H Beam Piper Recommendations

[Whipsnade]

Ouch again. But stop sugar coating it and tell me how you really feel...

Blackirish,

Pournelle wrote rousing little adventure stories which, had they been written in the late 1800s or early 1900s, would have been set in Ruritania, darkest Africa, lost South American plateaus, and the like. Because he wrote his stories after 1950 and because all the empty place on Earth have been mapped and tramped over, he had to set his stories in space.

Oddly, despite setting his adventure tales in space, Pournelle never bothers to update the technology his heroes use much beyond that used by the technology used by the heroes in King Solomon's Mines, and that despite Pournelle working with some pretty bleeding edge stuff as a USAF consultant and being aware of much more. He fought in Korea as a 2nd Lt. in the artillery and all the battles his CoDo Marines, mercenaries, and other protagonists fight are battles Lt. Pournelle would immediately recognize using equipment Lt. Pournelle would immediately recognize.

He takes great care in twisting his settings to actively preclude technologies that might be unfamiliar to that long ago Lt. Pournelle. The CoDo supposedly stifles all progress, somehow using fusion power plants and Alderson drives along with bolt action rifles and mortars. While economics would play a great role in just what sort of weapons may be found on the backwater worlds where Pournelle sets his stories, it needs to be pointed out that Biafran rebels and Somali pirates are armed better than most of Pournelle's protagonists.

Pournelle further compounds this "retro-tech" silliness by going out of his way to either remove aircraft and tanks or greatly limit their roles in his stories. And should I even bother mentioning about how all the oceans on all his alien worlds have "sea monsters on steroids" so Pournelle can avoid even mentioning boats?

Sure, he throws an occasional bone to science fiction in his stories. The action takes place on other planets, people get there with starships and shuttles, the skies look different, there are weird plants, you see a hovercraft every so often, and there's some fancy personal armor too. However, how Pournelle's characters fight and the tools they use to fight with are not very far removed from how my great-uncles fought and the tools they used when they and the rest of the 79th marched with Kitchener into the Sudan to avenge Gordon and put down the Mad Mahdi.

I can live with a sci-fi book written in the 1950s or 60s in which computers are huge and Mars is warm, after all the author was writing about what was envisioned and what was known, but what about a military sci-fi book written in the 1970s that deliberately ignores 1950s military technologies? That's when I begin to scratch my head and that's why I place Pournelle on a much lower tier.


Regards,
Bill

 

[Peter Schutze]

bit biased ?

>about how all the oceans on all his alien worlds have "sea monsters on steroids" so Pournelle can avoid even mentioning boats?

like the new washington campaign where they ship a unit in between the king tides (twin earths tend to cause that) to capture the fortress

Hadley has no sea monsters either ... its an urban story. Arrarat uses low tech paddlewheels and barges

sparta has big fish but fishing and the spartan coast gaurd are meantioned in several threads

so all the oceans comes down to one of 5 - the drug growing dinosaur world

>either remove aircraft and tanks
..... geez I'd almost think you were talking about Hammers Slammers where lightspeed weapons make anything above NOE confetti

helicopters play an important role in arrarat when they are well away from manpad missiles

and tanks are important on several occassions especially the new washington campaign and the threat of just a few on the Tanith (dino world) plus the backstory for several events. Sparta building up its armour capability is a big part of the high level political backstory in that campaign

 

[chshrkt]

BTW, has anyone read and care to review his non-SF "Murder in the Gunroom"? Thanks!

Yes I have, and I can recommend it.
As for a review, it aptly demonstrates HBPs knowledge and love of old guns.

I have all HBPs stuff from Project Gutenburg on my Palm Centro (About 25 stories) and I am currently re-reading "4 Day Planet".
If you can get past the dated themes in his stories (they way women are treated; everyone smokes, even on an archeological dig on Mars!) they are great fun and a gold mine for any Traveller campaign.

 

[Whipsnade]

like the new washington campaign where they ship a unit in between the king tides (twin earths tend to cause that) to capture the fortress...

Peter,

Yup, monstrous tides on an ocean planet with one continent caused by the planet's twin Franklin. All water traffic simply scurries from tide pool to tide pool, so nearly everything an everyone ends up marching.

Arrarat uses low tech paddlewheels and barges...

Which are mentioned only in passing with regards to grain shipments and which Pournelle's heroes never once use despite their great utility for operational movement and logistics.

sparta has big fish but fishing and the spartan coast gaurd are meantioned in several threads

Pournelle's solo work never described Sparta in much detail. When he got a collaborator - Surprise! - those oceans suddenly got used.

helicopters play an important role in arrarat...

TWO helos and then only to carry out a single surprise attack. After that, the helos are never seen again thanks to Pournelle's lame and much overused manpad SAM excuse.

In the CoDo setting, Pournelle grossly inflates the abilities of manpad SAMS and grossly discounts the countermeasures available to aircraft - and this despite being a USAF consultant - so that he can continue fighting the Korean war battles of his youth and/or the light infantry battles of the late Victorian era in his fiction.

...and tanks are important on several occassions especially the new washington campaign...

The heroes defeat tanks on New Washington, they don't use them.

... and the threat of just a few on the Tanith (dino world) plus the backstory for several events.

Precisely. Armor and the other things I mention are routinely relegated to the back story in Pournelle's little adventure tales. He carefully twists the settings and makes other in-story excuses for why little beside light infantry, a few artillery tubes, infinite tactical genius, and loyal true hearts are ever really necessary.

On Arrarat for example, even a few armored cars would help John Christian and his Merry Band of Retro-Tech Heroes immensely but those heroes and no one else on that world even thinks about trying to cobble one together despite the fact that heavy duty trucks are mentioned in the very first chapter. Instead, a single tank, which is also happens to be a "shop queen", gets very small role and then only when it breaks down.

Think about this for a minute. Pournelle's colony worlds face the threat of constant sectarian violence resulting from BuReloc's forced emigration program, so much so that the notoriously stingy Grand Senate actually fields a specific branch of the CoDo Marines to handle that problem. There are Fleet, Line, and Garrison marine regiments in the CoDo military, with the Garrison marines permanently stationed on worlds as a stiffener for the local gendarmie. Yet the Garrison formations, which are placed with keeping something resembling peace on worlds like Hadley or Arrarat firmly in mind, don't even have armored cars despite their obvious benefits in patrolling troublesome areas both rural and urban and despite the fact they could be built, maintained, and fueled with local resources.

Why?

Because armored cars or any of the other no-brainer technologies we've discussed here means that Pournelle wouldn't be able to write his little Victorian/Edwardian, bolt action rifle, adventure stories set in the stars, that's why.

Sparta building up its armour capability is a big part of the high level political backstory in that campaign

Again, Pournelle wrote that book with a collaborator.


Regards,
Bill

 

[Whipsnade]

BTW, has anyone read and care to review his non-SF "Murder in the Gunroom"? Thanks!

Bob,

It's worth tracking down and reading. In fact, I believe it's at Gutenberg too.

I could never quite put my finger on it, but the story seemed "off" to me. Then I read a short biography of Piper which contained quotes from an old friend of his who was also trying to break into the market in the 1950s and everything fell into place.

He explained that Piper actually wanted to write detective fiction, not sci-fi, but no one would buy his detective stuff! The reason was that the style of detective story Piper was writing was completely at odds with the "noir" style of detective fiction at the time. Starting with Chandler and Spillane, everyone was trying to out Hammett Hammett with tough, edgy, hard boiled, loner protagonists who punched women, drank like fish, and slapped around their enemies.

Piper's hero in "Murder in the Gunroom", by way of contrast, is cultured, well mannered, and an Army reserve officer who runs his own detective agency, has several people working for him, and gets the girl in the end. Although guns are a big part of the story, the murder and the reasons for it have more in common with Christie's or Sayer's English drawing room mysteries than Spillane's gutter brawling.

Piper was writing the "wrong" type of detective story for the time, so the detective pulps weren't buying his stuff. That, thankfully, meant he had more relative success with sci-fi and thus wrote more sci-fi stories.

I think it would have been very interesting if both Piper and his historical novel Only the Arquebus survived. Historical fiction was just beginning to take off and it could have been a niche he did well in.


Regards,
Bill

P.S. Piper's interest in detective fiction most likely comes from his career as a railroad detective. I knew he'd worked for the Pennsy road, but never knew he was a railroad dick until reading The Last Cavalier.

 

[Finarvyn]

a H Beam Piper TerroHuman chronology

http://www.zarthani.net/chronology.htm

Thanks for the chronology, by the way. I hadn't seen it before.

I read a lot of H.Beam Piper back in the 1980's and am inspred now to track some of those books down again. I remember them as being a lot of fun!

 

[Timerover51]

To update the thread, if you search under H. Beam Piper on Project Gutenberg, you can download a fair number of his novels, including Little Fuzzy and Omnilingual. The ones that are not available are the Lord Kalvan series. The rest of his Paratime stories are on there. They all make for excellent reading. I am using his New Texas of Lone Star Planet as the basis for a few planets in the sector that I am building.

While you are looking, I would put in a plug for the Andre Norton works on Project Gutenberg as well.

 

[BwapTED]

The Wife and I are big H Beam Piper fans. So's my dad, from whose library I borrowed several of the novels when I was a kid.

Piper stories and novels I particularly recommend:

Little Fuzzy

Junkyard Planet/The Cosmic Computer

A Planet for Texans/Lone Star Planet

A Slave is a Slave (short story)

Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen