Piper At The Gates Of Doom
I recently (two months ago, which is how far behind I am in usefully posting here) finished reading every work of science fiction by H. Beam Piper, with two relatively marginal exceptions (Crisis in 2140 and Fuzzies And Other People). This was as close as I can get to a sheer cultural lark these days -- nobody is breathing down my neck for an H. Beam Piper RPG¹, I'm not forced to keep up with the vast panoply of H. Beam Piper fandom, there isn't an upcoming Paratime movie starring Natalie Portman as Dalla Hadron that I need to get up to speed on. I just did it to do it.

Although I'd read a decent chunk of Piper before -- the Paratime series, Little Fuzzy, and "Omnilingual" being the only ones I'm sure of -- reading the whole stretch of it as a (relatively) educated adult instead of an omnivorous 14-year-old made an interesting comparison, not just with other SF authors, but with other acts of reading. My recent memories of re-reading all of HPL last year came back in force; I was seeing things that I'm fairly certain I simply couldn't have noticed as a teenager, or before marrying a contentious English major with an ill-concealed impatience with genre SF, or before reading a whole lot of other stuff besides.

To begin with (although this observation isn't original to me by any means) Piper seems to be doing something more interesting with his future history than Asimov or Heinlein. Asimov's Foundation tells the stories of great men who meet and survive -- even overcome -- historical crises. Heinlein mostly wrote slice-of-life stories set in various future milieux. (Although "If This Goes On..." is crisis fiction to beat the band, and I'm sure other exceptions exist.)

Piper, by contrast, told stories that while set at historical crisis moments almost always openly admit, well, failure. In Space Viking, Lucas can't save the Sword Worlds from becoming hollowed-out caudillo states. The ambassador in Lone Star Planet can't continue representing the Federation. In Uller Uprising, the close patterning of Uller on the Indian Raj tells us that the company's rule (maintained by nuclear genocide) is evanescent, and the solution clearly prefigures the company's eventual fall. "Day of the Moron" is actually a story about inevitable failure. (Outside the future history, nobody ever figures out the answer in "He Walked Around the Horses.") Even the triumphant stories aren't so clear: In "Graveyard of Dreams," the original version of Cosmic Computer, there is no Merlin; in "When in the Course --", the original version of "Gunpowder God" (set in the Federation future history) the planet Freya may have thrown off Styphon, but it gets Terra instead. All future histories, by writing series stories set during different milieux, are at bottom meta-stories about the ineluctable failure of human effort. Piper just foregrounds it, in a way that only Stapledon really did before him, but far more accessibly in the mainstream SF tradition.

This will put many people in the mind of Poul Anderson, especially the Technic/Flandry series, and Anderson's Psychotechnic League stories, though based on a rather different set of political postulates from Flandry, still have a very Piperish feel. Anderson and Piper are a lot alike; both strongly autodidactic historiphiles with that odd American mid-century suspicion of democracy, both fans of the Competent Man, both with medieval streaks miles wide through them. (Both also write compelling, believably motivated villains on occasion; the bad guy in Little Fuzzy even becomes the good guy in Fuzzy Sapiens.) Anderson and Piper go in tandem: Anderson's "Time Patrol" comes 7 years after Piper's "Police Operation"; Space Viking comes 10 years after Anderson's "The Star Plunderer."

What Piper has that Anderson doesn't is a fascination, even an obsession, with escape. "Omnilingual" is about escaping the trap of single-planet culture; Fuzzy Sapiens is about escaping a genetic trap; Kalvan of Otherwhen is about escaping the mundane present into the glorious pseudo-medieval past; Cosmic Computer is about escaping planetary bankruptcy; "Time and Time Again" and "The Edge of the Knife" are both about escaping from history itself.

Escape and failure, then, are the two counterweights in Piper's fiction. The rest is merely postwar American SF at close to its finest.

[1] Although...