Poul Anderson’s The High Crusade by Bill Ward “At the moment, all was triumph. Red-splashed, panting, in scorched and dinted armor, Sir Roger de Tourneville rode a weary horse back to the main fortress. After him came the lancers, archers, yeomen — ragged, battered, shoulders slumped with exhaustion. But the Te Deum was on their lips, rising beneath the strange constellations that twinkled forth, and their banners flew bravely against the sky. It was wonderful to be an Englishman.” The year is 1345; the place is the village of Ansby, Lincolnshire, England, Earth. A great host is being assembled under Sir Roger, Baron de Tourneville, in preparation for a campaign in France as part of the ongoing conflict that would come to be known as the Hundred Years War. The army features knights and men-at-arms and longbowmen and the various other components of a Medieval host…but it certainly doesn’t have anything to match the likes of the Wersgorix. Alien invaders, the Wersgorix fall from the sky in the midst of Ansby in an enormous chrome ship bristling with weapons. They have anti-gravity, beam cannons, force screens, flame guns, sophisticated communications and mapping technologies and the will to use them — for the Wersgorix are the overlords of an enormous galactic empire that makes a habit of finding new worlds, exterminating or enslaving their populations, and installing new Wersgor masters in their place. The Wersgorix emerge from their ship, demonstrate their overwhelming technological power, and deliver an ultimatum of submission to the assembled primitives of Earth: represented in this case by the arrayed army of Sir Roger. But, unimpressed, Sir Roger orders a charge, and the ‘assembled primitives’ butcher the shocked crew of the Wersgor scout ship and capture it for themselves. Thus begins The High Crusade. Slim, fast-paced, fun and compelling in equal amounts, it’s the kind of book people used to write before every idea had to be milked for 500 pages and a sequel. And make no mistake, the premise of The High Crusade is very milk-able, being both instantly understandable and wide-open for exploration. But Anderson keeps his story tight, throwing off clever extrapolations of his ‘Middle Ages meets Space Opera’ idea like sparks off a grinding wheel, all while keeping his story moving at a breakneck pace along the edge of its well-honed plot. Originally...