Nathan <-- redeacted --> writes:

> >It would be interesting to know what prompted Beam to write *Lone Star*.
> >It's almost as if he wanted to spoof Texas and just used some of his more
> >general TFH ideas to do so, while "changing the names to protect the
> >innocent." :)
>
> Oh, I don't know.  The political philosophy represented in the book sounds
> like pure Piper.

Yes.  I was thinking more about the way he portrayed the New Texans.  They're
like charicatures from the lowest-budget country-western spoof ever!

> Piper being the epitome of the "self-reliant man", I would gather that he
> viewed the post-war expansion of the US government with a rather jaundiced
> eye.    (Also, don't forget this wasn't all that long after the McCarthy
> hearings.)

Actually, from the way "leftists" and "socialists" are portrayed in Piper's
works, I wouldn't be surprised if he wasn't a big fan of ol' Joe McCarthy.
Indeed, I was more than a little surpirsed to discover, while rereading
*Uller Uprising* last night, that both Carlos von Schlicten(sp?) and Paula
Quinton are rather proud of their Nazi and Vichy, respectively, ancestry.
The Nazis and their fascist friends were nothing if not anti-communist.

> You can tell from his literature in general that he did not
> believe that strong governments were conducive to a free society.  You can
> make a case (and he did himself; "Ministry of Disturbance" and the
> Mardukans in _Space Viking_ are the two best examples) that in time a
> society with a strong government eventually becomes a servant to that
> government, instead of the other way around.  Even the Federation didn't
> have the kind of all-encompassing power that one might think; short of
> intervening on Zarathustra during the Fuzzy Crisis and on Kwanon during the
> disaster there, the Federation was pretty content to let local government
> attend to local affairs (look how long they took to get around to sending
> anyone to Fenris to clean <that> mess up).

Yeah, that's certainly the way Beam liked to portray it, but what he
doesn't admit was that it takes a pretty large government to raise the revenue
to pay for the weapons development and procurement and personnel that gave the
Federation (and later the Empire) all that firepower for his "self-reliant" men
to throw around when the natives (or more often the underclasses in general,
whether non-human or human) got restless.

> In fact, when you think about it, what Colonel Hickock says in _Lone Star
> Planet_ ("If I started acting like a master around this ranch in the
> morning, they'd find my body in an irrigation ditch before sunset") is
> relevant to what happened to King Angus I of Gram when he started acting
> like a dictator rather than a benevolent monarch...

Again, that sure seems like a "good thing" when you look at it from Lucas
Trask's or A.J. Hickock's perspective.  If you take the perspective of the
"average Jane--especially Jane--or Joe" on Colonel Hickock's ranch or Baron
Trask's estate, these little "revolutions" look a lot more like "here's the new
boss, same as the old boss."

I mean, you got to admit it, told from the perspective of the average
"townie" on Fenris, or Tanith, or Odin, or Zarathustra, Beam's stories
would look a lot different and his "self-reliant" men would look a lot
more like the "thugs" they're always getting the best of.

> Poking fun at Texans?  Maybe.  I don't read it that way; I think Piper was
> being deadly serious (but went about it in a fun way).

Well, liking to think of myself as a "naturalized Texan" (currently in exile),
maybe I'm a little too sensitive. . . . :)

David Johnson                        Net: -- redeacted --
Rockville, Maryland, North America   Web: http://gwis2.circ.gwu.edu/~david
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When a man tells you something you don't understand, don't tell him he's
crazy.  Ask him what he means."      -Capt. Otto Harkaman (H. Beam Piper)
                                     *Space Viking*