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

extraterrestial signals; and lastly, Dr. Bruce Murray, Director of J. P. L.
and creator of Purple Physics.

TOPIC: SATURN AND THE MIND OF MAN: Fourth in a series of
symposiums on man and the planets.

Dr. Murray, his short cropped silver hair gleaming in the spots, looking
like a California-tanned version of one of the original astronauts ten years
later, hunches forward: "Saturn, our first look at this most magnificent
planet, and we are there! This first glimpse at the terra incognita of
Saturn will remain one of the finer moments throughout the time of man."

Great stuff, but what does it have to do with Beam Piper?

He wasn't there; and he should have been.

In my study of the life of H. Beam Piper, I ran head-on into a number of
perplexing questions: Why, despite numerous reprintings, have Piper's
books been ignored by academic critics and scholars? How is it that the
man who created one of science fictions most detailed future histories
received the following note in Peter Nicholls' The Science Fiction
Encyclopedia: "Many of his (Piper's) novels and storiesтАж are set in a
common future history, but are insufficiently connected to be regarded as
a coherent series."? (This last comment is mere sloppy scholarship, as I
shall show in the essay on the Federation.) And why is Piper, who
published most of his best fiction in Astounding/Analog, seldom
mentioned as one of the great Campbell writers although he always places
in the top ten in the readers polls?

The answers to these questions are bound within the Gordian knot of
Piper's character, the low stature of science fiction and sf writers in
general during the fifties and early sixties, Piper's premature death, and
the subsequent unavailability of most of his work.

Horace Beam Piper was born in 1904, the son of a Protestant minister.
He had no formal education and at age eighteen went to work as a laborer
for the Pennsylvania Railroad's Altoona yards. Throughout his life he was
a reticent and guarded man and as a result we know little about his early
years. He was largely self-educated; he obtained a deep knowledge of
science and history: "without subjecting myself to the ridiculous misery of
four years in the uncomfortable confines of a raccoon coat."

While still working for the Pennsy Railroad, he sold his first story to
John W. Campbell at Astounding Science Fiction. "Time and Time Again"
appeared in the April 1947 issue and was the first of many time travel
tales. Like the themes of nuclear war and the lost Martian races, time
travel was a theme that would appear in many guises. In a moment of
guarded confidence, Piper once admitted to Jerry Pournelle that "He
Walked Around the Horses"-another time travel taleтАФwas a true story. "I
know," said Piper, "I was born on another time line." Even now Jerry can