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

somewhere near the top of that list and should be completed within the
next year or two.

H. Beam Piper had a lifelong love affair with history. Off and on during
the last few years of his life he was working on a major work he called in
one letter Only the Arquebus, a historical novel about Gonzalo de Cordoba
and the Italian Wars of the early sixteenth century. Unfortunately it is not
known whether Piper ever finished Only the Arquebus, and as far as I
know no trace of it has been found among his effects. Jerry Pournelle still
remembers many an evening spent with Piper discussing historical figures
and events and how they might apply to the future. Piper had many a keen
insight into the past and often expressed a longing that he had been alive
in the simpler days of the Christian Era, when Clausewitzian politics and
nuclear war were a faraway nightmare.

In a number of his works Piper created major characters who are
historians or study history as a hobby. In "The Edge of the Knife," a story
about a college history professor who can sometimes see into the future,
the professor says, "History follows certain patterns. I'm not a Toynbean,
but any historian can see that certain forces generally tend to produce
similar effects." Piper set forth a great number of his views concerning
history in his works. In Space Viking we learn from Otto Harkaman, a
Space Viking captain whose hobby is the study of history, "I study history.
You know, it's odd; practically everything that's happened on any of the
inhabited planets had happened on Terra before the first spaceship."
Vilfredo Pareto, a famous mid-twentieth century Italian sociologist, once
made a very similar statement; almost every known form of government or
political-science possibility existed at one time or another among the
Italian city-states of the Renaissance.

Piper also used past events as plot models and for inspiration for future
history. In Uller Uprising, the first published work in Piper's TFH, he used
the Sepoy Mutiny, a revolt started in British-held India when Bengalese
soldiers were issued cartridges coated with what they believed to be the
fat of cows (sacred to Hindus) and pigs (sacred to Moslems), as the basis
for his plot. This is confirmed by Piper in "The Edge of the Knife," an
interesting story that fits sideways into his future history, where the
history professor who sees into the future compares a planetary rebellion
in the Fourth Century A.E. (the Uller Uprising) to the Sepoy Mutiny. He
also compares the early expansion of the Federation to the Spanish
conquest of the New World.

Another historical analog used by Piper was the war in the Pacific
during World War II. In Cosmic Computer the planet Poictesme, the
former headquarters of the Third Terran Force during the System States
War, has become in the post-war period a deserted backwater. Most of
those remaining on Poictesme earn their living by salvaging old army
vehicles and storesтАФa way of life that still continues on one or two Pacific
atolls. The survivors have created a belief-system around Merlin, the
legendary computer that was reputed to have won the war for the