The Paratime series written by H. Beam Piper and subsequently by John F. Carr consists of several short stories, one novella, and one novel, all but one of which were originally published in Astounding Science Fiction under the editorship of John W. Campbell. The series deals with an advanced civilization that is able to travel between parallel universes with alternate histories, and uses that ability to trade for goods and services that its own, exhausted Earth cannot provide. The protagonists of the stories are the Paratime Police, the organization that protects the secret of paratime travel.
Stories in the Paratime series These stories were written by Piper:
"He Walked Around the Horses" (Astounding Science Fiction Magazine, April 1948) Police Operation (Astounding Science Fiction Magazine, July 1948) "Last Enemy" (Astounding Science Fiction Magazine, August, 1950) Temple Trouble (Astounding Science Fiction Magazine, April, 1951) Genesis (Future Magazine, September, 1951) Time Crime (novella) (Astounding Science Fiction Magazine, February and March 1955) Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen (novel) (Analog Science Fiction, 1965) in two parts: "Gunpowder God" and "Down Styphon!"
Sequels not written by Piper and mainly written by John F. Carr:
Great Kings' War, written by Roland J. Green and John F. Carr. Kalvan Kingmaker, written by John F. Carr. The Siege of Tarr-Hostigos, written by John F. Carr. The Hos-Blethan Affair, written by John F. Carr and Wolfgang Diehr. The Fireseed Wars, written by John F. Carr. The Gunpowder God, written by John F. Carr.
Some persons dispute He Walked Around The Horses and Genesis being Paratime stories, however Genesis is the account of a group of Martian colonists arriving on Earth between 75,000 and 100,000 years ago exactly as described by Piper in several of his Paratime Police stories. All of the names used in Genesis follow the conventions used in all of the Paratime stories but not used in Piper's other stories. Additionally the events in He Walked Around The Horses are referred to by Tortha Karf in the story Police Operation where he describes the event briefly to Verkan Vall.
Analysis
The Reader's Guide to Twentieth-Century Science Fiction notes that, as in most of Piper's stories, the Paratime plots nearly all "rely on the self-sufficient human. This type of person, nearly always male, uses inner strength to pull through situations that weaker persons cannot survive". The Guide notes Piper's expertise for exploring "'what if' history" the Paratime stories.
Karen Hellekson explains that "Piper divides his worlds into levels, based on their proximity and likeness to the home time line", meaning the time line of the people who know how to move between parallel worlds. She explains this as a useful technique for developing the alternative histories of the story.
Hellekson compares Paratime to Frederik Pohl's The Coming of the Quantum Cats, describing similarities in the approach to parallel timelines, as well as some meaningful differences including the fact that Pohl doesn't use the same idea of "nearness" as Piper, and that Pohl makes a heavier use of analogous characters who develop differently between timelines.
Alva Rogers says the "stories were entertaining tales not intended to be taken too seriously", noting the stories attempts to answer various "Fortean mysteries". Rogers says that Piper even got the initial idea from Charles Fort.
The Paratime universe
Paratime Levels
In Piper's Paratime universe, there are an infinite number of timelines, but in each timeline, events occurred differently. They are grouped into five Levels, based on the probabilities of success of an attempt by Martians to colonize Earth 75,000 to 100,000 years ago; humans, on timelines where they are present, are the descendants of the Martian colonists. Timelines with points of divergence before the Martian colonization attempt are not discussed.
First Level This is the level of complete success of the Martian colonization. However, in this level are several sectors of several thousand timelines each:
Home Timeline Home Timeline, and its associated First Level Commercial, First Level Passenger, First Level Industrial Sector, First Level Service Sector, is the home of the Paratime civilization. This is the only known timeline with paratime travel capacity, and protection of the Paratime Secret is the highest priority.
Venus and Mars are also colonized by the Home Timeline (or in the case of Mars, reclaimed), and paratime transport exists there as well.
Dwarma Sector The Dwarma sector is one where paratime travel was never discovered, and the Martian colonists settled down into a subsistence agriculture economy to survive. The culture is pacifistic and nonaggressive, though Dwarma peoples eat meat. One major event people remembered for years is when a farmer and trader contradicted themselves on the price of a pig; they raised their voices and shouted at each other. Verkan Vall and Hadron Dalla were planning a vacation in the Dwarma Sector when it was interrupted by the discovering of a paratemporal slave-trading ring in Time Crime. (In Home Timeline usage, family names precede personal names.)
Abzar Sector The Abzar Sector is one where the survivors exhausted the resources of Earth and exterminated each other in a series of wars. Apparently the Home Timeline was only saved from a similar outcome by the discovery of paratime travel, which allowed it to exploit the resources of other timelines.
Some Abzar Sector timelines were used as a hideout of a crime organization that traded slaves across timelines.
Second Level In the Second Level, the colony succeeded, but there were intermittent periods of Dark Ages between civilizations.
Akor-Neb Sector The Akor-Neb civilization of Last Enemy is Second Level; its technology is almost identical to the Home Timeline except for paratemporal transposition. The culture there has legends or records of their Martian origins.
Jak-Hakka Sector The Jak-Hakka civilization follows an ideology of "Dictatorship of the Chosen," it has been used as an example of political structures the Home Timeline wishes to avoid.
Khiftan Sector The Khiftan sector is one whose cultures are brutal and violent. Their cities are low domes, for protection against nuclear blasts; the priesthood of Fasif punishes blasphemy with torture; and an example of Khiftan craftsmanship seen in Time Crime is a whip, the tip of which can be heated by a nuclear battery to 200 degrees Celsius. A commonly used curse by Verkan Vall is "By the Fangs of Fasif" referring to the religion common in the Kiftan Sector.
Third Level Third Level timelines, as Piper described them, were "A few survivors—a shipload or so—were left to shift for themselves while the parent civilization on Mars died out. They lost all vestiges of their original Martian culture, even memory of their extraterrestrial origin."
Esaron Sector Some Third Level timelines have developed space travel; the Esaron civilization developed space travel before it developed the germ theory of disease and suffered a great setback when Venusian microbial life killed off most of the population.
Khanga Sector The Caribbean islands of this sector are overrun with pirates reported to be the best knife fighters in all of Paratime. Verkan Vall learned his knife fighting technique from them.
Fourth Level The Fourth Level is the level of highest probability: the survivors lost all concept of their Martian origins and believe themselves to have developed on Earth.
Nilo-Mesopotamian The Nilo-Mesopotamian cluster of sectors, including the Macedonian Empire Sector, the Alexandrian-Roman, Alexandrian-Punic, Indo-Turanian and Europo-American (which includes our own timeline), there was an Aryan invasion of Eastern Europe and Asia Minor about four thousand elapsed years ago.
Aryan-Transpacific In the Aryan-Transpacific sector, the Aryans moved east, through Asia into North America (the Minor Land Mass); one timeline in Aryan-Transpacific is the setting of Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen. After Piper's death, three additional books have been written based in this universe.
Other sectors The Proto Aryan Sector had the Aryan migration occur 1500 years later than in our sector, where the presence of established Sumerian and Nile civilizations inhibited their migration.
Near our timeline are timelines where there was a Second American Civil War, as well as a band where racial-based fascism rules North America as a result of a Nazi victory in 1940.
Fifth Level The Fifth Level are those where the colonization either failed or never took place; they are empty of Martian derived human life. Piper described the Fifth level as "on some sectors Subhuman brutes...on most of it nothing even vaguely human...". Fifth level Neanderthal man exists in a Stone Age culture having evolved on Earth independently, but never advanced.
Travelling through timelines The means of traveling through timelines is a flying saucer-shaped "conveyor"The conveyors of Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen are described as a "cross-time flying saucer" using the Ghaldron-Hesthor field generator, which was developed via a fortuitous fusion of attempts to develop faster than light space travel with ones attempting to explain certain psychic phenomena. Conveyors are fixed in place, which means that as they travel through timelines, they may end up inside nuclear reactors or other hazards or be caught in warfare (a common activity on at least one timeline in nearly every trip, Paratimers note). Weakening of the transposition field is a concern of Paratimers.
Because there are so many timelines and many conveyors, it is possible for two conveyors to "cross" each other and end up with mutually weakened fields. In this case, objects from the outside may penetrate the conveyor. Often these objects are alive. If they are people, they face two choices: be shot or have their memory obliterated. The Paratime Secret is more important than one outtimer's life. Sometimes they stumble out of the conveyor onto another timeline: this could have happened to British diplomat Benjamin Bathurst in He Walked Around the Horses (Note: This "could" is almost a certainty since the details of the story of such an occurrence that Tortha Karf tells in Police Operation match exactly the events in this story) or to the stranger on the train in Crossroads of Destiny as it did to Pennsylvania State Police officer Calvin Morrison in Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen. In those cases, the Paratime Police try to return them to their home timelines with memory obliteration. In other cases, such as a "Christian Avenger" of the Hitler-victory timeline, they decided he's better off dead and will let the locals do the job.
Home Timeline The people of the Home Timeline, overall, believe themselves to be scientific rationalists, otherwise known as Rational Empiricists, and atheists. Their calendar numbers days of the year rather than months.
The Home Timeline's capital city apparently is Dhergabar, as is the home of many of its prominent scientific and cultural institutions. Based on clues in the stories, Dhergabar seems to be located in the general vicinity of our timeline's India - Malaysia, some three hours travel by rocket from the east coast of North America over the North Pole.
The government of the Home Timeline, the "Management", is a parliamentary system.
Service Sectors Many of the inhabitants of the Service Sector, as well as servants and low-status workers in Home Timeline, are Fourth Level tribesmen from primitive cultures who are recruited by the tribe to work. They are not mistreated, but they do not have Citizen status, which can be granted through adoption into a Citizen family. At least two divisions of soldiers are stationed in Service Sector to deal with riots and rebellion.
Paratime Secret and Paratime Police