Worlds of the Imperium
Keith Laumer
124 pages
published in 1962
As I’ve said before, Keith Laumer was one of my favourites when I first started reading science fiction. I would never accuse him of being a particularly brilliant writer, but he has a knack for writing gripping, fast-paced adventure science fiction. Laumer writes in a sort of polished pulp style, with loner heros relying on their native brawn and brain to solve the predicaments their superscience weapons cannot help them with. There’s a hint of sex, though nothing beyond noticing the graceful curves of a passing female. The best mainstream author I could compare Laumer to would be John D. MacDonald.
Worlds of the Imperium is a good example of Laumer’s style. It’s the first in a series of three novels starring Brion Bayard, secret agent of an British-German-Swedish empire that spans several dozen parallel earths, a much more benign empire than that imagined by H. Beam Piper. The other two novels are The Other Side of Time and Assignment in Eternity and all three of them have been published in a omnibus edition by Baen Books. A fourth novel, Zone Yellow was written long after Laumer had had the stroke that robbed him of his writing abilities and by all reports is … not good.