H. Beam Piper 2 hr 28 min read

Across a web of parallel timelines, the Paratime Police hunt a conspiracy of slavers exploiting worlds that never knew the secret of crossing between them, and one loose thread could unravel it all.

H. Beam Piper's 1955 novel is a superb alternate-history and time-travel adventure, a Paratime tale. Sharp, ingenious, gripping. Read it for classic Piper, his brilliantly worked-out Paratime Police policing traffic among countless parallel Earths, tracking an interdimensional slave ring, in a tightly-plotted golden-age masterwork of cross-time intrigue and detection.

In its time

Published in 1955, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

2 hr 28 min read (a novella, a full arc in one sitting or two).

Illustrated by

Kelly Freas