Imperium
Keith Laumer
Edited by Eric Flint
Published by Baen Books
Hardcover, 465 pages
ISBN: 0743499034

More Laumer information
http://www.geocities.com/keithlaumer2002/
http://www.hycyber.com/SF/laumer_keith.html

As many of you know, I am a first level Keith Laumer fan. And when Baen published this new collection of his Imperium stories I was thrilled. Laumer was a mainstay of 1960's Science Fiction. His Bolo stories (intelligent, thinking battle tanks) helped design the way modern Sci-Fi warfare books went. And his Retief character is the sort of diplomat I wish we had at the U.N. today.

And it was his Imperium series dealing with alternate worlds and histories that helped this sub-genre get its feet and hang on. Now, Baen is reissuing these classic sci-fi works of Laumer's edited by Eric Flint. And this one is a really good-looking book, with a beautiful cover by David Mattingly.

As to the debt modern Sci-Fi owes to Laumer just look at the preface by Harry Turtledove, called "This is Where I Came In" where he say Laumer's Imperium, as well as stories by L. Sprague de Camp, H. Beam Piper, and Philip K. Dick were the well from which today's alternate history field really began.

But to me, it was Laumer who set the mark for stories like this. In Imperium we have three journeys across the many parallel worlds, from a universe where World War I never occurred, and the British, German and Swedish governments work together, and two guys named Maxoni and a Cocini found that running current through wire wound up Moebius-fashion would propel them out of their as easily as driving a car.

Brion Bayard is a clever American diplomat hijacked away from the streets of Stockholm. Taken to a gas-lit gilded world where 19th century style, decorum and attitudes were still and a guy named Karl Marx never rose to power. Welcome to the Imperium. Bayard is no ones fool. After sizing up the situation he accepts a posting in the Imperium's intelligence corps, and even with a bit of hemming and hawing, it takes little time (and a beautiful woman) for him to realize he is actually needed for a purpose.

It doesn't take the reader long to actually come to envy Bayard with his new home. In a world where there were no World Wars and no nuclear weapons, where the air is still clean and the water has not been poisoned and the people still value honor, with innocence that makes the whole package intensely attractive.

But don't think it is all cake and gravy. Crosstime travel is a very risky business. Most of the worlds that attempt it end up destroying themselves, leaving vast areas of blighted space-time. Our Earth is a rarity in the middle of a spread of desolation and is known to the Imperium as Blight-Insular Three and is only safe because we had Edison and Marconi.

But Bayard is sent to B-I Two, a world where the Second World War ended with massive nuclear destruction; and a barbarian warlord has found out about trans-dimensional flight and has hatched a plan to take over the multi-verse. Bayard's job is to stop this man, take his place and help bring this world to a place in the Imperium without war and bloodshed.

In book two, "The Other Side of Time", Bayard travels even further into the blighted areas to again save the Imperium, this time from a timeline where a Neanderthal race have discovered Crosstime travel and seek to make the Imperium a slave world. Bayard finds an ally of sorts from a world where Apes rule (Damn Dirty Apes!!) but when he gets to his new friends home world, he is brain-wiped and dropped in French Louisiana in a world where Napoleon won his wars and France basically rules the world.

He gains a true ally this time in the form of a beautiful (of course) woman who helps him to recover his memory and to develop the basics for Crosstime travel in this new world before he can get back home and save the Imperium.

The final chapter, "Assignment in Nowhere", puts Bayard in the background as it follows the adventures of a new character from B-I 3, Richard Curlon, who turns out to be a pivotal nexus in Crosstime with his life affecting several different worlds at once. In ours he is a direct descendant of Richard the Lionhearted. Demonstrating his own vast imagination and skill Laumer brings us a new advanced form of the trans-dimensional flyer with invisibly and the ability to move in space and through matter.

And the villain here is a man known as Baron van Roosevelt. And yes, I wonder how Laumer felt about Roosevelt in our timeline as well. Keith Laumer is pure reading fun. And Imperium shows that as well as demonstrating that 'older' Science Fiction can still be enjoyed by our 'modern, free thinking' society.

If you are new to Keith Laumer, this book is a fine introduction. Even though these stories are over forty years old in some cases they are filled with vitality, intelligence and even love from a writer who truly cared about the genre and the readers. My greatest regret in this book is that there are no new stories about the Imperium or from Keith Laumer.