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

memories were corroborated by the mothers during independent questioning.

In an interview in the Los Angeles Times, Dr. Chamberlain said: "The fact that a
child's mind is actually working at birth upsets a lot of theoriesтАж obviously,
we're not dealing with the brain at allтАжI don't think that birth memory has
anything whatever to do with the brain. What we're dealing with is mind. It's a
non-physical aspect of every person. And mind has an all-or-nothing quality. It
doesn't develop cell by cell over the years so that it's competent to do something
at six years that it can't do at two. It's just not that way." Reincarnation is one
possible explanation for the retention of birth memories.

I think H. Beam Piper would have been very interested in Dr. Chamberlain's
work. In "Last Enemy" Hadron Dalla is doing research on reincarnation,
although she is attempting to communicate with the recent (dead) rather than the
newly born.

On the Akor-Neb time-line where Dalla is doing her research, we have a culture
where reincarnation is an accepted scientific truth, while death is considered no
more than a somewhat disruptive eventтАФmore an inconvenience than anything
else. When Dalla establishes communication with recently dead who have not
yet picked a new incarnation, she starts a political crisis between the
Volitionalists (the party that believes you return in the body of your choice) and
the Statisticalists (who believe that one is reincarnated in the first available
human host). Not only does she undermine the belief in statistical reincarnation,
but she opens up a literal Pandora's Box over inheritance laws and guilt over
crimes in past lives.

If H. Beam Piper did believe in volitional reincarnation, it goes a long way to


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explain his own suicide. While an inconvenience, death does clean the slate of
debts and financial obligations, and Piper at the time of his death felt weighed
down by both. I hope for his sake he was right.

***

The idea of parallel worlds is an old one in human mythology and folk tales,
with roots in mythical fairylands and astral planes. Edgar Rice Burroughs, A.
Merritt, and Henry Kuttner were some of the first writers to use this theme in
science fiction. A major treatment of the parallel worlds theme has been to create
a series of alternate worlds as part of a continuum of increasing social and
historical variation from a template worldтАФusually a present or future version of
our own civilization. These variations are based on alternate historical
branchings at some time in the past; for example, Carthage winning the Punic
Wars with Rome or Germany defeating the Allies in World War II. The farther