Adventures in an advanced civilization that travels to and exploits alternate time lines
This volume combines several paratime police stories starring Verkan Vall and Tortha Korf with "Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen", the latter being a novel length story of 16th century warfare set in the paratime universe. I first read "Lord Kalvan" years ago, probably in high school, when I was interested in adventure and war stories, and re-read parts of it after I bought this volume two weeks ago. This is typical 1950's science fiction, with unconflicted male heroes, smoking pipes, drinking cocktails, and drawing their guns to shoot clearly evil gangsters. The plots are resolved usually in a rapid few pages when the good guys suddenly reveal how they outsmarted the bad guys, and shoot them dead. Paratime is explained usually in a few pages of dense expository writing disguised as a conversation, and I never quite understood the structure of levels, sectors, and other divisions in the timelines, and could not visualize the police headquarters and props. I enjoyed the break from serious literature. ( )

I love "complete volumes".

This is the series that hooked me on the idea of time as an ever-branching tree. Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen, which Dad read to me as a shrimp. I've never stopped loving the idea, and never stopped playing around with books ideas that use it!

ETA: I realize the writing of this series of tales is, well, workmanlike is the polite way to say it; I give it 5 stars out of a sense of wonder it retains for me, a sense that has grown over the years that Mr. Piper was onto something bigger than his talent could support. The Carr novels that extend Piper's stories of Kalvan are much higher quality writing, and extending the stories of Hos-Hostigos, Kalvan, Rylla, and Verkan is a worthy endeavor to me.

But it all comes back here. And so a five-star rating it gets. ( )