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

We find Piper's use of historical models, fine historical detail, and
political philosophy throughout his TerroHuman Future HistoryтАФa
history which spans thousands of years across the First and Second
Federation, the System States Alliance, the Interstellar Wars, the
Neo-Barbarian Age, the Sword-World Conquests, the formation of the
League of Civilized Worlds, the Mardukan Empire, the First, Second,
Third, and Fourth Galactic Empires; just the first of which is described as
containing 3,365 worlds, 1.5 trillion people, and 15 intelligent races. But, of
the whole TerroHuman Future History, it is the early Federation that
receives most of Piper's attention, contains the most novels and stores, is
the focus of this collection, and is what we shall rum our attention to next.

The Terran Federation included an area of over two hundred billion
cubic light years and held over five million planets that could sustain life
in a natural or artificial environment. Although internal evidence leaves us
to suspect that only one thousand or more of these worlds were inhabited
by man during the Federation, there were new worlds being colonized up
until the time of the System States War in the late ninth century A.E.,
when the Federation began to turn back into itself. The language of the
Federation was the universal Lingua Terra, an
English-Spanish-Afrikaani-Portugese mixture of old Terran tongues. Time
is kept according to Galactic Standard, based on earth time in seconds,
minutes, and hours.

By the First Century, A.E. homo sapiens has become racially
homogeneous; in Four-Day Planet, Piper states, "The amount of
intermarriage that's gone on since the First Century, [had made] any
resemblance between people's names and their appearances purely
coincidental." Lingua Terra was also universal; by the seventeenth
century, A. E. it was spoken, in one form or another, by every descendant
of the race that had gone out from the Sol System in the Third Century."
Once could assume that by the time of Space Viking all racial differences
had been lost, although there is some mention of new species
differentiation. On Agni, a hot-star planet mentioned in Space Viking, the
inhabitants were said to be tough for Neo-Barbarians, and to have very
dark skin.

Where are the American-Sino-Soviet superpowers in Piper's history of
the future? And what has happened to the cultural domination of North
America and Europe?

To understand the answer to this question we have to go back to Piper's
early short stories and novelettes, many of which are not in his TFH.
Throughout his body of work, Piper shows a fondness for certain themes:
nuclear war, lost Martian races, the cyclical nature of civilization, the
threat of barbarism from within and without, the citizen patriot, parallel
time lines, etc.. In the stories published in the early fifties (and in some of
his letters, too) it is the threat of a global nuclear holocaust that is clearly
on his mindтАФas it was on the mind of any sane person in that era of
nuclear brinkmansship.