H. Beam PiperKirja-arvosteluja

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.

An absolutely classic that I have read around 2006 pre audiobookbay and goodreads times

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.

Charming story. The fuzzies are very cute, the main characters are sympathetic and the story line is relatively simple, but engaging.

Interesting socio-political though experiment more than it is a novel. Looking at in broad strokes, with some occasional microscoping in at key events, two species first evolving then slowly developing culture and technology on sister worlds. The two are vaguely stand-ins for the US/USSR, though there are some pretty serious deviations from both, and it eventually leads to post-ww2 era nuclear stand-off and nuclear annihilation (other than some survivors off planet).
If you're looking for a good narrative driven scifi novel, you might want to skip this as there are barely characters let alone a 'story' in the traditional sense, but it *is* a good read as long as you know what you're getting in to.
Its got a lot of what you'd expect from a 50s/Heinlein era sf writer in terms of glorification of a really strange (definitely not modern) sort of libertarian-ism that still sees value in community and community building. As well as a lot of fear of certainly not real form of communism that inevitably leads to totalitarianism. But they're both such caricatures here in service to the overall fable it feels a lot less out of place.
Also, as others have noted, it was unfinished manuscript of notes after Piper's suicide, finished by Kurland with rather limited changes.

I only give this a four star because you can get these same four novels plus the short story collection together in one better purchase, listed as "Terro-Human Future History".

A reasonably good story, but not well written. In this story, the author frequently muddied up the dialogs, where multiple people are speaking, but without indicating who is saying what. At first it appears that a character is being completely contradictory to what he previously said, then you realize he had another character enter the conversation with indicating who was speaking

Some great stuff here, though in several ways becoming quite dated. For instance, not a single chapter goes by without several mentions of lighting up pipes, cigars, cigarettes.

Good for a cheap read

Most of these stories are from authors that made it big in the SF pulp boom of the 1950s. Unfortunately, that period was still a little simplistic by modern standards. The Fantastic was in style and people were not as educated, and so the stories reflect that. They usually educate a point, but plots were not heavily scrutinized.
But hey, for a dollar...

When John Scalzi mentioned this book on his blog, I knew it would be classic and quaint. But I expected it to be a little more timeless. I look forward to seeing what Mr. Scalzi does to update it.

In the meantime, I listened to the audiobook to see what the hubbub was about. Wow. Piper wrote a future that is just like our present, except we have travel to other worlds, contra-gravity, and verdicators (advanced lie detectors). I think I would like to have air cars, but only in rural settings like those in which the initial chapters of the book take place. Anything more urban and you just multiply the current traffic problems by a third dimension.

I would also not like to live in a world where every witness was subjected to verdicators. I don't think that any society would long endure that sort of mental fascism.

Overall, the story was interesting enough and pleasant enough. However, I found the writing fairly clunky, based on the examples above, plus space commodore, atomic age, constant discussion of sapience and mentation, and sun stones. I suppose they fit the view of the future seen from the early 1960s. But as I previously noted, they are pretty dated. I also disliked some stereotypical characters and a bit of deus ex machina at the end. Nevertheless it was enjoyable. Let's see what Scalzi has done with it.

Read it yet again in anticipation of reading Scalzi's remake in the near future. Still a personal favourite, and a must read for anyone who enjoys sci-fi.

Somehow this quiet story remains a personal favourite, after many re-reads years apart.

Sure, it's got that 50's feel with everybody smoking and cocktail hour before dinner, but despite that the characters are real and likeable, and the basic premise and it's conclusion stands. Any communication with aliens past or present requires a starting point, and there's only one thing we all really share.

Read this one - freely available these days from gutenburg if you like.

Part of the long running Paratime Police series, enjoying this short story centres around accepting the premise that reincarnation is scientifically provable.

Get over that hurdle, and the rest is fun with (almost) two party politics, an armed and dueling populace and some YA-ish gunplay.

Personally I hate the bit with the table close to the end, but other than that it's a fun read.

Probably more in the 3.5-3.75 range.
I was worried in the first 10-15 pages, it was feeling a little clunky, but after that it moved along at a pretty fast clip.
A don't want to call this entry in H. Beam Piper's Federation timeline a standard 60s space opera, though I did think that's what I was in store for. As we follow the main character Trask from an initial revenge tail into a more 'rebuilding of civilization' yarn we also get into a lot of politics. While not as intricate, if for no other reason than being much more brief, than Herbert's Dune in universe political discourse I think fans of the latter will find something to enjoy here. Otherwise, just enjoy the good old fashioned space combat or world building stuff if those are your bag.
I know there's a lot of criticism of Piper and his views on libertarianism, democracy, feudalism, and authoritarianism. Besides taking that sort of thing with a grain of sale when reading stories from this era, it is explicitly mentioned in the end of the book that perhaps all currently known forms of government are doomed to failure until we're able to come up with something radically different. Until then, keep refining and hope they last a little longer and work a little better each time. I feel that's perhaps more demonstrative of the overall point, rather than a false dichotomy between pre-existing systems.
Random side note, there is a *very* similar ship name here to what is used in The Expanse. Curious if anyone else noticed or knows if this was an inspiration?

The Cosmic Computer by H. Beam Piper is a solid, mostly planet-bound, space opera. A colony struggles to recover from the ancient System States war. They scavenge old military hardware and dream of finding a supercomputer called Merlin. Piper often raided human history for space opera themes. In this case, the colonists suffer from what looks like a cargo cult. Give it 3.5 old mainframes.½

Piper, H. Beam. Uller Uprising. 1953. Introduction to Uller Uprising by John F. Carr. Introduction: The Silicon World by Dr. John D. Clark. E-book ed., Gateway, 2015. Federation 1.
H. Beam Piper was in his mid-forties when he published his first story in 1947. He was a prolific author of short stories and a few novels until his suicide in 1964. It is commonly thought that he felt despondent because of the low income produced by his work. That work became better known after his death. Jerry Pournelle, then an editor at Ace, republished many of his works in book form in the 1980s, and John Scalzi has written an affectionate reboot of Little Fuzzy, arguably his best novel.
Many of his works are loose alternate histories that remind me of Asimov’s Galactic Empire and Foundation series. Asimov raided Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in ways that are sometimes hard to recognize. Piper also took many liberties with history. According to John F. Carr’s introduction, Uller Uprising was inspired by the 1857 Indian revolt against the Raj and the British East India Company. The Terrans are, I guess, stand-ins for the British and the various Silicon-based aliens for the Indian factions. The original introduction by John Clark is notable as an outline for the ecology and lifeforms of Uller. Clark was an expert on the Conan series and a well-known figure in science fiction circles of the time. He may have written the introduction for the shared-world collection in which Uller Uprising first appeared, or another writer may have used his name as a pseudonym. The novel is planet-based mil-SF in which the combatants are harassed by old-school Nagasaki-class nukes. There are at least two kinds of nostalgia.½

This was 2nd book by H.Beam Piper, and probably my last.

I enjoyed the space combat in this book. Every time the term "Space Viking" was used it just sounded stupid. Piper's politics are on display most of the time. He was a very unhappy man who ended up killing himself. I'll just say I found this book moderately enjoyable but I don't have any desire to revisit Piper's universe at all.

An enjoyable read. The end borrows a bit from Asimov, but I did enjoy this book. Pretty typical in style of the SF of its time. Essentially no important female characters, etc. After reading a bit about Piper I see where he very much injected his own political leanings into the novel, which I suppose is also common.

Very light and enjoyable. I am going to read more books by Piper.

Reading classic SF helps me remember much our culture has changed. Piper was a globalist - characters names were drawn from many countries and cultures. Refreshing to not read a story with only English and made-up names. However, most of female characters were "girls" who were "secretaries." Sigh.

Amid much smoking of cigarettes (who cares about contamination of artifacts), scientists, specialista, and their military escorts study an ancient city of mars.
A Linguist pieces together a "Rosetta stone," by studying what appears to be a periodic table in an auditorium.
Very short, but enjoyable, for the author's Viewpoint of what an ancient Mars University looks like.

This was included on the Audible audiobook I read of John Scalzi's Fuzzy Nation, which was based or inspired by this book. The main story for both was how you decide whether a species is sentient.

In both, a new species is discovered on a planet being mined by a large corporation, and if the species is proven to be sentient, then the corporation will need to stop it's work there. So, of course, they bring out all their lawyers to argue against this, and their hired guns to try to make it a moot point. In both stories, there is one man who fights against them, the one that first discovered the creatures.

It's fairly interesting how they go about deciding exactly how to define sentient beings.

a little dated, but a fun read. the plot brings up a great point, though: at what point should we consider a species sentient?

El inesperado hallazgo de una raza de animales que demuestran rápidamente poseer facultades racionales, desencadena una encarnizada lucha en un planeta distante y extraño. Si la presencia de estos animales significa que el planeta debe considerarse habitado, una poderosa compañía perderá los privilegios de los que hasta ese momento había gozado. Y sus hombres están dispuestos a todo para impedirlo: si es necesario, llegarán incluso a exterminar a los simpáticos pobladores de aquel mundo nuevo.

This novel doesn’t get a lot of respect among Piper fans and scholars. John F. Carr in Typewriter Killer only mentions it seven times in the body of that book. First Cycle was written about 1953 for the Twayne Triplets series from Twayne Books. They were the first of what we now called “shared-world anthologies”. Piper’s Uller Uprising was written for the first in the series, The Petrified Planet. The next Twayne Triplet was a fantasy anthology called Witches Three. The next two proposed installments, science fiction anthologies, were never published.

Piper wrote this story, originally called “The Heavenly Twins”, for the fourth proposed volume which was also to include stories by James Blish and Murray Leinster. It was discovered in Piper’s estate. Michael Kurland made some minor changes and revisions to it, but this version largely matches Piper’s original manuscript. The framing device of having a Terro-Human Federation starship show up was a Kurland addition.

Like The Petrified Planet, the story starts with astronomical history, here the planets Thalassa and Hetaira came to be. They circle a common center of gravity in a system with both yellow and red dwarf stars. Hetaira has much more water than Thalassa. Each planet has its own sentient race.

Carr calls it a “deeply flawed work”, “derivative and flawed in its execution”. It’s a political fable, of sorts, of US/USSR tensions and nuclear war. Carr faults the characterization in this novel and states Piper’s best work, with better characterization, stems from 1957 and later and that the “emotional upheaval” of Piper’s separation from his wife may be responsible for that. That may be true, but I’d also argue that it's hard to do a lot of characterization in a 201 page novel where the first half covers millions of years of evolution and cultural development on the two planets.

Piper’s sympathy is clearly with the Hetairans, a sexually promiscuous race who do not have nations but “gangs” and “combines” as their organizing units. They do not have the religious zeal of the Thalassans who have groups more like human families.

Starting on page 203, Piper introduces his main historical analog: the development of Marxism and the Russian Revolution. Here this is the Thalassan work The Organic State.

The scale of the novel becomes much finer at this point as we see the development of radio and attempts by Hetairans to see if they can communicate with Thalassa which they have come to learn has a sentient race of its own.

An expedition is sent to Thalassa, and the Organic State begins to have designs on Hetaira as a water rich world with plenty of room for its population which is ten times Hetaira’s.

The Hetairans are appalled at what they’ve learned of Thalassans with their “hereditary bondage – called ‘government’”. They decide to “sterilize the source of the infection” and launch a nuclear war on Thalassa. Unknown to them, however, Thalassa has developed its own nuclear missiles.

When the Federation shows up, they find two destroyed planets. However, they do find some Hetairans on a mining colony on another world of the system. They’ve lived there since the war 600 years ago. Piper’s sympathy with the Hetairans is made even more clear when the Federation described them as “quite extraordinary”, “a really intelligent people”.

I didn’t find this that bad of a novel. It kept my interest though it is definitely minor Piper.

review of
H. Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - November 1, 2020

This was great, something that wd appeal to 'animal rights' folks, wch is more or less what I am even though I eat meat. It's from 1962 so it even predates John Brunner's (admittedly greater) ecological novel The Sheep Look Up (1972) (see my review here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/344636-a-review-of-john-brunner-s-ecologica... ) wch means it deserves a special place in my small pantheon of environmentally sensitive SF.

In this day & age of the PANDEMIC PANIC so much of what I read speaks to me about the extraordinary delusions I feel increasingly suffocated by. To me, the following describes a typical QUARANTINIAC.

""If you don't like the facts, you ignore them, and if you need facts, dream up some you do like," she said. "That's typical rejection of reality. Not psychotic, not even psychoneurotic. But certainly not sane."" - p 15

Of course, BELIEVERS, might find that descriptive of me instead of of themselves.

On a planet that's being exploited by big business unfettered by any concern for life there because there supposedly is no intelligent life there a prospector discovers a little creature that he calls a "fuzzy" & the more he's around sd creature the more he realizes that it's very intelligent indeed.

"Then holding it where Little Fuzzy could watch, he uncrewed the cap and then screwed it on again.

""There, now. You try it."

"Little Fuzzy looked up inquiringly, then took the bottle, sitting down and holding it between his knees. Unfortunately, he tried twisting it the wrong way and only screwed the cap on tighter. He yeeked plaintively.

""No, go ahead. You can do it."

"Little Fuzzy look[ed] at the bottle again. Then he tried twisting the cap the other way, and it loosened. He gave a yeek that couldn't possibly be anything but "Eureka!" and promptly took it off, holding it up. After being commended, he examined both the bottle and the cap, feeling the threads, and then screwed the cap back on again.

""You know, you're a smart Little Fuzzy."" - p 20

I wonder if that wd work w/ a raccoon.

As Little Fuzzy becomes more accustomed to Papa Jack's good intentions his family moves in w/ them, including a baby.

"Baby Fuzzy was clinging to her fur with one hand and holding a slice of pool-ball fruit, on which he was munching, with the other. He crammed what was left of the fruit into his mouth, climbed up on Jack and sat down on his head again. Have to do something to break him of that. One of these days, he'd be getting too big for it." - p 30

A gesture takes place across screens that wd be right at home in today's socially distanced world.

"They shook their own hands at one another in the ancient Terran-Chinese gesture that was used on communication screens" - p 42

The big business that's exploiting the planet will have its interests dramatically damaged if the Fuzzies turn out to be thinking beings b/c the planet will be reclassified as protected. This is the crux of the struggle.

"Leonard Kellogg looked pained. "What I was about to say, Victor, is that both Rainsford and this man Holloway seem convinced that these things they call Fuzzies aren't animals at all. They believe them to be sapient beings."

""Well, that's—" He bit them off short as the significance of what Kellogg had just said hit him. "Good God, Leonard! I beg your pardon abjectly; I don't blame you for taking it seriously. Why that would make Zarathustra a Class-IV inhabited planet."" - p 44

SO, the managers of the big business proceed to try to prevent any classification of the fuzzies as anything but animals.

""Holloway spoke, on the tape, of their soft and silky fur."

""Good. Emphasize that in your report. As soon as it's published, the Company will offer two thousand sols apiece for Fuzzy pelts. By the time Rainford's report brings anybody here from Terra, we may have them all trapped out."

"Kellogg brgan to look worried.

""But, Victor, that's genocide!"

""Nonsense! Genocide is defined as the extermination of a race of sapient beings. These are fur-bearing animals. It's up to you and Ernst Mallin to prove that."" - p 47

Hence, the race to prove or disprove sapience is on.

"Riebeck said, "If they're working together on a common project, they must be communicating somehow."

""It isn't communication, it's symbolization. You simply can't think sapiently except in verbal symbols. Try it. Not something like chnaging the spools on a recorder or field-stripping a pistol; they're just learned tricks. I mean ideas."

""How about Helen Keller?" Rainsford asked. "Mean to say she only started thinking sapiently after Anna Sulivan taught her what words were?"

""No, of course not. She thought sapiently—And she only thought in sense-imagery limited to feeling." She looked at Rainsford reproachfully; he'd knocked a breach in one of her fundamental postulates. "Of course, she had inherited the cerebroneural equipment for sapient thinking." She let that trail off, before somebody asked her how she knew the Fuzzies hadn't.

""I'll suggest, just to keep the argument going, that speech couldn't have been invented without pre-existing sapience," Jack said." - p 53

That's an interesting discussion, don't you think? I'm preoccupied w/ the idea of what I call "pre-linguistic thinking": in other words what happens in the mind before something comes out of it in language. Some might argue that until the language is formed it's not thought — but what about what's being kicked about here in relation to Helen Keller? Or in relation to a pre-lingual child? If what's going on in their mind is non-lingual & it's not thought than what is it?

""Wait a minute," Jack interrupted. "Before we go any deeper, let's agree on a definition of sapience."

"Van Riebeek laughed. "Ever try to get a definition of life from a biologist?" he asked. "Or a definition of number from a mathematician?"

""That's about it," Ruth looked at the Fuzzies, who were looking at their colored-ball construction as though wondering if they could add anything more without spoiling the design. "I'd say: a level of mentation qualitatively different from nonsapience in that it includes ability to symbolize ideas and store and transmit them, ability to generalize and ability to form abstract ideas. There; I didn't say a word about talk-and-build-a-fire, did I?"" - p 54

145 pages later someone's actually testifying on the subject in court! Whatever happened in that time?! The testimony is given into a lie detector of sorts so that any naughty business is caught right quick.

""what, in you professional opinion, is the difference between sapient and nonsapient mentation?"

""The ability ot think consciously," he stated. The globe stayed blue.

""Do you mean that nonsapient animals aren't conscious, or do you mean they don't think?"

""Well, neither. Any life form with a central nervous system has some consciousness—awareness of existence and of its surroundings. And anything having a brain thinks, to use the term at its loosest. What I meant was that only the sapient mind thinks and knows that it is thinking."

"He was perfectly safe so far. He talked about sensory stimuli and responses, and about conditioned reflexes. He went back to the first century Pre-Atomic, and Pavlov and Korzybski and Freud. The globe never flickered." - p 159

In other words, he hadn't gotten to lying about the Fuzzies yet.

Well, it doesn't turn out too good for the bad guys, a key corporate player gets sentenced to death. He beats them to the Kool-Aid.

""At twenty-two thirty, the prisoner went to bed, still wearing his shirt. He pulled the blankets up over his head. The deputy observing him thought nothing of that; many prisoners do that, on account of the light. He tossed about for a while, and then appeared to fall asleep.

""When a guard went in to rouse him this morning, the cot, under the blanket, was found saturated with blood. Kellogg had cut his throat, by sawing the zipper track of his shirt back and forth till he severed his jugular vein. He was dead."" - p 163

That resonated with me. I was put in jail once b/c I'm such an evil demon & must be put down (& also b/c a rather unscrupulous person arranged this) & I hunkered under the too-short blanket in the pretty cold cell on the concrete bed & thought about sawing my arm arteries w/ my zipper pull b/c that was the sharpest thing I had at my disposal. I'm sure the world is very thankful that I didn't b/c now my bk Unconscious Suffocation - A Personal Journey through the PANDEMIC PANIC is here to bedevil the zombies.

H Beam only made it to age 60 so there's another one I've outlived. I can see that I'm going to have to read more by him. It's the least I can do for the young feller.