The Sound of His Horn

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The Sound of His Horn is a 1952 dystopian time travel/alternative history novel by the senior British diplomat John William Wall, written under the pen name of Sarban. It relates the story of a British naval lieutenant, Alan Querdillon who, after becoming a POW during the Battle of Crete awakens in a Nazi controlled world 102 years on from World War II. He is literally hunted by a "Reichsforester" (a title Hermann Göring held during the Third Reich). He takes refuge with genetically mutilated "undesirables" — one of the first fictional portrayals of genetic manipulation.

Originally a mass market paperback published in the U.S., UK, Spain and Commonwealth countries, it was republished in hardback by Tartarus Press.

The book's title is from an Eighteenth Century song about the "gentleman farmer" John Peel, a famous fox hunter in his day, and given a sinister meaning not appearing in the original - as under the victorious Nazis, humans are given the role of the fox. In his introduction to a 1960 edition of the novel, Kingsley Amis writes: "I shall always feel a slight twinge whenever I am reminded of the innocent English hunting song from which the title is taken."

The theme of "undesirables" being hunted for "sport" was taken up by Poul Anderson in The Corridors of Time - though in that case unconnected with a Nazi victory, but rather with an oppressive regime arising in our far future. The institutionalized hunting of humans also appears in the Draka dystopian series by S. M. Stirling.