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

Piper was not rewriting Asimov and that instead of appearing after the
System States War (as his critics claim); the Second Federation appeared
during the Second Century A.E. before the real push toward interstellar
colonization came in The Third Century A.E. In "Omnilingual" there is
mention made of the Thirty Days WarтАФwhich clearly makes that story
part of the TFH cannonтАФand of a Pan-Federation Telecast System.
(Pan-Federation is a term used only in early TFH stories mentioning the
Federation, and I believe it is translatable as First Federation.) Then, in
Uller Uprising, there is talk of a "revolt of the colonies on Mars and
Venus"тАФcertainly the same revolt mentioned in Space VikingтАФwhich
means the revolt had to take place sometime earlier than the Fourth
Century A.E., the time of Uller Uprising. And in "The Edge of the Knife"
Piper states, "the world of 2050тАФ2070тАж [was a] completely unified world,
abolition of all national states under a single world sovereignty, colonies
on Mars and Venus." This, I think we can safely say, is Piper's Second
Federation, since the First began in 31 A.E.

There is little mention of what happened on earth after the Third
Global War, although by reading "The Return" (by H. Beam Piper and
John J. McGuire) we see a very convincing portrait of a far-future earth
devastated by a long-ago nuclear war. Nature in "The Return" has run riot
and the human survivors are slowly beginning to rebuild civilization
again. There are some interesting parallels here with the far-far-future
earth described in "The Keeper," which does belong in the TFHтАФbut I will
save those for my introduction to Empire, the next Piper collection due
from Ace.

So how did Terran civilization rebuild itself after the Third World War?
Certainly by 54 A.E. (1996 A.D.) civilization had reasserted itself
sufficiently enough to mount a major archeological expedition to Mars, as
described in "Omnilingual." Piper's own definition of Lingua TerraтАФif you
remember, a combination of English (probably Australian) and Spanish
(South American) and Afrikaans (South African) and Portugese
(Brazilian)тАФprovides us with the major loci of early Federation
civilization, especially since all are in the Southern Hemisphere. In
Four-Day Planet two major papers are named, the La Presna from
Buenos Aires and the Melbourne Times, "formerly London Times, when
there was still a London." From this and other evidence, it is apparent that
South America and Australia were the cradles of First Federation culture
and technology.

As we mentioned earlier, the government of the First Federation was
based on the Corporate StateтАФquite distinct from the Second Federation.
For by the time of the Second Federation, the Federation government
most closely approaches that of Georgian EnglandтАФa representative
government with colonies and member statesтАФ rather than a monarchy.
We also have chartered companies (remember the British East India
Company) like the Chartered Zarathustran Company, which tried to
enslave the Fuzzies. Also many of the planets had appointed colonial
governors, who could only be overthrown by direct military intervention,