"H. Beam Piper - Empire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piper H Beam)

the headline of the Los Angeles Times as I write this article. Hundreds of distraught fans are already
gathering at the famed Dakota Building where John Lennon lived and died. Thousands of flowers drape
the fence. Tower Records of Hollywood announces they've sold over a thousand copies of Lennon's new,
last, record, "Double Fantasy," in less than ten hours. Radio stations across the dial are playing Lennon's
songs and Beatle retrospectives.

I think of James Dean, Jim Morrison, Dylan Thomas, Stanley G. Weinbaum, Marilyn Monroe, John F.
Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Cordwainer Smith, Brian JonesтАФH. Beam Piper.

There's very little other than death that gives these people anything in common; a premature death that
robbed them of future success and us of the special talents that might have enriched us all. What they all
left us was a terrible sense of lossтАФwithin the science fiction community, the rock music community, the
literary community, and occasionally the entire human family.

At the time of his death, H. Beam Piper was writing at the top of his form and certainly with the best of
his contemporaries. "Omnilingual."

"Gunpowder God," Little Fuzzy, The Cosmic Computer, Space Viking: these were the products of Piper's
last five years. When he died, Piper was working on a major historical novel, Only the Arquebus, had
recently completed the third, and now lost, "Fuzzy" novel, and was finishing a new Empire novelet. We
can only imagine what Piper, free of debts and worries, might have accomplished during the next ten or
twenty years. Jerry Pournelle believes that had Beam lived, he would have been elevated to the top ranks
of the science fiction pantheon.

But we will never know, and that is the greatest tragedy of all. Piper's death, by his own hand, because he
wrongly believed his career was finished, brought everything to a premature end. Because of problems
over the estate, it also kept much of his early work out of print for some time.

For over twenty years Piper's short stories have remained forgotten in past issues of musty old science
fiction pulps. Other than an occasional anthology appearance, few of Piper's short stories have ever
appeared in book form. But now, thanks to Ace Books, the best of them are being reissued in thematic
collections like this one. Now together for the first time in Empire are the stories that describe and define
the First Galactic Empire and the later times of the Terro-Human Future History.

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H. Beam Piper is best known to sf readers for his Fuzzy books and to fans for his Paratime stories, but it
is his Terro-Human Future History that is his greatest and most imaginative gift. Robert A. Heinlein may
or may not have created the first future history series in science fiction, but he certainly gave it its modern
definition and legitimacy. Isaac Asimov and Poul Anderson soon followed with their own unique
contributions. Not far behind was H. Beam Piper. The Terro-Human Future History may not have the
evolutionary synthesis of Gordon R. Dickson's Childe Cycle or the breadth of Anderson's Polesotechnic
League and Terran Empire, but Piper's history of the future has a historian's attention to sociological and
political detail that is unsurpassed.