and content—with the exception of “He walked around the horses”. Being set in 1809, and written in the form of an exchange of letters, gives it an oddly timeless quality: if I didn’t know when it was written, it would be hard to guess.

[Jay Goemmer · Rating 3 out of 5]

These are probably some of the earliest science fiction stories dealing with the idea of parallel worlds. H. Beam Piper wisely put some limitations into his technology, including the requirement that it takes half an hour to shift to your destination.

Unfortunately, Piper's character names seem to be arbitrary and jarring, but kudos to him for not settling for "Sam Smith" and similar ilk.

Piper's fascination with reincarnation is evident, especially in one parallel world where they've documented it as scientific fact. Even though Piper was a productive author for the pulps, his narratives are easier for modern readers to follow than, say, the early chapters of E.E. "Doc" Smith's The Skylark of Space.

Generally speaking, pretty solid for old-school science fiction.

Jan. 29, 2013.

[Sean Brennan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This the complete collection of Piper's Paratime stories, where we see an almost infinite possibility of probable timer lines can be divided roughly into two segments, the stand alone time paradox stories like Temple and especially the excellent Genesis which are very good. Then we have the specific Paratime Police stories such as Time Crime which are rather confusing contain too many forgettable characters and are rather poor!

[Allen McDonnell · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Good Anthology

Most of the Paratime stories of H. Beam Piper are here in one new collection. The only thing I see missing are the original Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen stories.
I love all these stories and highly recommend this for any reader interested in the concept of Paratime as described by Piper during his all to short writing career.

[J. Scott Phillips · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had high hopes for this series of stories. It has a clever premise, but the characters and the plots just didn't pay off for me. For me, the stories felt plodding and contrived. After just a few paratime "transpositions," the gimmick became rather tired and I lost interest.

[Lynette · Rating 5 out of 5]

athe paratime stories are what I really like H Beam Piper for. When I first read these years ago they seriously messed with my concepts of time and parallel universes. I write out a longer review before but the Goodreads app closed and I lost it. Too bad!

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Verkan Vall, Tortha Karf, and the members of the ultra-secret Paratime Police traverse the time-line continuum to protect the Earth from invasion or destruction by millions of parallel universes

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty well written and the stories have aged well. Good reads but not great literature. Parallel universes which are reachable by a transporter invented in the so called level one. The Paratime Police seek out those who violate the rules protecting the secret of Paratime travel.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good time/alternate universe stories

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great group of short stories with the same characters; "Last Enemy" is my personal favorite.