Imperium
 There are Millions of Parallel Worlds—and Most of Them
are No Longer Inhabitable. The World That is Home to the
Imperium is Desperately Fighting Not to Join Their Number!
Brion Bayard had been an American diplomat—until he was abducted on the streets of Stockholm, and thrust into what he thought was a truck. At first, he was relieved to find that his abductors were very apologetic, and very British. Then they began speaking about nations and leaders which Bayard had never heard of. That was understandable, they told him, because they were from Earth, but not his Earth.
There are millions or more parallel Earths, each different in some slight way from the other, where history has taken every possible turn—where the heirs of Napoleon rule Europe, where King John tore the Magna Carta to shreds and executed those who had presented him with it, even one where the ancestors of homo sapiens lost the evolutionary struggle to another upright ape, who became the dominant intelligent lifeform. But mostly there are uninhabitable worlds, destroyed by the discovery of the technology to travel from one parallel Earth to another and the misuse of it.
The Earth of the Imperium was at war with another parallel Earth and Bayard could stop the war by killing the ruler of the aggressor Earth and replacing him—because the ruler was a parallel version of Bayard. But when Bayard went on his mission to the alternate Earth, things didn’t turn out to be quite that simple. . . .
And that was only the beginning of Bayard’s adventures as he defended his new homeworld, both from internal enemies and invaders from the other side of time, becoming the staunchest and most resourceful defender of the Imperium!
Complete for the First Time, Keith Laumer’s Epic Trilogy of
Sweeping Cross-Time Adventure—Including the First Book
Publication of the Uncut Worlds of the Imperium.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Keith Laumer was born June 9, 1925 in Syracuse, NY, raised in Buffalo, NY and in Florida. He served as a Captain in the U.S. Air Force, and later as a Foreign Service Officer in the U.S. Foreign Service, in posts all over the world. This gave him a solid background both for his fast-moving adventure stories and his satirical comedies of Retief, the galaxy’s only two-fisted diplomat, who deftly and repeatedly saved both the skins of beleaguered human colonists and the careers of his bungling superiors in a popular series that spanned four decades. Almost as popular were his stories of the Bolos, gigantic robot tanks who serve valiantly throughout the galaxy, guarding humans who are often far less noble than their cybernetic defenders. He was renowned as one of the top writers of science fiction adventure and several of his novels and stories were finalists for the Hugo and Nebula awards. He died in 1993.
Illustration by David Mattingly
Cover design by Jennie Faries
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