“The Other Side of Time”
Worlds of the Imperium
Brion Bayard, an American diplomat on assignment in Stockholm, Sweden, attempts to evade men he believes to be Soviet agents, only to find himself kidnapped by agents of the Imperium from a parallel world. Taken to the home world of the Imperium, he is introduced to the aristocratic members of the government, which rules most of the civilized world from London, having been formed by the union of the British Empire, which included America, and the German and Austro-Hungarian empires of Europe. He is impressed by the commitment to duty of the Imperial officials he meets and drawn to a particularly noble lady…
The main reason for his abduction, however, is that the Imperium is under attack from another parallel world. The Maxoni-Cocini drive, which is the technology for traveling between worlds, is extremely dangerous. Almost all worlds where its development is attempted are destroyed in bizarre and horrible ways. The collection of time lines where this occurs is known as the Blight, and the rare ones where the Earth survives are known as Blight Insulars, or BI's. BI-1 is the Imperium, and BI-3 is Bayard's home world, where the technology never developed. The raids are coming from BI-2, a chaotic world where war has swept the planet for generations, and which was not believed to have the Maxoni-Cocini drive. That version of Earth is currently ruled by a dictator, who happens to be Brion Bayard.
There are three sequels to this novel. They are The Other Side of Time (1965), Assignment in Nowhere (1968), and Zone Yellow (1990).
I'm tempted to do a Wikipedia edit, because this is both incomplete and inaccurate (albeit only in minor details).
The Other Side of Time was a vastly better work by a better-practiced author, and I had the good fortune to read it first. Compared to it, WotI is perfunctory sketchwork with only a few rich elements found far between. In OSoT the Imperium comes under attack by TRULY alternate-history types: Variant hominids from worlds diverged eons ago, where evolution itself went elsewise!
One minor example of why K Laumer was so good as a writer: Early on, Bayard encounters time shuttles built by a Neanderthaloid species that look like the product of drunken Soviet apes, crude hammered-together machines that look harsh and dangerously primitive next to the sleek Imperial models. Later on in the book he encounters a hominid species who would be the Good Guys if they wanted to be, but who harbor a bigoted hatred of homo sapiens; their shuttles are gleaming ovoids, supermodern compared to the clunky clumsy Imperial models of Bayard's world. Wait - what happened to 'sleek'? Without drawing attention to it, Laumer thus showed Bayard's perspective widening.
In 'Olivia,' he also created a female character so much more interesting and well-drawn than Bayard's wife from the first book that, like Ivanhoe's Rebecca vs Rowena, you feel like Bayard missed out. *
The writing and the ideas were so much better - Olivia's world survived because there was no Cocini, so Maxoni puttered around, wound a few coils, then went on to make galvanic buggy-whips or whatnot. Bayard and Olivia rob a museum in which such a coil (“of unknown purpose”) is kept, and Bayard whips up a castaway's time shuttle, wherein the overheating coil burns the packing-crate slats he made it of… I mean, this was a thumpin' good story.
What I particularly remember is something that a movie made of this could really only accomplish now, with today's computer FX: Travelling through time, not forward or back but sideways, means that the environment around him flowed and morphed sequentially from one possibility to the next - trees writhed as their branches and leaves changed position, dwindled or grew into different species then disappeared, while a nearby field-stone fence shifted into brick then concrete then sprouted spikes then resolved into hedgerow - what you see in The Time Machine, the world around the time traveller changing as he sits watching, but the sun never moves in the sky… It was SO well done.
p.s. I've also read Assignment in Nowhere, and all I can say is, I have no interest in reading that next one. We're talkin' bell curve here, what I mean to say.
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* In his introduction, Sir Walter Scott scolded the reader for thinking thus:
The character of the fair Jewess found so much favour in the eyes of some fair readers, that the writer was censured, because, when arranging the fates of the characters of the drama, he had not assigned the hand of Wilfred to Rebecca, rather than the less interesting Rowena. But, not to mention that the prejudices of the age rendered such an union almost impossible, the author may, in passing, observe, that he thinks a character of a highly virtuous and lofty stamp, is degraded rather than exalted by an attempt to reward virtue with temporal prosperity… [The] duties of self-denial, and the sacrifice of passion to principle, are seldom thus remunerated; and… the internal consciousness of their high-minded discharge of duty, produces on their own reflections a more adequate recompense, in the form of that peace which the world cannot give or take away…
i.e. Virtue is its own reward, and the only such you'll get. In short, Embrace the Suck. I mean, damn. Easy enough to think that maybe Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert had the right idea after all; as he was forbidden by his Order to marry anyway, Rebecca's Judaism was irrelevant:
“Marriage were an enduring crime on the part of a Templar; but what lesser folly I may practise, I shall speedily be absolved from at the next Preceptory of our Order. Not the wisest of monarchs, not his father, whose examples you must needs allow are weighty, claimed wider privileges than we poor soldiers of the Temple of Zion have won by our zeal in its defence… [Now] my language shall be that of a conqueror. Thou art the captive of my bow and spear-subject to my will by the laws of all nations; nor will I abate an inch of my right, or abstain from taking by violence what thou refusest to entreaty or necessity.”
All RIGHTY then. Truly, if there is but one road open to thy goal, upon that road must ye wend…