Tuesday 13 October 2009

Police Operation

Official Blurb

H. Beam Piper (1904–1964) 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. (Summary from Wikipedia)

My Review

This is a short novelette set in Piper's Paratime world, a future where human kind is crossing multiple parallell time streams and policing any illegal actions carried out by the paratimers.

This story is notable for giving a good explanantion of the paratime terminology, an introduction if you will to how the worlds of Paratime work and interact.

The story itself is rather simple, a paratimer has illegally taken a beast from one time line as a pet into another time line where the beast does not belong, and the paratime police are tasked with sorting the mess out.

The book is an interesting listen and doesn't take long, less than an hour. The reading is done by two people, the first half being notable for an excellent reading by a young librivoxateer. His reading is pretty good but suffers from a plosives on the mic' which is a little distracting. That said I'm glad I listened as it was a fun little jaunt into the paratime.

Reading 2/3
Production 1/3
Story 2/3

Total Score 5/9

Download it from Librivox

Listen to the first chapter