"The High Crusade" by Poul Anderson

I read this on somewhat of a whim. The book is somewhat old, written in 1960, and I found it while I was looking for an apartment in Oakland a few months back before I found my current place. It was in the bargain bin of paperbacks at this trendy used books bookstore. I saw the cover and read the pitch blurb, and it suddenly dawned on me that this might be a lot like my Tales of Reagul series, where a Roman set of villages is transplanted to an alien planet as a psychological experiment conducted by an alien race.

The High Crusade is a lot different than my idea, thankfully, although it was quite intriguing nonetheless. In this story, a group of aliens on a scouting party come to Medieval England to invade and end up getting fought back by a British nobleman who ends up stealing their spaceship and having one of the surviving aliens take them to join King Edward during the Crusades. But the alien double crosses them and puts the ship on autopilot to one of his home planets, thinking he's doomed the Englishmen. The Englishmen end up launching an attack on the military alien race and slaughtering them, and then practically destroying their interstellar empire.

Very interesting book. Quite short, too. It won both Hugo and Nebula awards during its time on the shelves. While the book wasn't what I was expecting, it was still worth the read to see how a great science fiction writer can write in brevity and still create an excellent story that serves as a somewhat condemnation of mankind's tendency to wage war violently.

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