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

So naturally my first research assignment was to take extensive notes
on all the planets, history, characters, artifacts, and personal and political
relationships contained in Space Viking. I thought it would be a piece of
cake; after all, hadn't I done post-graduate work in history? My surprise!
There aren't more than one or two pages in Space Viking that don't have
some kind of historical or planetary reference, some which run for pages.
On the first reading I picked up only the obvious; it took two more
readings and several hundred note cards before I was finished.

But, of course, I wasn't done; now that I had discovered the fascinating
and intricate tapestry of Beam's History of the Future I had to know it all.
This meant reading everything he ever wrote as well as making elaborate
charts and chronologies, and spending hours talking with Jerry about the
historical events and models Piper used. Then, using Beam's
correspondence and Jerry's notes, I tried with Jerry to plot the uncharted
areas of the TerroHuman Future History.

Slowly and steadily we began to fill in large chunks of the missing
territory. We began to gather steam as more and more of his
conversations with Piper began to return to Jerry. Piper's original plan
had been to write at least one novel per century of his future history;
accordingly he had file folders for each century containing all the
pertinent historical data and characters. Even had he lived his full life
span it is doubtful that he would have ever finished this monumental task,
for there is evidence that the TerroHuman Future History (to simplify
matters, we will call it TFH) was to continue for over six thousand years. It
is hard to believe that even Beam could have written another fifty to sixty
books in the twenty years he might have been expected to liveтАФalthough it
would have been nice to see him try. But he had already admitted the
futility of this plan to Jerry during one of their discussions on the
popularity of the Fuzzy novelsтАФa popularity which forced him to write two
sequels, only one of which was published, in the Seventh Century Atomic
Era.

While my research on Space Viking was completed some time back, my
interest in Piper, his works, and personality has continued to grow. I have
managed to obtain copies of every story he ever published, many of which
have been out of print for over thirty years. One result of this mild
obsession with PiperтАФin addition to this essay-was a rather long article
for "The Bulletin of the Science Fiction Writers of America" on the
"TerroHuman Future History of H. Beam Piper".

As for Return of Space Viking, Jerry Pournelle is still working on that
book. Jerry thrives on having four or five simultaneous projects competing
for his attention: witness, three columns, several ongoing anthologies, at
least two collaborations with Larry Niven always in the works, plus several
independent sf novels and his new mystery series, and the new non-fiction
book he just decided to do last week. During the sixties when he was
working with NASA Jerry grew to like, make that love, the constructive
chaos of the space program. However, Return of Space Viking is now