Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen

"Piper is one of those writers of the 40s, 50s and ’60s who is not remembered well enough. And I think this is one of his two best books, the other being Space Viking . It’s set in western Pennsylvania, in the area where he lived his whole life, so it has the local colour baked in. It drops a policeman from our world into a world where the Indo-Europeans, instead of having gone west across Asia and into Europe as they did in most timelines, went east – they went across by raft and boat, and settled North America. They have 16th century technology, more or less, and their kingdoms are dominated by the god Styphon, who is the god of gunpowder. Only the priests of Styphon know how to make this stuff – except that our policeman, Calvin Morrison, who rapidly becomes Lord Kalvan, also knows. He went to college and studied military history , he fought in the Korean War . It’s a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court kind of story, where someone who knows things that the locals don’t know goes about showing them how to do stuff – and it’s very nicely done. The other thing about Lord Kalvan is that it’s kind of tragic, not for the story itself, but for the story about the story. Piper wrote it as three long novelettes, which he then sold to Analog one at a time, and planned to put them together as a book when they were all out in Analog . Unfortunately, though, Piper was chronically broke; then his agent took sick and died at about this time, throwing his affairs into a large mess; and very sadly he shot himself. Yes. They were sold together as one before the third one ran in the magazine, because the fellow who had taken over the agency that had represented Piper didn’t know that Analog had prior claim to the third one. So there was a mess. You try to sell them usually to the regular science fiction markets. So many science fiction writers have done alternate history every now and then, it’s an accepted sub genre. I probably do it more than most people do, just because I have the weird academic background. This goes back at least to Tolkien, if not further. One of the reasons that I fell on the Lord of the Rings with glad cries when I first read it in the mid-60s, was going through the appendices with gun and camera, trying to figure out – what does this lead to? What does that mean? It gives the world a depth and a lived-in feel that you really can’t get any other way, if you remember that what happened ‘back then’ is still important to the fictional now – as it would be to the real now."