Any H. Beam Piper fans?

[Mysterion]

Just started reading Little Fuzzy and am quite enjoying it. And wondering why it has taken me this long to read any of Piper's work. Looked him up on Wikipedia and was a bit bummed out to read about the direction his life took. Seems like if he'd lived longer he might have become a very big name in science fiction. Well, a bigger name maybe, or at least he would have been around to see it happen. In any case, I forsee a trip to my local used bookstore in the near future to find more of his stuff.

 

[HobartFloyt]

I'm another fan of Piper's works. They fall into two general themes, the TerroHuman FutureHistory, which Little Fuzzy is a part of, and the Paratime stories, which the major novel of that is Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen.

No real clinkers, the weakest one IMO is the Futurehistory Cosmic Computer. Not really bad, just didn't really gel as a novel length story. He did a short story with the same themes and it was better. As a general rule, except for Kalvan, I prefer the Futurehistory stories.

There are a couple of sequels to Kalvan. The first is Great King's War by Roland Green and John F. Carr. Needless to say the writing is different but not enough to be jarring. Carr continued with a couple of sequels on his own after that but I haven't read them as copies are hideously expensive.

 

[Mistral]

I own everything that Piper wrote except the non-fic history tome. I suggest you snatch up any copy of Paratime! you can find-I paid 22$ for a copy 6 years ago. Federation and Empire are awesome collections of his shorts. William Tuning wrote a sequel to the Fuzzy novels before Pournelle found the final novel in a box of notes-it goes in a different direction but still rings true to the original. I've always felt that a movie based on Little Fuzzy, done right, would blow E.T. out of the water. I actually have 14 pages of a script I started based on it, but the tangle of his estate/Ace SCIFI books made it an impossibility for many years. I sure wish a clever chap like JJ Abrams would tackle it.

ed.-I built a game based on Space Viking back in 87 that worked. It was true to the idea of various worlds being at various levels of civilization and involved the player as a viking going out and building an empire. It was strictly table top but begged for adaptation for computer.

 

[FluffyUnbound]

The only work of his I ever owned or read was the Empire collection.

I really enjoyed the short story "A Slave is a Slave" quite a bit, and "The Return" is one of my all-time favorite sci-fi or post-apocalyptic short stories.