H. Beam Piper (1904–1964)

What makes salience is surprisingly relevant today. As AI gets better will the day come when smart phones have civil rights.
The story of the meeting with a new species on a planet far away.
Will travel to planets hundreds of light years away ever become practical? If so we are nearly certain to encounter sapient beings. Coping with that encounter will clearly be a challenge.
In the Fuzzy universe sapience on a planet means the right to self determination. I first read this forty years ago and was enthralled then. I had forgotten the story but now I see why.… (lisätietoja)

Adventures in an advanced civilization that travels to and exploits alternate time lines
This volume combines several paratime police stories starring Verkan Vall and Tortha Korf with "Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen", the latter being a novel length story of 16th century warfare set in the paratime universe. I first read "Lord Kalvan" years ago, probably in high school, when I was interested in adventure and war stories, and re-read parts of it after I bought this volume two weeks ago. This is typical 1950's science fiction, with unconflicted male heroes, smoking pipes, drinking cocktails, and drawing their guns to shoot clearly evil gangsters. The plots are resolved usually in a rapid few pages when the good guys suddenly reveal how they outsmarted the bad guys, and shoot them dead. Paratime is explained usually in a few pages of dense expository writing disguised as a conversation, and I never quite understood the structure of levels, sectors, and other divisions in the timelines, and could not visualize the police headquarters and props. I enjoyed the break from serious literature.… (lisätietoja)