Creator / H. Beam Piper

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Henry Beam Piper (March 23, 1904 – circa  November 6, 1964) was an American SF writer, best known for the series Paratime (which is about exploiting The Multiverse for fun and profit); the Terrohuman Future History, or TFH, which is about the human race spreading throughout the stars, and the cultural rising and falling that happens as a result; and Little Fuzzy, an arc within the TFH series about the discovery of intelligent life on a settled planet.

A two-level real-life case of an Embarrassing First Name — Piper told people he went by the initial because he didn't like the name Horace; his actual first name was Henry.

He shot himself in 1964 because of financial problems. A check was literally in the mail.

Works written by H. Beam Piper include:

• Crisis In 2140 (co-authored with John J. McGuire)
• "Crossroads Of Destiny"
• Embedded
• First Cycle (co-authored with Michael Kurland)
• Four Day Planet
• Fuzzies And Other People
• "He Walked Around the Horses"
• Junkyard Planet
• Little Fuzzy
• Lord Kalvan Of Otherwhen
• Murder In The Gunroom
• "Naudsonce"
• The Other Human Race
• Paratime
• A Planet For Texans (co-authored with John J. McGuire)
• "A Slave Is A Slave"
• Space Viking
• "Time and Time Again"
• Time Crime (co-authored with John F. Carr)
• Uller Uprising

Tropes found in his works include:

• Accidental Truth: In The Cosmic Computer, Conn Maxwell returns from Earth with the results of his investigations into the rumors of an abandoned supercomputer on his home planet. He concludes that the device never existed, but rather than say so he organizes a search in order to stimulate the economy and improve morale. Then the computer is discovered....
• Alternate Universe: A bare minimum of Once per Episode in Paratime.
  • His first published story, "Time and Time Again" (1947), launched an Alternate Universe when the dying main character Allan Hartley's consciousness was flung thirty years back in time to 1945 to his then-thirteen-year-old body — and decided to change history to prevent World War III in which he'd been killed. His plans involved having his father, Blake Hartley, become President in 1960; two later stories, "The Mercenaries" set in 1965 and "Day of the Moron" set in 1968, mention President Hartley, so the plan was successful to that extent at least...
  • "He Walked Around the Horses", a sort of proto-Paratime, had a mysteriously vanished diplomat from our Earth stumble into a parallel universe where the American and French Revolutions failed. Although this story isn't explicitly labelled a Paratime story, the first specifically Paratime story makes an apparent reference to the incident as having been accidentally caused by a Paratime policeman. At least the dates and a one-sentence description of the events match up. The disappearance of Benjamin Bathurst is Truth in Television, and one of the Great Historical Mysteries, frequently bracketed with Judge Crater. This is because most accounts are confused about how quickly he disappeared; in fact, between the time he was last seen and when he was noted missing was plenty of time for him to be robbed and murdered, particularly since he was in a crime-ridden area. Piper's own story turns on its being a much shorter time than reality.
  • In "Crossroads of Destiny", several people brainstorm ideas for a TV series based on alternate-history scenarios. A bystander chimes in... and several clues (most notable the odd dollar bill he was carrying, showing a picture of George Washington much older than when he was, in the narrator's history, killed in 1777) imply that he was a person from our world somehow conveyed into another timeline.
• Artificial Meat: "Carniculture vats" are common in the "Terro-Human Future History", although the products are implied to be inferior to real dead animals (whether ultimately Terran, or of extraterrestrial origin like Zarathustran veldbeest).
  from Space Viking: Every Viking ship had its own carniculture vats, but men tired of carniculture meat, and fresh meat was always in demand.
• Brown Note: The aliens in "Naudsonce" experience sound as physical sensations. The Terran expedition finds it necessary to bury their water pump because it gets the aliens blissed out to the point of neglecting their farms; their linguist is handicapped because her voice causes the aliens extreme discomfort.
• Continuity Nod:
  • Carlos von Schlichten and Paula Quinton have a romance in Uller Uprising; the short story "Oomphel in the Sky" has a reference to a Paula von Schlichten Fellowship, which is in sociography, Paula Quinton's field.
  • The short story "Naudsonce" named a exploratory starship Hubert Penrose after an important character in "Omnilingual".
• Death from Above: Dire Dawn in Uller Uprising. One of the rebellious Ullerians worked on another planet for a time, on a human project. It taught him to make a very deadly, very old, weapon.
• Death World: Fenris in Four-Day Planet comes very close, if not outright qualifying.
• Diplomatic Impunity: Treated with great realism in "He Walked Around the Horses."
• Due to the Dead: Are the Little Fuzzies intelligent? Well, they bury their dead.
• Earth That Used to Be Better:
  • In ''Space Viking", the main character worries about his home planet's civilization declining, and a historian agrees: "That's what happened to the Terran Federation, by the way. The good men all left to colonize, and the stuffed shirts and yes-men and herd-followers and safety-firsters stayed on Terra and tried to govern the Galaxy."
  • In "The Keeper", Earth is a backwater world of the Fifth Empire (Piper's other stories only cover his future history up to the glory days of the First Empire); most people, including most of its inhabitants, are unaware that it is the planet where humanity originated.
• Everybody Smokes: Many of his characters are smokers. Lord Kalvan eventually breaks his pipe and lighter and is forced to use a local version with a flaming twig to light it off.
• Fantastic Legal Weirdness:
  • "Last Enemy'' from his Paratime universe gives us a society in which reincarnation has now been proven, so their view of death is far more relaxed. Assassination is a legal profession because of this (though there are certain rules, such as no nukes). Near the end of the story, lawsuits start to be launched by people trying to recover property they had in their past lives, though we don't see whether any succeed.
  • Piper's Terro-Human Future History books have the veridicator, a Lie Detector that can scan people's brains to tell if they're lying or not almost flawlessly. It's commonly used when interrogating people and during trials. Court orders are required for this, but there's no sign the Terran Federation law has a legal right against self-incrimination
• Fantastic Slurs:
  • Ullerans are known as "geeks". Partially through onomatopoeia from some local languages, partially because some Ulleran cultures kill small, iguana-like food animals by biting off their heads.
  • The Khooghra of Yggdrasil are officially sapient, but so stupid that calling a Terran a "son of a Khooghra" once led to a shooting. The man so described knew he was being insulted.
• Fictional Flag: In the novella "When in the Course..." the new flag adopted for Hos-Hostigos is a quarter-arc rainbow on a white field, chosen so that anyone who was annexed later would at least be able to find his colors in the flag.
  • While the version in Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen is a red keystone (a reference to OTL Pennsylvania) on a green field. “Darken the green a little more and make the scarlet a dull maroon, and they’d be good combat uniform colors.”
• The Federation: The Terran Federation during the early part of the TFH.
• Feudal Future: Used in a variety of ways in the later eras of the TFH. The "Sword Worlds", from where the titular raiders of Space Viking come from, are straight-up feudal with each planet either ruled by a king or split between several independent continent-sized duchies, which are divided up into a range of smaller estates down to baronies of farms or factories. The later Empire permits local planets considerable autonomy under a wide range of forms of government (as long as they acknowledge the sovereignty of the Emperor) from republics to "republics" to various forms of monarchy.
• Genre Shift: While Piper mostly wrote SF, he wrote one mystery novel, Murder In The Gunroom. There is a very subtle reference to the Paratime stories, which he was working on around the same time.
• Giving Radio to the Romans: Calvin Morrisson in Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen.
• Hideous Hangover Cure: Not actually hideous or a hangover cure; the "alcodote-vitimine pill" won't let you get drunk at all.
• Homage: Traveller revises the Sword Worlds of Space Viking to suit the Traveller universe.
• Horse of a Different Color: Freyan oukry, which are used to make Westerns. Most people in the TFH seem to think horses are extinct; a minor news story in Four Day Planet mentions a movie shot using real horses.
• Human Aliens:
  • The Freyans, spelled out in the novella "When In the Course..." They're human enough to interbreed with Terrans, despite the Terran doctor insisting it's impossible. Piper apparently had some explanation in mind, most likely some variant of Transplanted Humans, but it was never revealed. The story was Retconned out of Future History, and substantially rewritten to become Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen in the Paratime milieu. Although Paula Quinton from Uller Uprising states that she's part Freyan, so the concept wasn't completely eliminated.
  • Also Martians, in the TFH: they died out 50 millennia ago, but statues, paintings, and mummified corpses in "Omnilingual" are specifically stated to look fully human. Considering the short story "Genesis" and the Paratime series both claimed Earth humans are descended from Martian colonists, Piper may very well have had this origin in mind for the TFH too.
• Humans Are White : Averted. While explicit physical descriptions of characters are rare, the prevalence of multi-ethnic names indicates that most of them are some shade of brown.
• In the Future, We Still Have Roombas: In The Cosmic Computer, set in the waning days of the Terran Federation, even an impoverished and somewhat backwards planet like Poictesme has "serving-robots" (which, thanks to "contragravity", float in the air.) Centuries later, in Space Viking, the people of the Sword-Worlds still make use of such technology. (On the planet Marduk — in spite of that planet's more democratic pretensions compared to the explicitly feudal-aristocratic Sword-Worlds — they still tend to use human servants, at least among the planet's upper crust, though this is likely a status thing.) Centuries after that novel, in the era of the Empire (the short stories "A Slave is a Slave" and "Ministry of Disturbance") serving-robots and cleaning robots are still in use. Throughout this sweep of fictional futuristic history, robots are merely utilitarian machines, with no themes of true "artificial intelligence", robot uprisings, technological trans-humanism in the form of machine intelligences, and so forth. Although, there is "Merlin" in The Cosmic Computer. And even Merlin is depicted more as a very capable analytical machine than anything like a true "mind".
• Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: Except in Paratime.
• Language Drift: Most of the TFH uses a kind of linguistic potpourri that's basically every modern language run through a blender at once.
• Lie Detector: TFH law is based around the "veridicator", a 100% accurate lie-detector.
• Like a Duck Takes to Water:
  • Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen. He quickly goes from State Trooper to Great King.
  • Lucas Trask takes to being a Space Viking like said fish.
• Lost Language: "Omnilingual" is about decoding the dead Martian language. Martha spots a periodic table in a derelict library, and realises what it is. The names of the elements might not be much, but they're a start.
• The Masquerade: One of the primary tropes of the Paratime stories: you can go visit other universes, but you're not supposed to let the locals catch on that you're from another universe... It might cut into the 'profit' end.
• Moving Roadways: In Crisis in 2140 (also known as Null-ABC; co-authored with John J. McGuire) the different strips of the "beltway" top out at only twenty miles per hour, and coexist with ubiquitous personal flight.
  "...he crossed the sidewalk and stepped onto the beltway, moving across the strips until he came to the twenty m.p.h. strip....Then he came to the building on which he had parked his 'copter, and left the beltway, entering and riding up to the landing stage on the helical escalator."
• Multiple Government Polity: The Empire of his later-set Terro-Human Future History stories practices this. In "A Slave is a Slave" the fundamental rule of the Empire is that there is to be one overall government in the inhabited galaxy, and one planetary government (subordinated to the Empire) on each inhabited planet, but otherwise the Empire is not very picky about the form that planetary government takes (as one character notes "The Empire does not guarantee every planet an honest, intelligent and efficient government; just a single one"). There are some rules — the Empire forbids outright chattel slavery, for example — but in "Ministry of Disturbance" the planetary government of Aditya (the same planet featured in "A Slave is a Slave" but now centuries later) is now a People's Republic of Tyranny, while Durendal (once one of the Sword-Worlds featured in Space Viking) is a Planetary Kingdom with a quasi-feudalistic social and governmental system (but the king is a completely useless fop).
• Mundane Utility: We're going mining on Fluorine-Tainted Niflheim, the Planetary Hell... volcano mining with atomic warheads.
• Narrative Profanity Filter: "I'll fix the expurgated unprintability!"
• Nuke 'Em: Ship-to-ship combat in Space Viking, the climax of Uller Uprising.
• Our Souls Are Different: The Last Enemy involved a world where reincarnation was a proven scientific fact, and the resulting cultural changes. Most important: death was considered a temporary inconvenience at worst, leading to suicide parties being a socially accepted practice and frequent duels to the death taking place.
• Past-Life Memories: The retrieval of these by means of mediums channeling the souls of the recently deceased, proving one theory of reincarnation true in The Last Enemy, sparks the plot. This leads to social chaos as people sue to reclaim property which they had in former lives.
• The Plan: "Ministry of Disturbance".
• Planet Baron: By the time of Space Viking this is more or less the norm among the Sword-Worlds. Most of the Sword-Worlds are either ruled by a planetary king, or else have lesser nobles actively vying to become planetary kings. The Space Vikings also establish planetary kingdoms or planetary princedoms on many non-Sword-World planets.
• Planet Terra: Used throughout the TFH.
• Public Domain Stories: Much of Piper’s work is out of copyright. It can easily be found at Project Gutenberg, among other places.
• Reincarnation: The focus of the plot in The Last Enemy, with an exploration of the social effects that result in its being proven to exist, along with two political factions fighting over their rival theories about how it works.
• Silicon-Based Life: Life on Uller, including four-armed humanoid reptiles and creatures like hexapodal pine cones.
• Space Cossacks: The Space Vikings appropriate the remnant of the System States Alliance's navy, take off to space, and settle on Excalibur, a planet too far away that The Federation hasn't even heard of. Once said Terran Federation collapses, the Vikings start raiding its former territories.
  "At the end of the Big War, ten thousand men and women on Abigor, refusing to surrender, had taken the remnant of the System States Alliance navy to space, seeking a world the Federation had never heard of and wouldn't find for a long time. Eight centuries later, their descendants have begun raiding into the territory once held by the now-collapsed Terran Federation."
• Space Pirates: Or, more accurately, Space Vikings. They don't board and rob ships, they nuke cities from orbit and loot any cities that chose to surrender.
• Spheroid Dropship: The starships of the Terro-Human Future History aren't actually drop ships — they aren't just military assault shuttles, they're full-fledged starships, used for all purposes from freighters to passenger liners to Space Navy warships. Other than that, they do fit every criterion of the trope: Starships in the Terro-Human Future History are invariably spherical, make vertical take-offs and landings from planetary surfaces, and have single-stage surface-to-space capability (and beyond that, are fully capable of Faster-Than-Light Travel by means of hyperdrive). They are also on the large side — described as hundreds or even thousands of feet in diameter; in "A Slave is a Slave" an Imperial ship-of-the-line is almost a mile in diameter.
• Standard Sci-Fi History: The Terro-Human Future History is one of the Trope Codifiers. Space Viking, for example, is not just a story of space barbarians raiding the ruins of the Old Federation, it's a story of the Space Vikings' raid-and-trade bases becoming the kernels of a new civilization.
• Stuff Blowing Up: Ranging from exploding bullets to fusion fireball bombs that destroy everything within a thousand miles with a miniature sun.
• Suicide Is Painless: In The Last Enemy, reincarnation is a proven fact, so attitudes toward death have become much more casual. People that want to move on to their next incarnation will often throw "suicide parties", saying farewell before they off themselves.
• Technology Marches On: The TFH stories include videophones, antigravity, faster-than-light travel... and... cameras that use film which must be developed before viewing and huge computers that fill whole rooms and are programmed via plugboards.
• Tomato Surprise:
  • "The Return".
  • And "Crossroads of Destiny".
• The 'Verse: The "Terro-human Future History", including the novels Four-Day Planet, Uller Uprising, Little Fuzzy and its direct sequels, The Cosmic Computer, Space Viking, and various short stories, chronicling (albeit very intermittently) thousands of years of human history, including the rise and fall of the Terran Federation, the (eventual) rise of the First Galactic^note noted in-universe to really only control a small portion of the Galaxy, though still a huge area by human standards Empire (a hardnosed but rather more benevolent than usual example of "the Empire"), and eventually (by the time of the final story by internal chronology that is generally including in this canon, "The Keeper") the Fifth Empire—by that point at least thousands if not tens of thousands of years into the future. These stories are linked by a common history (including a nuclear war on Terra which left the northern hemisphere devastated, meaning the human race's interplanetary and eventually interstellar civilization is based in South America, South Africa, and Australasia), the use of the "Atomic Era" to date things (its epoch being the first artificial self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction, in 1942 of the Gregorian calendar), various bits of shared tech (antigravity, invariably referred to as "contragravity"; "collapsium", a form of super-dense matter suitable for building armor that can withstand direct hits from nuclear weapons; and spaceships equipped with both "Abbott lift-and-drive engines" and "Dillingham hyperdrive engines"), and assorted call-backs and shout-outs from one work to another.
• Video Phone: Piper made extensive use of these — "visiphones", "communications screens", or "telescreens" — in both his Paratime and "Terro-Human Future History" settings, and in the standalone novel Lone Star Planet (AKA A Planet For Texans). On the one hand, there are some shrewdly-guessed-at details (such "screens" may be used for other functions, like watching television programs, which rather nicely anticipates the multi-functional nature of a real-world desktop or laptop or smartphone, which can be used to make video calls, and also to watch YouTube videos, and to do a great many other things). On the other hand, there is still plenty of Zeerust, with references to visiphone or telescreen booths, or a character who is away from home telling people to leave a videophone message...by propping up a card with a message written on it in front of the camera.
• We Will All Fly in the Future: The existence of "contragravity" makes this one ubiquitous throughout Piper's "Terrohuman Future History". Buildings have "landing-stages" on their roofs; Little Fuzzy even describes a "streetless contragravity city of a new planet that had never known ground traffic". In Uller Uprising, there are "aircars" (and military "airjeeps"), tanks can all fly, and even "dump-trucks and powershovels and bulldozers" are equipped with contragravity and are therfore flying dump-trucks and powershovels and bulldozers. Space Viking has "egg-shaped one-man air-cavalry mounts". In Space Viking, a planet not having ubiquitous Flying Cars classes it as a "Neobarbarian" world, a place which has (at least partially) de-civilized.
• Writer on Board: Piper believed in reincarnation and wrote a Paratime story about a world where it was proven to the hilt. Even with this, it was still a pretty good story. Perhaps more importantly, in that story? The problem's because reincarnation is proven to the hilt — and they've started to get too good for The Masquerade's sake at retrieving memories of past lives...
• Xenoarchaeology: The short story "Omnilingual" is about an archaeological expedition excavating the ruins of an extinct Martian civilization. The main character is a linguist who struggles to translate the Martian language without reference points, until she finds a periodic table.