The High Crusade is a riotous adventure story.

A spaceship arrives in a medieval kingdom. Instead of being paralyzed with surpris, the English Knights charge into the fray and take the battle to the aliens. From here, the story escalates to one of increasingly lucky conquest. Far more Pulp SF than Hard SF, I imagine a serialized audience becoming more incredulous with each weeks installment.

The characters are mostly static, encountering a small difficulty then resolving it fairly soon. The narrator is mostly sparse with his descriptions, in only a few cases spending more than a page to describe a scene. The first chunk of the book had a religious subtext - was God among the aliens? Do they have souls? - but this didn't show as much in the latter majority. The author could certainly make a point about the eventual outcome, but does not.

In short, this short pulp novel was a fun read, with a great topic. i didn't find it particularly well written, and didn't care about the characters afterward, I wouldn't seek out a sequel either. 2.5 stars - Poul Anderson has done better.