Military history of an alternate universeH. Beam Piper’s science fiction novel Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen is the final installment in his Paratime series. The novel, published in 1965, is actually an amalgamation of two novellas, Gunpowder God and Down Styphon!, that were previously published in the pages of Analog Science Fiction magazine. In the Paratime series, an advanced human civilization has discovered that multiple universes exist, each with its own unique timeline that varies from the history of our Earth. A law enforcement agency, the Paratime Police, is charged with keeping this discovery a secret and stopping those who criminally use paratemporal travel for their own personal gain.
When paratime travelers jump from one timeline to another, bystanders occasionally get caught in the time displacement field of the conveyor equipment. Calvin Morrison, an officer of the Pennsylvania State Police, is one such hapless victim of this phenomenon. Though he knows nothing about paratime, he is accidentally pulled from our Earth and transported to an alternate world. The Pennsylvania landscape is still recognizable, but the civilization that resides there is very different. Morrison finds himself in an America with a European feudal society that has reached a level of technology roughly equivalent to our Earth’s 17th century. Rather than lament his involuntary displacement, Officer Morrison decides to make lemons from lemonade. As a history buff, he has studied enough wars to enable him to introduce military technologies that the inhabitants of this world have never seen. For example, one religious cult has maintained a monopoly on the manufacture of gunpowder, attributing its powers to magic. Morrison, however, knows the basic underlying chemistry of gunpowder and is able to impart that knowledge to his allies. In reward for his military prowess and scientific contributions, Calvin is dubbed Lord Kalvan of the kingdom of Hostigos and assumes command of that nation’s armed forces.
Given the alternate universe angle, this is technically science fiction, but it reads more like military history. Piper obviously revels in the minutiae of troop movements within the fictional world he has created. The resulting novel is like sitting beside a weapons enthusiast as he plays a solitary wargame you only partially understand. Personally, I didn’t really care much when Hostigos deployed 500 cavalry and 1500 infantry with four eight-pounders of artillery to outflank their enemies. Those sorts of details are what make up the bulk of the text in this novel. Readers who are interested in that degree of specificity in military matters will feel right at home in Piper’s personal military fantasy camp.
The science fiction, fan, however, will likely be more interested in what Piper has to say about Paratime. As always, Paratime Police officer Verkan Vall is on the case. This novel’s opening chapters and epilogue go into much fascinating detail about the mechanics of Piper’s Paratime multiverse. For that reason, this is a valuable book in the Paratime series, but such passages only occupy a small portion of what is mostly a military narrative.
After Piper’s death, a few science fiction writers published a Kalvan series of half a dozen novels set in this alternate history. Though I haven’t read any of those non-Piper works, Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen hardly seems to merit such treatment. This is a fine science fiction novel, but not one of Piper’s best works. I prefer other Paratime adventures that focus more on Verkan Vall, such as Police Operation, Last Enemy, or Time Crime.
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Less profound than its predecessor
Over the course of his career, science fiction writer H. Beam Piper established a fictional timeline known as the Terro-Human Future History, which consists of a total of 16 novels and short stories. Like Frank Herbert’s Dune, Piper’s speculative history charts the diaspora of the human race over thousands of years as we spread out through the stars to colonize other planets. One such world is the planet Zarathustra, where a trilogy of novels takes place roughly 600 years from now. This trilogy, known as the Fuzzy series, began with Little Fuzzy, published in 1962. Its sequel was published in 1964 under the title of The Other Human Race. In 1976, however, the title was changed to Fuzzy Sapiens, which has stuck with it ever since.
You don’t have to know much about Piper’s Terro-Human Future History to enjoy the Fuzzy books, but you do need to have read Little Fuzzy to understand what’s going on in Fuzzy Sapiens. The story of this sequel begins about a week after the events related in Little Fuzzy. In that first book, a gem prospector named Jack Holloway discovered a species of monkey-like beings, dubbed fuzzies. A legal battle ensued between Holloway’s friends, who asserted that fuzzies are an intelligent life form that deserves human rights, and a resource-exploiting corporation, who asserted that fuzzies are just dumb animals. This brought up some fascinating philosophical debates about the nature of what it means to be human, but since a decision was reached at the end of Little Fuzzy, the Fuzzy franchise shows it is losing steam in this second installment.
In the week that has passed since the first novel ended, Jack Holloway and most of his cronies have been appointed to government positions. Piper, when writing science fiction, enjoys playing with imaginary governments like other people enjoy playing chess. In this novel, the fledgling government of Zarathustra encounters a few fuzzy-related problems they need to solve, and Piper moves his civil servants around the bureaucratic game board to get them resolved. Despite quite a bit of recapping, it is still quite difficult to keep track of which characters in this large ensemble cast are scientists, lawyers, administrators, military officers, and so on. The corporate villains from the last book have now proven they’re not evil after all, so everyone works together towards a common good. Piper introduces a few new villains, but they are just discussed in absentia for most of the book while the heroes go about their administrative duties.
An undocumented fuzzy surprisingly shows up in a main character’s office, and no one knows where he came from. This leads to suspicions that some nefarious gangsters may be capturing fuzzies for slavery or human trafficking. Meanwhile, Holloway and friends are setting up an agency for people to adopt fuzzies as pets, which quite frankly doesn’t seem all that different from fuzzy trafficking. While so much ado was made in the last book about the humanness of the fuzzies, in this novel they are reduced to something equivalent to housecats that talk. Piper previously used the fuzzy species to comment on imperialism, colonialism, and Indigenous rights, but here the only parallel is that the independent fuzzies are confined to a reservation, similar to Native Americans, which Piper portrays as a good thing.
Piper’s imaginative writing is still entertaining as always, but unlike its predecessor this fuzzy sequel just feels empty of meaningful ideas. It doesn’t make me excited to read the third book in the trilogy, Fuzzies and Other People, which wasn’t published until 1984, two decades after Piper’s death.
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Nearly his complete works
The publisher Wildside Press has produced an extensive line of inexpensive ebook collections of genre fiction resurrected from the pages of vintage pulp fiction magazines. Their Megapack series includes dozens of science fiction titles, including both multi-author anthologies and collections devoted to individual authors. Among those featured in the latter category is H. Beam Piper, an exceptional sci-fi author who was active from the late 1940s until his death in 1960. The H. Beam Piper Megapack is essentially a complete works collection of Piper’s writings up to 1963 (several of his works were published posthumously). His works published after that date were likely omitted due to copyright restrictions. Rather than list what’s in the Megapack, it’s quicker just to state what is missing: Piper’s novels The Other Human Race (a.k.a. Fuzzy Sapiens) and Fuzzies and Other People, from his Fuzzies series; his novellas Gunpowder God and Down Styphon!, which were eventually combined into a novel, Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen; and his novel First Cycle, which was completed posthumously by another author and published in the early 1980s.
What this Megapack does include is a lot of fantastic science fiction. Piper is a master at creating well-thought-out worlds rich in intricate detail. His two main personal interests were collecting firearms and libertarian politics, so naturally many of his stories deal with political or military matters. Piper often crafts Byzantine interplanetary bureaucracies just to prove a point about democracy vs. autocracy or capitalism vs. socialism, for example, but in the process he never fails to fully flesh out the social, cultural, religious, and economic dimensions of his fictional worlds as well.
Piper published two major science fiction series. The first is the Paratime series, which was briefly introduced in his 1948 story “He Walked Around the Horses,” but really gets into full swing with the novella Police Operation, published later that year. In this fictional universe, the Paratime Police patrol the multitude of alternate timelines that result from myriad deviations in historical events. Time Crime, Genesis, and Last Enemy are other fine entries in this series. Piper’s other series is his Terro-Human Future History, which chronicles the future of mankind from the present Atomic Age to over 300 centuries in the future. Piper mapped out a complex chronology of mankind’s interstellar diaspora, which he revealed in an essay, “The Future History,” published in the fanzine Zenith (not available in this Megapack, but you can find it for free online). The Future History stories are only loosely connected, so they can be enjoyed individually or as part of the grand whole. Among his best works are Omnilingual and Little Fuzzy, the latter being the first of a trilogy of Fuzzies novels that are a subset of the Future History timeline.
The H. Beam Piper Megapack also includes two non-science fiction works by Piper: Murder in the Gunroom, a mystery novel; and Rebel Raider, a nonfiction biographical narrative of Confederate commander John Singleton Mosby; the latter of which is actually quite entertaining. By giving this collection a five-star rating, I don’t mean to imply that every selection is a masterpiece. In fact, Murder in the Gunroom, A Slave Is a Slave, Day of the Moron, and The Keeper are not very good, and some other selections are merely passable. Overall, however, if you are going to purchase a retrospective collection of a science fiction writer’s work, this is a great one to buy. Following the career trajectory of Piper’s visionary adventures is a wild and enjoyable ride.
Stories in this collection
(Many of the works in this collection have been reviewed individually. Click on titles below.)
Time and Time Again
He Walked Around the Horses
Police Operation
The Mercenaries
Last Enemy
Flight from Tomorrow
Operation R.S.V.P.
Dearest
Temple Trouble
Genesis
Day of the Moron
Uller Uprising
Null-ABC
The Return
Time Crime
Omnilingual
The Edge of the Knife
The Keeper
Lone Star Planet
Graveyard of Dreams
Ministry of Disturbance
Hunter Patrol
Crossroads of Destiny
The Answer
Oomphel in the Sky
Four-Day Planet
Naudsonce
Little Fuzzy
A Slave is a Slave
Space Viking
The Cosmic Computer
Rebel Raider
Murder in the Gunroom
Entertaining nonfiction Civil War biography
I’m a fan of H. Beam Piper’s writings in science fiction, and I read this work as the final piece in The H. Beam Piper Megapack, a collection of nearly his complete works published by Wildside Press. Rebel Raider was originally published in the December 1950 issue of True: The Men’s Magazine. It tells the story of real-life Confederate guerrilla John Singleton Mosby who commanded a party of irregular partisans, known as Mosby’s Raiders, that made incursions into Union-held territory to antagonize and terrorize the Union Army.
Although I was fully aware that this was not a work of science fiction before I began reading it, I expected it to be a work of historical fiction. Instead, it appears to be an almost entirely factual nonfiction account of Mosby’s life and career, as researched and rewritten by Piper. Only the slightest amount of fictionalization is injected into battles or conversations to make the reader feel as if he or she were a spectator at these historical events. The characters, including Mosby himself, don’t amount to much more than names augmented by biographical facts, with little or no hint of their personalities, just essentially a resume of deeds done and missions accomplished.
Although I do enjoy reading history I am by no means a Civil War buff, but even a layman like myself can find much to appreciate in Rebel Raider. Piper was an arms collector and self-professed ballistics expert, and his gun nuttery is often apparent in his science fiction works. Here, however, although he does mention the arms used in various situations, he doesn’t get overly carried away with technical details of the weapons like he does in his mystery novel Murder in the Gunroom. You don’t have to be a hardcore military buff to enjoy Piper’s narrative and learn an interesting fact or two in the process. This chronicle of Mosby’s war record provides an interesting perspective on the Civil War, and his post-war career, briefly touched upon here, is also fascinating.
Obviously, Rebel Raider is an anomaly in Piper’s body of work, and fans of his impressive career in science fiction need not feel compelled to read it, but it is a good, brisk, and entertaining read for those interested in American history.
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A stagnating planet searches for its techno-savior
This science fiction novel by H. Beam Piper was originally published in 1963 as Junkyard Planet, but the following year the title was changed to The Cosmic Computer. Though the latter title is certainly more attractive, in many ways the former is far more accurate of its contents. This novel is a revised and expanded version of a 1958 novelette by Piper entitled Graveyard of Dreams. The story takes place in Piper’s Terro-Human Future History timeline, at year 2837 of our calendar. Mankind has populated numerous planets, which are united by a Terran Federation. An interplanetary civil war has recently taken place. Rebellion has been quashed and peace restored. The planet Poictesme was an important Federation military base during the war, but now the armed forces have departed, leaving Poictesme to succumb to economic stagnation. The planet is now a sort of Wild West backwater, with its one major export being a melon-based liquor. One good result of the war, however, is that the Federation forces left a lot of their military hardware behind, and salvage becomes big business on Poictesme, hence the title Junkyard Planet.
In need of more sustainable long-term economic solutions, the citizens of Poictesme pin their hopes on a mythical strategic supercomputer that the military supposedly left buried in a secret location. With its ability to run complex models and simulations, this computer, dubbed Merlin, is seen as a techno-messiah that can revitalize Poictesme’s economy and ensure the planet’s longevity and prosperity. The leading citizens of Litchfield, a city on Poictesme, send their brightest son, Conn Maxwell, off to an Earth university to study computer science and hopefully uncover Merlin’s secret hiding place. As the novel opens, Conn returns to Poictesme with bad news.
As told in Graveyard of Dreams, this story felt somewhat half-baked, so it benefits from the expansion it receives here but at times feels a bit overdone. Fascinating at first, it drags in the middle but thankfully picks up at the end with an innovative conclusion. The story includes a few battle scenes for excitement, but although Piper is a ballistics enthusiast and a wannabe military commander, the main attraction here is not combat but commerce. While dangling the carrot of Merlin before Litchfield’s techno-worshipping chamber of commerce, the level-headed Conn encourages everyone to invest in infrastructure that will further their current industries. The book is all about the progress of Poictesme’s economic development, and at times reading Piper’s complex industrial scenarios is like watching a master player in a civilization-building role-playing game. For Piper, the establishment of a limited liability corporation is just as exciting as a laser gun battle, and boy are there a lot of companies chartered in this book. It becomes very difficult to keep track of the large ensemble cast of characters and all the various enterprises they are involved in. The ending, which hinges on an ethical dilemma, is a welcome philosophical respite from the logistical chaos that characterizes the middle of the book.
Nevertheless, in Piper’s novels such frustrating complexity is as much a blessing as it is a curse. Piper really excels at creating fictional worlds, and the intricacy with which he explores every political, economic, and spiritual dimension of those worlds really adds authenticity to his sci-fi visions. The Cosmic Computer is a perfect example of the depth of forethought that he invests into every planet he envisions. Though it is not necessary to know the whole Terro-Human Future History timeline to enjoy this book, the sweeping scope and level of detail in Piper’s grand plan is very impressive and really adds to one’s appreciation of each individual story in the series.
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A circuitous path to revenge
Space Viking, a novel by H. Beam Piper, was originally serialized in the November 1962 to February 1963 issues of the magazine Analog Science Fiction – Science Fact before being published in a paperback edition. Part of Piper’s Terro-Human Future History series, the story takes place in the 37th century of our calendar. For over a millennium mankind has been colonizing other planets, and now humanity’s descendants live in varying states of civilization on different worlds. By this time the Terran Federation, which figured prominently in works like Uller Uprising and Little Fuzzy, has now fallen apart. A group of outlying planets called the Sword Worlds have developed a feudalistic system of government replete with royal titles and dynastic conflicts. The economy of these Sword Worlds is largely driven by the pillaging and plundering of planets of the Old Federation by wayfaring adventurers known as Space Vikings.
Lucas Trask is a nobleman on the Sword World of Gram. He is set to marry the love of his life, but on the day of their wedding the bride is assassinated by Trask’s rival, an insane baron named Andray Dunnan. Dunnan flees the planet to parts unknown, and Trask vows to get his revenge, if it means combing every planet in the galaxy. To that end, Trask renounces his land and titles and becomes a Space Viking. While that may sound like the start of a thrilling revenge epic, the path to vengeance in this novel is quite circuitous. Before he can track down Dunnan, Trask ends up spending years building a civilization on a formerly primitive planet called Tanith.
Though at times it’s good fun, Space Viking isn’t the smartest of Piper’s novels. Why Trask would choose to lead a band of Space Vikings—looters, murderers, rapists—in response to his wife’s killing never seems logical, although atrocities are only hinted at and never committed by Trask’s own hand. The revenge theme gets totally lost in the development of Tanith—yet another Piper fantasy-camp in the exercise of world-building. Though this is not exactly a satirical work, Piper uses different planets in the story to critique various forms of government. Fascism, socialism, and democracy all have their faults pointed out. Dunnan is overtly presented as a stand-in for Hitler, and there is a race of interplanetary traders who might double for the Jews. If there’s a message, however, it is pretty convoluted and murky. Piper is known as a libertarian, but here if anything he seems to be advocating authoritarian monarchy as the best form of government, and he demonstrates a “might makes right” attitude towards imperialism and colonialism that shows up in a lot of his works. He’s always contemptuous of “the rabble” and seems to believe in the myth of an elite class of rulers born with the hereditary power to lead.
That said, the book does have its charms. With the exception of Frank Herbert’s Dune, nobody builds fictional universes with as much intricacy as Piper. He comes up so many countless details of government bureaucracy, diplomatic protocol, political economy, and technological logistics, from the grandiose to the mundane, that one can’t help but admire his boundless creativity. At times this complexity works against the book, as many passages read like laundry lists of proper nouns of Piper’s own invention (but again, no one invents better space names than Piper). In Space Viking, the final showdown is terribly anticlimactic and the whole plot feels a bit pointless, but it is fun to live in this world for a while. After Piper’s death, the authors John F. Carr, Dietmar Wehr, and Terry Mancour wrote several sequels to Space Viking. The fictional universe Piper created certainly seems to have endless narrative possibilities, but this novel often feels like he tried to cram all those possibilities into one book.
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A great sci-fi author’s worst story
A Slave is a Slave, a novella by science fiction author H. Beam Piper, was originally published in the April 1962 issue of Analog Science Fact – Science Fiction magazine. This work is part of Piper’s Terro-Human Future History series of loosely related stories and novellas that chronicle mankind’s extraterrestrial future. In Piper’s fictional timeline, A Slave is a Slave takes place around the year 4093 of our calendar. By this time, the Terran Federation that features so prominently throughout the series has evolved into the Galactic Empire. A Slave is a Slave follows a recurring template in Piper’s fiction of interplanetary colonization: an expeditionary force from the interstellar government, made up of distant descendants of Earth’s humans, arrive at an outlying planet with the intention of annexing it into the Empire. In order to complete their mission, they must overcome the unusual political, economic, and religious customs of the planet’s inhabitants, also members of the human diaspora who settled this new world centuries before.
In this case, the planet in question is Aditya, which is visited by the Empress Eulalie, an Empire ship complete with an imperial prince, government bureaucrats, military commanders, and a noble viceroy ready to be installed into office. The single unique characteristic of Aditya is its system of universal slavery. The planet is currently ruled by a small oligarchy of masters who own the rest of the population outright. Since chattel slavery is illegal in the Galactic Empire, the new conquerors inform the Adityans that this system of slavery must be abolished. The transition proves to be more difficult than expected, however, not only because of resistance on the part of the Adityans but also because of the difficulty of finding what to do with all these emancipated slaves.
I’m a fan of Piper’s fiction and only a few novellas shy of having read his complete published works. Though I typically find much to enjoy in his work, I have to say that A Slave is a Slave may be the worst Piper story I’ve ever read. That’s not to say it is poorly written. He still manages to skillfully structure and craft the narrative with his usual complexity of detail, but there is little to like or enjoy here, and it all feels rather pointless. Worse, it barely qualifies as science fiction. Unlike other worlds of Piper’s creation, Aditya has no interesting environmental conditions, no unique natural resources or industrial exports, no fascinating native life forms. The only aspect of Aditya that’s even discussed is its system of slavery. The story is merely thinly veiled political commentary dressed up with a few space ships. It could just have easily been told in a third world nation on Earth.
That said, it is difficult to tell what comment Piper is actually trying to make. Early on, he briefly touches on the idea that capitalist wage slavery is just a modified form of chattel slavery. Eventually, he seems to be using the story to justify American imperialism, a stance common to Piper’s fiction. He certainly sympathizes more with the colonizers putting down the rabble than with the rabble itself. Finally, Piper, ever the libertarian, pejoratively compares the slaves to proletariats, which allows him to take a few digs at socialism. Coincidentally, the issue of Analog in which this story debuted also featured the novella Mercenary by Mack Reynolds, another case where sci-fi speculation takes a back seat to boring political and military theorizing. It’s hard to understand why sci-fi magazines would publish such mundane stories of military and political bureaucracy, or why sci-fi fans would want to read them. Just about anything Piper wrote is more exciting and imaginative than A Slave is a Slave.
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Animal or aborigine?
Little Fuzzy, published in 1962, is a novel by science fiction writer H. Beam Piper. The story is part of his Terro-Human Future History series, which depicts a future in which humans from Earth have colonized planets in distant star systems. The stories in this series are only loosely connected, however, so no prior knowledge of Terro-Human Future History is required to enjoy this book.
The story takes place in the late 26th century on the planet Zarathustra, a world that was discovered twenty-five years earlier. Since then a development company has been profitably extracting the planet’s natural resources for trade in interplanetary markets. By this time cities have been established on Zarathustra, but they are still relatively low in population, and the planet maintains a sort of Wild West atmosphere. Jack Holloway, one of the old-timers among the settlers on Zarathustra, works as an independent prospector, hunting gems in the area around a remote outpost he calls home. Though he probably knows the planet as well as anyone, he is greatly surprised one day by a visit from an undiscovered species of animal. This creature, whom he dubs Little Fuzzy, resembles something like a naked Ewok and shows obvious signs of intelligence. The question is, how intelligent is he? If Little Fuzzy turns out to be a sapient life form—one who’s level of conscious thought approaches that of humans—under the laws of the Terran Federation his existence will legally negate the company’s right to extract resources from Zarathustra. The entire enterprise rests on whether Little Fuzzy is recognized as a sapient being or simply designated a fur-bearing mammal. To protect its investment, the company will stop at nothing to make sure the matter is decided in its favor.
At first this may sound like a novel about environmental ethics and a preachy metaphor for mankind’s poor stewardship of our own planet. There are touches of that, but Piper, who was anything but a hippie, does not lay it on too thick. Mostly he is concerned with the definition of sapience and the amorphous theoretical boundaries of what defines us as human. Piper not only thoroughly examines the psychological and biological aspects of the question but also its ethical and legal ramifications. The worlds Piper creates in his fiction are always fully realized in their political, economic, and legal dimensions, and nowhere is that more true than here in Little Fuzzy. Piper looks at indigenous rights from an interspecies perspective. If mankind ever does colonize the galaxy, what sort of legal and ethical framework will be needed to avoid the genocidal mistakes of our past?
Beyond the issues, one thing that makes this novel so enjoyable is that the fuzzies are just so darn cute, if such a term can be applied to words on a printed page. Their behavior is simply adorable, but Piper doesn’t overdo it. Cute never becomes cutesy. He always depicts the fuzzies as a realistic mammalian species and gives a convincing glimpse of what culture might look like among a sapient species other than our own. The scientific and philosophical aspects of Little Fuzzy are truly fascinating, and at times it also happens to be a decent sci-fi thriller.
If you can’t get enough of the fuzzies, there’s more. Piper published a sequel to Little Fuzzy in 1964, entitled Fuzzy Sapiens. This was followed by Fuzzies and Other People, published posthumously. Several other science fiction authors have since written additional books in a Fuzzy series based upon Piper’s original works. While I can’t vouch for those other writers, after reading this excellent novel I fully intend to read the remaining two books by Piper.
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Unraveling a xenolinguistic conundrum
A contact team from the Terran Federation lands on a previously unexplored planet, soon to be named Svantovit after a Slavic god. The team’s job is to communicate with the planet’s native population and prepare them for Terran colonization and resource extraction. Svantovit is inhabited by an intelligent bipedal race with a civilization based around roughly Bronze Age technology. The team wants to introduce them to Terran tools and machines in order to accelerate their development and acclimate them to the technology necessary to establish large scale factories. The first step, of course, is to communicate. Despite their years of experience with xenolinguistics, however, the Terran scientists cannot make any headway in deciphering the language of the Svants (as the indigenous population has come to be called). Their native tongue does not correspond to the linguistic rules of any language the Terrans have ever encountered.
H. Beam Piper’s sci-fi novella Naudsonce was originally published in the January 1962 edition of Analog Science Fact – Science Fiction. In this story, Piper builds upon the fantasy of an anthropological explorer discovering a hidden culture in the wilderness, only in this case the wilderness is extraterrestrial and the natives have an alien anatomy. Like many explorers in Earth’s history, the Terran team has commercial motives for their expedition, but they also seek the benefits of scientific knowledge, cultural exchange, and galactic diplomacy. One of the great things about Piper’s fiction is he doesn’t confine himself to space operas or stories of astrophysical science. He writes speculative fiction about all branches of science, including, in this case, anthropology and linguistics. Piper has covered similar ground before in Omnilingual, his 1957 novella about scientists discovering an ancient lost city on Mars. Comparing the two works, Naudsonce is far less successful in capitalizing upon the joy of exploration and the thrill of discovery. While the science used to unravel the mystery of the Svants’ communication is interesting, the story just isn’t all that much fun. The Terran contact team, veterans in their fields, act as if such interspecies contact is old hat, and their blasé attitude is contagious.
Don’t expect to find any qualms about colonialism in this story. Piper acknowledges the moral sketchiness of imperialism, but doesn’t frown upon it. His libertarian political views are often evident in his work, and he makes it clear that an empire is OK with him as long as it’s a capitalist empire that thrives on free trade. For most of the story, the Svants are depicted as dumb primitives, just waiting to be exploited, though towards the end they start to develop more as characters and display some higher reasoning. Because it deals with the Terran Federation, Naudsonce is considered part of Piper’s Terro-Human Future History series. The story takes place about the end of the 26th century in that timeline, but the Future History stories are only loosely connected, so no prior knowledge of that series is required to read Naudsonce.
If you want to know what “naudsonce” means, you’re going to have to read the whole story. It isn’t explained until the final sentence, and I’m not telling. Unless you’re a diehard Piper completist, however, I wouldn’t recommend reading Naudsonce. If you’ve ever daydreamed about being an anthropologist who discovers a previously unknown culture, and you want to see how that might play out on another planet, I would highly recommend Omnilingual.
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