H. Beam Piper
7 Bücher
- A breezy frontier yarn told by Walt, a teenage reporter covering his whole grim planet, where the sun stays up for a thousand hours and everyone hunts sea monsters for a living. Piper keeps it light and quick, and the town drunk turns out worth watching.
- Jack Holloway, a crusty old prospector, finds a small golden-furred creature in his shower stall, and suddenly the whole planet's fate hinges on whether it can be called a person. It's breezy and warm, half courtroom drama, and gentler than you'd expect from 1962 sci-fi.
- If antique flintlocks and wheellocks sound like fun, you'll enjoy watching Jeff Rand appraise a dead collector's guns while quietly working out who killed him. Piper's only mystery is talky and gun-nerdy in the best way, though the puzzle itself is fairly standard stuff.
- Piper writes puzzle-box science fiction with real warmth under it, and Omnilingual alone earns the read: an archaeologist on Mars cracking a dead language with no Rosetta Stone. If you like problem-solving stories over space battles, mid-century flavor and all, you'll settle right in.
- A revenge story that keeps outgrowing itself: Lucas Trask sets out to hunt the man who shot his bride, and somewhere between raids he accidentally starts rebuilding civilization on Tanith. Piper's more interested in politics and trade than laser battles, which is exactly why it works.
- A young engineer comes home to a depressed junkyard planet where everyone believes a mythical super-computer will save them, and decides the myth itself might do the job. Cheerful, tinkery, very 1960s can-do; if you like watching people bootstrap an economy out of war surplus, this scratches it.
- Piper openly rebuilds the Sepoy Mutiny on a planet of quartz-skinned, silicone-based natives, and von Schlichten's scramble to hold things together (including improvising an atom bomb from scratch) is pure competence fiction. Fun if you like brisk 1950s military SF, though the colonial framing hasn't aged gently.