David Sooby  08-31-2017
23:35 UT
|
> The origins of the different Paratime Levels in the different
> outcomes of the original Martian attempt to colonize Terra are
> told in various ways in "Last Enemy" (1950) and "Time Crime"
> (1955). But by the time he was writing "Gunpowder God" (1964)
> and "Down Styphon!" (1965) Beam abandoned the Martian origins
> of Terran civilization, with the differences in Paratime Levels
> attributed instead to "genetic accidents."
Just
because the "omniscient narrator" chose to *explain* the difference
between the timelines in different ways in different stories, doesn't
mean there is a contradiction. We only need to stipulate that it was
genetic accidents, and the resultant slightly different gene pools,
which lead to the different outcomes of the Martian attempt to colonize
Earth on the various timelines.
The various outcomes of the
Martian attempts to colonize Earth are likely the *easiest*, and most
obvious, ways to distinguish between the timelines, but that doesn't
mean those events were the actual origin of what seems to be,
subjectively, the splitting of timelines. But as "jimmyjoejangles" has
just pointed out, there actually isn't any splitting of timelines; each
of them already exists at all moments in the past and the future.
However,
please don't take my merging of the two Paratime "origin stories" to be
an attempt to defend the idea that Paratime and the THFH are one and
the same universe. Paratime has certain mystical elements, including the
mumbo-jumbo about consciousness sliding along the timelines in the
first Paratime story, and most notably the scientifically proven
existence of souls in "The Last Enemy".
None of those mystical
elements are present in the THFH, and in fact the (relatively) hard-SF
viewpoint of THFH stories is a pretty sharp contrast to the mysticism
found in some Paratime stories.
In fact, one could parody the
idea of merging the two timelines by suggesting a satire of Piper's
stories, in which a "discarnated" Terro-human wound up being reborn in
the body of a Fuzzy... or vice versa!
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Clear ether!
David "Lensman" Sooby
|
jimmyjoejangles 08-31-2017
13:09 UT
|
AT the end of Time crime they create another Paratime Police and put
VAl in charge of it. So maybe you are right KAlvan is out.
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Jon Crocker 08-31-2017
06:38 UT
|
I just double checked Lord Kalvan - that book ends with Vall being
promoted to Chief, and since Tortha Karf is Chief in all the other
paracop stories, I think that makes Kalvan the last.
Vall was
mentioned as a "blue seal noble, hereditary Mavrad of Nerros" in Police
Operation, and it's mentioned again in Time Crime. The way it's
handled, it struck me as a factual listing, not making a big deal of it,
and it really didn't figure prominently in either story. I can't think
of a place where it tells us where "Nerros" actually is.
|
jimmyjoejangles 08-31-2017
05:16 UT
|
But Lord Kalvan takes place in between Temple Trouble and Last Enemy
with Time Crime being the last chronologically. ANd they make a big
deal of Val's MArtian Nobility.
|
Jon Crocker 08-31-2017
01:24 UT
|
> Beam himself dumped the Martian connection (as he'd done with the
original idea of multiple Home Time Lines--with the multiple,
para-peeping Verkan Valls--he'd depicted in "Police Operation").
I thought the multiple-Valls version had promise. Maybe that's where the people behind that Jet Li movie got the idea.
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-31-2017
01:04 UT
|
~
James "jimmyjoejangles" Romanski wrote:
> SO you are saying that the The Paratimers
> in Lord Kalvan are not the result of a
> martian colonization?
I'm not saying it; Beam said it in ~Lord Kalvan~. ;)
Down Styphon!
David
--
"Fourth
Level was the big one. The others had devolved from low-probability
genetic accidents; it was the maximum probability." - H. Beam Piper,
~Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen~
~
|
jimmyjoejangles 08-30-2017
12:43 UT
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SO you are saying that the The Paratimers in Lord Kalvan are not the result of a martian colonization?
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Tanith in Oz 08-30-2017
05:24 UT
|
~
David Johnson wrote:
> So, if you want to use
"Martio-humans" to connect Paratime and the Terra-human Future History
you have to throw > out ~Lord Kalvan~!?!
Yikes. That's a
great observation there David, it certainly would pose a significant
problem. I especially like the idea you've suggested that Piper
abandoned the idea of Martian origins for Terran civilization. Though
Genesis does suggest Martians came to Earth, the story does show them
falling into barbarity.
So I was on the fence about all of this
Paratime/Terro-Human linkage stuff but this has swayed me more than
anything else. The two time lines are definitely now separate in my
mind and my assertion that Piper may have linked them had he lived on
now seems implausible.
Unless someone can explain this and
accommodate it in a brilliant piece of narrative legerdermain I am now
happy to support the no case.
Nice work David.
Terry
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-30-2017
03:08 UT
|
~
Jon Crocker wrote:
> My understanding was, Home Time Line had a
> successful colonization of Terra from Mars - they
> kept their technology and history. There were
> other successful missions - in Last Enemy, and
> undercover Vall has dinner in the hotel's Martian
> Room - but on most of Paratime, it hadn't gone
> so well.
The
origins of the different Paratime Levels in the different outcomes of
the original Martian attempt to colonize Terra are told in various ways
in "Last Enemy" (1950) and "Time Crime" (1955). But by the time he was
writing "Gunpowder God" (1964) and "Down Styphon!" (1965) Beam abandoned
the Martian origins of Terran civilization, with the differences in
Paratime Levels attributed instead to "genetic accidents."
This
is, perhaps, the most difficult challenge for those who want to use the
Martian origins of First Level civilization to connect the Paratime
yarns to the Terro-human Future History. Beam himself dumped the
Martian connection (as he'd done with the original idea of multiple Home
Time Lines--with the multiple, para-peeping Verkan Valls--he'd depicted
in "Police Operation").
So, if you want to use "Martio-humans"
to connect Paratime and the Terra-human Future History you have to throw
out ~Lord Kalvan~!?!
Down Styphon!
David
--
"Fourth
Level was the big one. The others had devolved from low-probability
genetic accidents; it was the maximum probability." - H. Beam Piper,
~Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen~
~
|
Tanith in Oz 08-30-2017
02:43 UT
|
Hi all.
Just to be clear. I have no desire either way to have
the Paratime or the Terro-Human stitched together. I'm happy for it to
remain as it is, but I'm happy to play the what if game by suggesting
how they could be connected.
I do continue to think that had
Piper lived on, there's a strong chance he may have linked them anyway,
but it's a moot point because he never did.
If someone comes up
with a really good story then none of us should discount it because as
it has been pointed out a number of times we are all really doing fan
writing anyway. I see no harm in discussing it.
The fact that it
gets discussed does point to a greater desire to engage with Piper's
works to find hidden meanings anyway. I am not bothered by this.
Whether
you believe the two universes can be linked, or whether you feel they
shouldn't doesn't really matter. That we are still engaging about an
author's work who passed away over 50 years ago is all that matters in
the end.
And might I point out that Piper's concept of Paratime
allows for parallel universes anyway, so why worry so much about it in
the first place?
For me, I don't see that the universes should be
linked, but I'm prepared to have an open mind about it. And as such
I'm happy to discuss it if the group wishes to, or not if the consensus
becomes such.
That's my two cents, offered with respect and no offense intended.
Terry
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jimmyjoejangles 08-30-2017
01:54 UT
|
>Right, but that's not Home Time Line.
.
>Val and the Chief talk a fair bit in the stories, which one is that part in?
I think it is in last enemy.
IT doesn't matter if its home Timeline, its a timeline that is directly mentioned.
Police Operation states:
"And when I back-slip, after I've been needled, I generate a new time-line? Is that it?"
Verkan
Vall made a small sound of impatience. "No such thing!" he exclaimed.
"It's semantically inadmissible to talk about the total presence of time
with one breath and about generating new time-lines with the next. All
time-lines are totally present, in perpetual co-existence."
So
that is why I believe that THFH is part of Paratime, not the other way
around. Police OPeration is one of his first written works, and the
first I read so that line sticks with me. SO since Piper believed
everything was happening at once, and wrote more then a few yarns about
that outside of Paratime, it stands to reason that PAratime and THFH are
happening at once. ANd since the Paratimers had the power to traverse
these lines I would call it their universe.
|
David Sooby 08-29-2017
20:45 UT
|
Terry "Tanith in Oz" said:
>"Consider Isaac Asimov, one of Piper's contemporaries.
> Asimov conceived his Elijah Bailey books, his Foundation
> stories, his "Empire" Series and his various robot tales
> separately. Then in the mid 1980s he decided to begin
> stitching all of these together with the publications of
> Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth.
Yes,
and consider that everyone -- or at least everyone I've talked to who
has read the stories -- thinks it was a terrible idea for Asimov to try
to shoehorn his various Robot stories (including the R. Daneel Olivaw
novels) into the same universe as his Foundation and Empire stories. I
did enjoy FOUNDATION'S EDGE very much, but if I recall correctly, that
didn't involve the appearance of R. Daneel Olivaw, or any other direct
connection with Asimov's Robot stories.
I have no doubt that
someone could do a crossover between THFH and Paratime without doing as
much violence to the original stories as Asimov did to his various
fictional universes by mashing them together, but I still see no point
to it. Piper himself was perfectly fine with the series being separate;
why this mad desire by some Piper fans to stitch the two together? How
would this in any way be worthy of exploration?
It really puzzles me.
|
Jon Crocker 08-29-2017
18:55 UT
|
>But Genesis is a timeline that VAl and Tortha speak about. A
disastrous attempt that left the survivors with no knowledge or mere
legends of they're martian ancestry.
Right, but that's not Home Time Line.
Vall and the Chief talk a fair bit in the stories, which one is that part in?
My
understanding was, Home Time Line had a successful colonization of
Terra from Mars - they kept their technology and history. There were
other successful missions - in Last Enemy, and undercover Vall has
dinner in the hotel's Martian Room - but on most of Paratime, it hadn't
gone so well.
You're right, Genesis could be pigeonholed in
either 'timeline' but that's before anything that would unambiguously
tie Paratime to Terran Future History.
|
jimmyjoejangles 08-29-2017
12:58 UT
|
But Genesis is a timeline that VAl and Tortha speak about. A disastrous
attempt that left the survivors with no knowledge or mere legends of
they're martian ancestry.
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Jon Crocker 08-29-2017
03:34 UT
|
> Genesis also really knits things together for me. WEll if not knits together could easily fit in both storylines.
"Genesis"
strikes me as the opposite of the Home Time Line in Paratime, an almost
completely wiped out expedition from Mars with a dismal-looking future
at the end of the story.
The term YMMV = Your Mileage May Vary.
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-29-2017
03:10 UT
|
~ James "jimmyjoejangles" Romanski wrote: > But it is more than that. First, Verkan said fifty > years later, and it happened fifty years later. No,
not necessarily more. Beam thought it would be about half a century
from his own time before there would be a Mars expedition. Then he used
that idea when he was writing about Fourth Level, Europo-American,
Hispano-Columbian Subsector timelines _and_ he used the same idea when
he was writing "Omnilingual." It need have nothing to do with making an
explicit connection; it was simply him making his own projections in
two different yarns he was writing which were both imagined futures of
his own world. . . . > Second the language that is deciphered sounds > an awful lot like the person and place names > that Paratimers use. I suppose it may sound like that if you're looking to make that connection. ;) > You start out saying you agree wholeheartedly > but by the end you are still looking for references > in THFH. So I am confused. Sorry.
I'm looking for Beam to make an explicit signal _somewhere_--in a
"future" Paratime yarn, in some author commentary, somewhere--if he
intended for there to be a connection. I agree that we wouldn't see
Paratimers _qua_ Paratimers in a Terro-human Future History yarn. But
if, say, Mike Shanlee is a Paratimer (the way "Trader Verkan" was a
Paratimer) then I would expect Beam to have _also_ shown us Shanlee
chatting with his Paracop friends on First (or Fifth) Level at some
point. He never does this. Never. > Cool. I like it. So any little bit of Forteana that > is in THFH screams Paratime to me. In other words, YMMV. ;) > Genesis also really knits things together for me. > WEll if not knits together could easily fit in both > storylines. That's
part of what Wolf was doing in "Second Genesis." So, if you haven't
gotten it already, go buy a copy of ~Rise of the Terran Federation~: http://www.pequodpress.com/book_info.php?id=PP_32But
again, I would want Beam to have shown us explicitly that Terro-humans
were actually Martio-humans. There's no suggestion to that effect in
"Omnilingual"--even though the Martians are remarkably human-like it
never seems to occur to anyone in the ~Cyrano~ expedition that they
might be related to Terrans--nor is there any indication the idea ever
caught on in Federation civilization. So, again, perhaps the
Paratimers were at work here. We wouldn't see that in a Terro-human
Future History yarn. But Beam never wrote a Paratime yarn drawing this
connection and he didn't leave us any commentary. Is it possible? Yes.
It is likely? I don't believe so. Cheers, David -- "Juan
Murillo . . . was a big man, copper-skinned, barrel-chested; he looked
like a third-or fourth-generation Martian, of Andes Indian ancestry." -
H. Beam Piper, ~Uller Uprising~ ~ Edited 08-29-2017 03:12
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-29-2017
01:37 UT
|
~
Dale Ridder wrote:
> and depending on how fast that Second
> Level civilization developed it, you might
> get the Paratime Police or the First Level
> government seeing about grabbing the
> idea. It would offer an alternate route
> to getting the needed resources without
> involving Paratime Transposition, with
> all of its attendant problems.
Here
is where the decadence and corruption of First Level civilization
becomes apparent. As the Paratimers discover more and more timelines
with faster-than-light technology--a single Second Level timeline at the
time of "Temple Trouble," multiple Second Level timelines and one Third
Level timeline by the time of ~ Lord Kalvan~--it becomes harder and
harder for them to claim that they "must" exploit other timelines for
resources. The entire physical universe of the Home Time Line--as well
as all those Fifth Level timelines--is available to them for
exploitation but they continue to be Paratime parasites because they
have huge capital and institutional investments in paratemporal
exploitation.
Essentially, it's the labor exploitation that keeps
them committed to being Paratime parasites. Why do the work themselves
when they can steal from Out-timers who have done much of the work for
them?
One would imagine that should Paratime civilization survive
until the time when faster-than-light travel becomes commonplace on
Fourth Level, Europo-American Sector, Hispano-Columbian Subsector
timelines--and is ubiquitous across Second and Third Level timelines--it
would have changed substantially.
Perhaps we don't see any
Paratimers in the Terran Federation era because they're busy exploiting
their _own_ versions of Uller and Loki and Gimli and Nifflheim. . . .
Cheers,
David
--
"Smart parasites never injure their hosts, and try never to reveal their existence." - H. Beam Piper, "Time Crime"
~
|
jimmyjoejangles 08-29-2017
00:38 UT
|
david piperfan johnson wrote>
not some sort of general event--like a Mars expedition-
But
it is more than that. First, Verkan said fifty years later, and it
happened fifty years later. Second the language that is deciphered
sounds an awful lot like the person and place names that Paratimers use.
Also:
~
James "jimmyjoejangles" Romanski wrote:
> Also I have to stress to you that searching for clues
> in the THFH is pointless. The main reason for the
> existence of the Paratime Police is to keep the
> secret of Paratime. Any references found in THFH
> would only show Verkan to be inept, so I don't
> think Beam would have made overt references.
Agreed
wholeheartedly. This is why we should look to Beam himself, either
through a Paratime story set at some point "in the future" of Verkan and
Tortha or through some sort of commentary, such as "The Future History"
interview where he never mentions Paratime when asked to identify the
Terro-human Future History yarns.
We'd never see the Paratimers
_in_ a Terro-human Future History yarn, but we'd see them from Beam,
somehow, if he'd meant for them to be there.
You start out saying
you agree wholeheartedly but by the end you are still looking for
references in THFH. So I am confused. Confused by YMMV also .
I
would think that if you asked Beam to speak about pistols he would, and
he might not mention that rifles or shotguns even exist. "Well, we
were talking about pistols." So he might not lecture that THFH is part
of Paratime because he was asked to talk about THFH. He might have
left us another tidbit to worry out from between the lines ourselves.
To
me he seems to have attributed most Forteana to the Paratimers. Cool.
I like it. So any little bit of Forteana that is in THFH screams
Paratime to me.
Genesis also really knits things together for me. WEll if not knits together could easily fit in both storylines.
|
Dale Ridder 08-28-2017
13:04 UT
|
We even know of one Second Level civilization which is approaching the
discovery of an interstellar hyperspatial drive, something we've never
even come close to.
The above comes from Temple Trouble, so that
there might be a vague chance of somewhat connecting the two universes,
and depending on how fast that Second Level civilization developed it,
you might get the Paratime Police or the First Level government seeing
about grabbing the idea. It would offer an alternate route to getting
the needed resources without involving Paratime Transposition, with all
of its attendant problems.
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-28-2017
05:51 UT
|
~
James "jimmyjoejangles" Romanski wrote:
> Also I have to stress to you that searching for clues
> in the THFH is pointless. The main reason for the
> existence of the Paratime Police is to keep the
> secret of Paratime. Any references found in THFH
> would only show Verkan to be inept, so I don't
> think Beam would have made overt references.
Agreed
wholeheartedly. This is why we should look to Beam himself, either
through a Paratime story set at some point "in the future" of Verkan and
Tortha or through some sort of commentary, such as "The Future History"
interview where he never mentions Paratime when asked to identify the
Terro-human Future History yarns.
We'd never see the Paratimers
_in_ a Terro-human Future History yarn, but we'd see them from Beam,
somehow, if he'd meant for them to be there.
YMMV, of course.
David
--
"I
remember, when I was just a kid, about a hundred and fifty years ago--a
hundred and thirty-nine, to be exact--I picked up a fellow on the
Fourth Level, just about where you're operating, and dragged him a
couple of hundred parayears. I went back to find him and return him to
his own time-line, but before I could locate him, he'd been arrested by
the local authorities as a suspicious character, and got himself shot
trying to escape. I felt badly about that. . . ." - Tortha Karf (H. Beam
Piper), "Police Operation"
~
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-28-2017
04:24 UT
|
~
James "jimmyjoejangles" Romanski wrote:
> Fifty elapsed years from Police Operation, 1998, is
> when the Omnilingual expedition would have been
> launched. Strange coincidence. That's another
> connector for me.
To
me, it's just Beam using his own ideas about how far away a Mars
expedition might be from his own time in multiple works, not some effort
to make a connection. He'd have had to draw a connection between two
things which were "native" to his own work, not some sort of general
event--like a Mars expedition--which occurs in thousands of
science-fiction stories by hundreds of writers, for it to suggest an
intentional connection.
> So if we take those dates and move the two story
> lines forward what was happening in the federation
> while Hadron DAlla was mind tweaking in Final
> Enemy (That thing sounds an awful lot like a
> veridicator) somewhere like sixty to seventy years
> after Police Operation. IF you guys follow my
> meaning.
It's certainly a possibility but it would surely help if Beam had given us a Paratimer lurking about on Freya. . . . ;)
Cheers,
David
--
"You
know, most of the wars they've been fighting, lately, on the
Europo-American Sector have been, at least in part, motivated by rivalry
for oil fields." - Verkan Vall (H. Beam Piper), "Temple Trouble," 1951
~
|
jimmyjoejangles 08-28-2017
03:56 UT
|
Also I have to stress to you that searching for clues in the THFH is
pointless. The main reason for the existence of the Paratime Police is
to keep the secret of Paratime. Any references found in THFH would only
show Verkan to be inept, so I don't think Beam would have made overt
references. I sight our shared history and the things that the
Paratimers used the best evidence.
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-28-2017
03:36 UT
|
~
Terry "Tanith in Oz" Glouftsis wrote:
> Of course we will never know. But there are
> themes in both of his universes.
Actually,
there are themes that run across multiple settings in Beam's work.
Simple ones like the Islamic Kaliphate of "The Mercenaries" and the
Islamic Caliphate of "The Edge of the Knife." (At about the time Beam
was writing these yarns the young Hashemite king of Iraq, great-grandson
of the Sharifan Caliph who proclaimed himself in Hejaz after the
Ottoman Caliphate was dissolved, was touring the U.S.). There are more
complex themes which cross several works like those we see in "Time and
Time Again," "The Edge of the Knife" and "Dearest" (and, of course,
"Last Enemy"). What is Crown Prince Edvard but an older, more subtle
version of Obray, Count Erskyll?
Beam was a struggling writer trying to make a living off his ideas. Of course he "recycled" them from time to time!
> And then there is the short story "When in the
> Course".
[snip]
> What is interesting about this story is that it is
> included in Terro-Human timeline because the
> planet found in the story is called Freya.
The
truly vexing thing here is not so much "When in the Course--" but
rather Paula Quinton's Freyan great-grandmother. We can dismiss "When
in the Course--" because (it was rejected by Campbell and/or because) of
the "preposterousness" of the inter-fertility of Terrans and Freyans
but we are still left with Quinton's great-grandmother, in a yarn
written nearly a decade before "When in the Course--." Like it or not,
Terro-human Future History Terrans and Freyans are inter-fertile . . .
unless you're prepared to throw out ~Uller Uprising~.
> This may be more accidental than design, but it
> tells me that Piper really had few issues with
> changing his ideas to fit with his editors
> demands
Bingo.
Beam was most interested in selling his work; he didn't have the
luxury of writing entirely consistent multi-yarn settings.
Cheers,
David
--
"Why
Walt Disney bought the movie rights to ['Rebel Raider'], I've never
figured out. Will Colonel Mosby be played by Mickey Mouse, and General
Phil Sheridan by Donald Duck? It's baffling. However, I was glad to
get the check." -- H. Beam Piper, The Pennsy interview, 1953
~
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-28-2017
02:57 UT
|
~
Jon Crocker wrote:
> All of these Paratime stories
> intrude upon 'our universe'
> before anything that I can
> think of that easily identifies
> them as part of the Federation
> era.
I
suppose there was a time, sometime between when ~Uller Uprising~ was
written and when ~Lord Kalvan~ was written, when one could argue that
the Terro-human Future History setting and the setting of the Fourth
Level, Europo-American Sector, Hispano-Columbian Subsector timeline on
which Calvin Morrison was born were the same as the "real world" in
which Beam was writing (although by the time ~Sputnik~ was launched--and
the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq was toppled--the Terro-human Future
History had begun to diverge from "real world" events).
I've
always been in the "separate" camp simply because Beam himself never
mentioned Paratime when discussing the Terro-human Future History yarns
in "The Future History" and also because it would have been simple--it
was the sort of thing he did all the time--for him to drop a hint in
either a Paratime yarn or a Future History yarn that the two were
connected.
Sure, we have the rejected "When in the Course--," but
we know what was going on there. And, yes, we have some of the sci-fi
tech that appears in both settings--but that no more makes them the same
setting than it connects them to any _other_ writer's work where the
starships "jump" through "hyperspace":
https://i0.wp.com/media2.slashfilm.com/sla...ewie-hyperspace.jpg
What
we don't have is a Paratime yarn set in the "future" of Verkan Vall
(not even the _idea_ of such a thing in John's scholarship about Beam's
writing). Nor do we have a Terro-human Future History yarn where some
character disappears under odd circumstances. We certainly never see
any Paratimers somewhere like Uller or Fenris or Zarathustra or
Poictesme. . . .
Might someone "shoehorn" them together? Sure.
Is that what Beam had in mind? I seriously doubt it. Does doing so add
some dramatic element to either setting that isn't there already? I
don't think so.
YMMV, of course.
David
--
"I
remember, when I was just a kid, about a hundred and fifty years ago--a
hundred and thirty-nine, to be exact--I picked up a fellow on the Fourth
Level, just about where you're operating, and dragged him a couple of
hundred parayears. I went back to find him and return him to his own
time-line, but before I could locate him, he'd been arrested by the
local authorities as a suspicious character, and got himself shot trying
to escape. I felt badly about that. . . ." - Tortha Karf (H. Beam
Piper), "Police Operation"
~
|
jimmyjoejangles 08-28-2017
02:54 UT
|
You guys are all agreeing with me kind of. I'm not talking about a
crossover. I'm talking about a side by side comparison. Fifty elapsed
years from Police Operation, 1998, is when the Omnilingual expedition
would have been launched. Strange coincidence. That's another
connector for me. So if we take those dates and move the two story
lines forward what was happening in the federation while Hadron DAlla
was mind tweaking in Final Enemy (That thing sounds an awful lot like a
veridicator) somewhere like sixty to seventy years after Police
Operation. IF you guys follow my meaning. Also I had no idea you
(some) were all writers, or that you wrote in the Piperverse(kinda).
I'm just a fan (just) but I am rabid.
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-28-2017
00:08 UT
|
~
James "jimmyjoejangles" Romanski wrote:
> All this stuff is about us, our universe.
So,
two key observations here. First, the Fourth Level, Europo-American
Sector, Hispano-Columbia Subsector timeline that Verkan visited in
"Police Operation" may have been "our universe" at the time Beam was
writing his yarns but that fictional timeline diverged from "our
universe" as time has passed _and_ (as Beam himself recognized in the
"Future History" interview from ~Zenith~) from any "timeline(s)" we see
in the Terro-human Future History yarns.
> Then lo and behold fifty years later Omnilingual
> happens.
So,
again, any "cross-over" concept also has to account for the passage of
"linear" time in the Terro-human Future History "timelines."
Cheers,
David
--
"I
remember, when I was just a kid, about a hundred and fifty years ago--a
hundred and thirty-nine, to be exact--I picked up a fellow on the
Fourth Level, just about where you're operating, and dragged him a
couple of hundred parayears. I went back to find him and return him to
his own time-line, but before I could locate him, he'd been arrested by
the local authorities as a suspicious character, and got himself shot
trying to escape. I felt badly about that. . . ." - Tortha Karf (H. Beam
Piper), "Police Operation"
~
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-27-2017
22:47 UT
|
~ Jon Crocker wrote: > For the Paratime/Federation crossover - as you > might imagine there is very little in the way of > direct evidence from the stories. The Paratime > ones seem to intersect with what would have > been almost 'present day' here-and-now, not > the Federation timeline itself. At one point the > Chief and Verkan were discussing timelines, > and "second-level interworld empire" gets > mentioned. Now, with an infinite number of > timelines, that could just have been an omission. Here's Verkan talking with Tortha in ~Lord Kalvan~: "There are Second Level civilizations, and one on Third that have over-light-speed drives for interstellar ships." This
suggests that at the time of the Paratime yarns--when Tortha and Verkan
are key figures in the Paratime Police--there is no interstellar
capability on Fourth Level. Thus, your observation is poignant that any
"cross-over" between Paratime and the Terro-human Future History would
also require a _linear_ time shift into "the future" to a time when
Verkan and Tortha are long dead. (Verkan might still be a very old man
by the time of "When in the Course--," say, but surely he's discarnated
by the time of ~Four-Day Planet~.) > Since our own here-and-now never had world > wars 3 or 4, (not that I'm complaining mind!) > obviously we've diverged from the Federation > timeline as established in cannon. This
is another key observation. If we assume that the Terro-human Future
History yarns are also Paratime yarns then it doesn't have to be that
_any_ of them "fit" with one another. They might all be various
slightly-different parallel timelines of the "Terran Federation" Sector
or some such thing. Perhaps there is one timeline where Fenris was
attacked with nuclear weapons by the Federation Navy and another--the
one we see in ~Four-Day Planet~--that wasn't. Going down this rabbit
hole might "solve" every apparent discrepancy in the Terro-human Future
History yarns but it also opens a huge can of multiple timeline worms. .
. . > Honestly, if you could shoehorn the timelines > together, I don't think anyone would mind as > long as it was done in a good story consistent > with the rest of Piper's universe. With
multiple Terro-human Future History timelines any considerations of
"consistency" are thrown out the . . . temporary interference in the
paratemporal transposition field. Cheers, David -- "I
remember, when I was just a kid, about a hundred and fifty years ago--a
hundred and thirty-nine, to be exact--I picked up a fellow on the
Fourth Level, just about where you're operating, and dragged him a
couple of hundred parayears. I went back to find him and return him to
his own time-line, but before I could locate him, he'd been arrested by
the local authorities as a suspicious character, and got himself shot
trying to escape. I felt badly about that. . . ." - Tortha Karf (H. Beam
Piper), "Police Operation" ~ Edited 08-28-2017 00:10
|
Tanith in Oz 08-23-2017
05:52 UT
|
A Paratime/Terro-Human crossover? Now there's an idea, I'm not
opposed to it. Though there is scant evidence Piper ever intended to
link the two together, had he lived on I think he may have. Consider
Isaac Asimov, one of Piper's contemporaries. Asimov conceived his
Elijah Bailey books, his Foundation stories, his "Empire" Series and his
various robot tales separately. Then in the mid 1980s he decided to
begin stitching all of these together with the publications of
Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth. Following this both Prelude
to Foundation, Forward the Foundation and even Nemesis came along to
truly ratchet them all together. My point is that in the 80s and
90s there was an interest in creating new work to aid in the sale of
older work by suggesting they were all part of one large narrative.
James Herbert and Kevin A. Anderson even jumped on this band wagon in
1999 when they starting telling the prequels to Dune before moving on to
sequels a decade ago. I can therefore totally accept that Piper, had
he lived may have done this too. Of course we will never know.
But there are themes in both of his universes. And then there is the
short story "When in the Course". This story is a posthumous
publication and tells a very similar tale to "Gunpowder God" (which
eventually was lengthened into Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen). What is
interesting about this story is that it is included in Terro-Human
timeline because the planet found in the story is called Freya. So here
we have a situation where the name Hostigos appears in both of Piper's
universes. This may be more accidental than design, but it tells me
that Piper really had few issues with changing his ideas to fit with his
editors demands (John Carr believes John W. Campbell asked Piper to
make it a Paratime story because of the idea of parallel evolution
within the first manuscript). So though the Paratime universe
is distinctly separate from the Terro-Human time line, I do think there
is a way they can be linked. It can be posited that Calvin Morrison,
taken from Piper's then contemporary universe by the saucer to the
Paratime universe, was removed from the same world that went on to
become the Terro-Human time line. This is totally legit, and works for
me. I'd point to S.M. Stirling here with his Emberverse books and his
Nantucket series. Nantucket tells the story of the island of the same
name being thrown back in time to the Bronze Age. The events of this
series would have changed the past creating a divergent time line. In
our world though the loss of the island changes the laws of physics and
leads to mass culling of the world's population, leading the survivors
on a journey to rebuild. What's notable here is that two time lines are
created from a common focal point and even a character from the
Nantucket series has a relative in the Emberverse books. Both series
remain separate but thematically linked. So this idea could work with Piper's stories, but it would have to be written well. Anyone up for the challenge? Terry Edited 08-23-2017 08:57
|
Jon Crocker 08-23-2017
03:38 UT
|
> All this stuff is about us, our universe.
That's right,
that's exactly what I said. All of these Paratime stories intrude upon
'our universe' before anything that I can think of that easily
identifies them as part of the Federation era.
That being said, if someone could combine them in a good story, I don't think anyone would be opposed.
|
jimmyjoejangles 08-23-2017
00:56 UT
|
Well, its mostly from Police Operation. Tortha KArth says he's
responsible for picking up Benjamin Bathhurst 139 years ago. 1809 plus
139 puts us at 1948. VErkan VAl says he is there three years after the
last major war, and that they had just got atomic power, all that lines
up fairly nicely with 1948. Both VAl and Karth talk about Kenneth
ARnold and his UFO sightings in 1947. VAl talks about how they will
have space flight in fifty years and Karth agrees. All this stuff is
about us, our universe. Then lo and behold fifty years later
Omnilingual happens. Pretty flimsy but there is more. Not right now
though
|
Jon Crocker 08-21-2017
14:59 UT
|
I'd love to get to the Irregular's Muster some year soon, but since my water heater died this summer and needed a replacement...
For
the Paratime/Federation crossover - as you might imagine there is very
little in the way of direct evidence from the stories. The Paratime
ones seem to intersect with what would have been almost 'present day'
here-and-now, not the Federation timeline itself. At one point the
Chief and Verkan were discussing timelines, and "second-level interworld
empire" gets mentioned. Now, with an infinite number of timelines,
that could just have been an omission.
Since our own here-and-now
never had world wars 3 or 4, (not that I'm complaining mind!) obviously
we've diverged from the Federation timeline as established in cannon.
Honestly, if you could shoehorn the timelines together, I don't think
anyone would mind as long as it was done in a good story consistent with
the rest of Piper's universe.
|
Gregg Levine 08-21-2017
14:59 UT
|
Hello!
Yes the list is still active. Lists are known to "go silent"
in between bursts of activity. In this case my guess is that the lists
members of which I am also one, we're all pursuing other issues.
One
sure fire method to see if your account with the list works is by
sending a simple test method to it. Gauging by the (seemingly) witty
responses you get back you'll find out if it works or not. Or you might
get a different message from the kludge who processes them.
Now why is there a Fuzzy in Wolf's study filling and emptying the wastepaper basket?
|
David Sooby 08-21-2017
13:05 UT
|
jimmyjoejanglesPerson said:
> While everyone is hot and bothered I'd like to ask about
> dovetailing THFH and paratime together and finding out
> what was happening to Verkan say when we were off on
> Zarathustra. THe paratime yarns span like a hundred
> years or more I believe. Obviouosly it is to bolster my
> Piperverse obsession.
Congratulations, you just touched the third rail of Piper fan discussion. :)
This
is a subject upon which epic e-mail wars have been waged, with both
sides using the heaviest possible artillery, sometimes resorting to
nuking the other side, but neither willing to given an inch of
territory.
Okay, all kidding aside, this is a frequent topic of
discussion, but one on which there is sharp (altho usually not
unfriendly) disagreement, and it seems quite clear that neither side is
going to prevail.
Some insist that Paratime and the Piperverse
(aka the Terro-Human Future History) are separate series, and that Piper
never intended for them to be interpreted as occupying the same
universe. I happen to be in that camp, and I'll point to Piper's own
"Future History" article, in which there is absolutely no mention
whatsoever of Paratime as a whole, nor any mention of any Paratime
story.
But others insist that Paratime and the THFH are
connected, pointing to the strong evidence in "Omnilingual" of
prehistoric Terro-humans on Mars. Compare with Piper's story "Genesis",
obviously part of the Paratime series, but also perhaps describing
something similar to how Martians may have colonized Earth in the
THFH... altho that is another point on which Piper fans very sharply
disagree. However, since Piper himself did not list "Genesis" in his
"Future History" article, I must admit that claim is rather dubious even
though I've made it myself.
For what it's worth, John F. Carr
(the author of a Piper biography and multiple pastiches of Piper's
works, and the closest we have to a real authority on Piper's writings)
says that Piper meant for the two series to be separate, and that any
similarities are due to them having the same author. Personally, I
entirely agree with his assessment.
> Also (so I might get some response) what is Wolf's site? Another forum?
That
refers to the e-mail Piper discussion forum, run by Wolfgang Diehr, who
posts as "Wolf" on his forum. Sadly, that forum is little used since
they created a Facebook page for it... and Facebook is sadly not
conducive to the sort of detailed discussions we see here. :(
...or maybe I've just fallen off the group due to a change in e-mail address, and didn't realize it?
Info at: https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Piper-Worlds/info
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Clear ether!
David "Lensman" Sooby
|
jimmyjoejangles 08-20-2017
04:53 UT
|
I like it! But on a more serious note I was looking at the website and
was bowled over to find out the information that I sought wasn't there.
I'm not sure who is in charge of the website I think David but may be
wrong. But I'll try to cobble something together and submit it for
consideration.
Also I was looking at the bibliographies and
noticed that Librivox is not listed. It's part of Project Gutenberg,
which is in the process of putting all public domain works onto the
internet. On the website you can find text files and audio versions of
almost all of Piper's works. The only things that aren't on there yet
are the last two Fuzzy novels, the Kalvan tales are a no show, The
Mercenaries and First Cycle. Everything else is on there and without
Librivox I wouldn't be here today, not that Librivox saved my life or
anything but it is where I heard of Piper first.
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-20-2017
02:15 UT
|
~
James "jimmyjoejangles" Romanski wrote:
> and finding out what was happening to Verkan say
> when we were off on Zarathustra.
Clearly
he was preparing to destroy Merlin. I mean, if mere mortals like
Ghaldron Karf and Hesthor Ghrom could discover paratemporal
transposition, then surely Merlin would someday. . . .
;)
"It's a lie! It's a lie! Merlin has been found!"
David
--
"Sometimes
I wish Ghaldron Karf and Hesthor Ghrom had strangled in their cradles!"
- Tortha Karf (H. Beam Piper), "Police Operation"
~
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-20-2017
00:50 UT
|
~
John "Calidore" Anderson wrote:
> If you believe we’ve reached an impasse and wish
> to move on to other topics, I am happy to do so.
By all means please continue. I have the sense that, Terry, for one, would continue to find the conversation helpful.
It's
also my sense though that we have reached, not so much an "impasse" but
perhaps rather a point of "diminishing returns." Let me see if I can
explain what I mean.
Imagine I suggest that the "faun-like"
natives of Loki are especially good at hunting the larval stage of the
arboreal sky-scorpions of Loki, whose venomous tail-sting is especially
toxic. One of the reasons that Anton Gerritt was successful in
enslaving so many Lokians was because he was able to use Terran
colonists' fear of the sky-scorpions to encourage them to want a few
handy "scorpion-wyrm" slayers always on hand.
At this point it's
obvious I've wandered quite far afield from what Beam left us about
native fauna on Loki and the infamous Enslavement (even if perhaps what
I've suggested here is internally consistent and does not specifically
contradict Beam's work).
Now suppose I ask why it was that the
Terran settlers in Loki's semi-polar regions were especially supportive
of Gerritt's slavery efforts. It's very difficult at this point for
anyone else to comment because I've actually sort of built a little
"mini world" of my own and placed it on Beam's Loki. Others will find
it difficult to comment effectively because we're talking about
something that is mostly a product of my own imagination. It would be
next to impossible for anyone to grasp that sky-scorpion stings only
ever seriously injured Terran children or small animals but that the
ranchers in the semi-polar regions liked to have Lokian slaves because
they kept the sky-scorpions away from the 'dillo-goat herds that were
their primary source of off-world income. At this point, no one but me
can comment effectively because they aren't privy to the "mini-world"
I'm imagining (even if it is placed on a planet Beam created and in the
context of events--the Enslavement--which he described).
Does that make sense? (Not the stuff about Loki but the idea of my own "mini-world.")
> In closing, I’d like to imagine a scene in the Hereafter.
> H. Beam Piper is sitting in a chair— in the Norse
> Asgard, of course, as the Christian Heaven is much
> too peaceful for his taste— looking down on us. “Can
> you believe it?” he asks himself. “Those two are about
> to have “pistols and coffee” over where Gimli’s Navy
> base is. Didn’t know I was *that* good!” He lit his
> pipe, chuckling happily.
Love it! :)
David
--
"I
was going to write like James Branch Cabell, which would have taken a
lot of doing. Before that, I was going to write like Rafael Sabatini,
and like Talbot Mundy, and like Rider Haggard, and even, God help us
all, like Edgar Rice Burroughs. . . . Eventually I decided to write
like H. Beam Piper, only a little better. I am still trying." - H. Beam
Piper, "Double: Bill Symposium" interview
~
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-20-2017
00:36 UT
|
~
Jon Crocker wrote:
> There's a tragic backstory there
> involving my dismissal from a
> haberdashery, but this really
> isn't the forum for that.
Would
love to hear that tale over your favorite milkshake--as long as it's
chocolate, vanilla or strawberry--at the Waffle Shop during the
Irregulars' Muster one year soon. ;)
> There is a figure in the
> background wearing something
> similar.
I'd
thought that might be a more traditional military hat--worn at a
particularly rakish angle--but I can see it now. If that's Sir
Nevil--if there's a beard it's obscured--then I can see that what we're
looking at in the illustration is the "business end" of Dunnan's foppish
beret hanging over the same side of his head.
So my next
question is, who is the gentlemen at the far right? It doesn't seem to
be the "small and saturnine" Rovard Grauffis nor the portly, gray-haired
Sesar Karvall.
> You can see Harkaman
> assessing the job-lot and
> thinking 'no problem.'
Yep.
And yet Dunnan turned out to be a substantial problem. Beam was quite
the storyteller, foreshadowing here that evil, especially the mad
variety, was likely to be overlooked until it was too late.
For Tanith!
David
--
"Good things in the long run are often tough while they're happening." - Otto Harkaman (H. Beam Piper), ~Space Viking~
~
|
jimmyjoejangles 08-19-2017
20:11 UT
|
While everyone is hot and bothered I'd like to ask about dovetailing
THFH and paratime together and finding out what was happening to Verkan
say when we were off on Zarathustra. THe paratime yarns span like a
hundred years or more I believe. Obviouosly it is to bolster my
Piperverse obsession. Also (so I might get some response) what is
Wolf's site? Another forum?
|
Calidore 08-19-2017
13:34 UT
|
David “Piperfan” Johnson said:
>This is silly though, John. I'm not interested in arguing with you
>about this. We simply have different opinions, in the face of a
>dearth of details from Beam. I'm willing to admit the possibility
>of your views being correct, even if I don't agree with them.
>I hope you can grant me the same courtesy.
Well,
I haven’t been arguing for the sake of argument; I thought we were
having a discussion. Certainly you are entitled to your opinion! I
have said so in the past. Nor am I denying that my opinions may be
wrong. In fact, I have changed a couple of them in the course of this
discussion, for which I am grateful to all involved. The free flow of
ideas here (and on Wolf’s site) has helped clarify my thinking on many
occasions, not to mention inspired at least one paper. If you believe
we’ve reached an impasse and wish to move on to other topics, I am happy
to do so.
In closing, I’d like to imagine a scene in the
Hereafter. H. Beam Piper is sitting in a chair—in the Norse Asgard, of
course, as the Christian Heaven is much too peaceful for his
taste—looking down on us. “Can you believe it?” he asks himself.
“Those two are about to have “pistols and coffee” over where Gimli’s
Navy base is. Didn’t know I was *that* good!” He lit his pipe,
chuckling happily.
John :)
|
Tanith in Oz 08-19-2017
13:33 UT
|
I think the solution to why Gimli has a base on it is relatively simple.
Gravity.
Clearly
the reason why the Federation builds naval bases on moons is the weaker
gravity of such bodies. This would then make lifting the ships from
any surface a lot more inexpensive as they would have less of a gravity
well to contend with. Also any type of atmosphere would also create
friction for returning starships, so placing a base on an airless body
makes sense as this doesn't become an issue.
But Gimli is
different. The Uranium there makes it a security concern, so having a
base there is to protect the mining efforts. Also Gimli has no moon. I
contend it has a debris ring (the golden roof) and I think from an
environmental point of view (and a navigational point of view too)
building the base on a orbiting body wouldn't make sense.
I do
not believe Gimli orbits a gas giant because as we all know gas giants
have multiple moons and based on this theory why then wouldn't the
Federation use one to build their base? It seems to me to be unusual to
build on Gimli (if it orbits a gas giant) as it is cheaper to use an
airless body instead than a habitable world with a native species.
So no Gimli doesn't orbit a gas giant.
To
me the answer is easy. Gimli isn't earth sized, its smaller - much
like Mars. So if you look at it this way then it makes sense why Gimli
would have a naval base. Being smaller means a lighter gravity well
than Terra. Add the Uranium factor then it becomes clear. The
Federation felt it was necessary to have a presence here, because Gimli
became important.
So unlike other naval base sites, Gimli became an exception, but by no means the only one.
Terry
|
Jon Crocker 08-19-2017
05:03 UT
|
A beret with an over-floppy side bit? Overlarge side bit to show
dramatic movement or some other artistic interpretations? Berets gave
the artist problems, he always drew the side bit too large?
Don't
know the technical terms for beret parts, sorry. There's a tragic
backstory there involving my dismissal from a haberdashery, but this
really isn't the forum for that.
The passage from Viking reads
"The man in front wore a diamond sunburst jewel on his beret, and his
cloak was lined with pale blue silk."
Are there different sizes of berets? Like different knots for ties?
There is a figure in the background wearing something similar.
I like this one, kind of a 'Danish modern' style. You can see Harkaman assessing the job-lot and thinking 'no problem.'
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-19-2017
01:24 UT
|
~
Viking formal wear?
Something I've often wondered about is
what Andray Dunnan is wearing in this image from the original ~Analog~
publication of ~Space Viking~. (This is apparently by John Schoenherr
like the other illustrations but it sure doesn't _look_ like the rest of
them.) What is that thing on Dunnan's head?
It looks like
something rather more than a beret. It almost looks like a turban of
some sort. You can see the robes on Dunnan and others in the
illustration, so clearly the artist had a particular idea in mind for
what the aristocracy on Gram would wear to a formal party.
Unfortunately, none of the other men seem to be wearing any head
coverings.
Any ideas?
David
--
"You are my chieftain. That's another mark of the barbarian." - Otto Harkaman (H. Beam Piper), ~Space Viking~
~
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-19-2017
01:18 UT
|
Dunnan interrupts the party
|
David Sooby 08-18-2017
23:25 UT
|
David Johnson said:
> It could be that _both_ CZC _and_ TBM paid for construction of the Xerxes base.
> The question would seem to revolve around whether the Federation navy is more
> like a contemporary navy or more like (a space-borne version of) a contemporary
> police force, with the corresponding differences in the models used to
> construct the infrastructure.
I
find it rather unlikely that newly formed chartered colonization
corporations would be saddled with the expense of building a naval base.
There's also the question of security; would a navy really want some
random civilian construction workers hired to build a naval base for
them? Wouldn't it prefer to use its own, carefully vetted construction
workers or contractors?
If the Federation maintains an outsized
Navy partially for the purpose of giving otherwise unemployed and
trouble-making young men useful work, as has been suggested or at least
implied in the current discussion, as well as for the obvious -- and I
think unquestionable -- purpose of maintaining the strong arm of
Federation enforcement on outlying frontier worlds, then that would be
yet another reason why construction of Federation naval bases would be
paid for by the Federation itself, rather than saddling newly created
chartered companies with that rather large expense. Forcing newly
chartered companies to shoulder the burden of that expense would greatly
discourage the formation of such companies, which definitely does not
seem to be the intention of the Federation.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Clear ether!
David "Lensman" Sooby
|
David Sooby 08-18-2017
22:58 UT
|
I find it disheartening to see Piper fans arguing from entrenched
positions based on such scant evidence. In fact, the only reason y'all
are having this argument is because it's not at all clear; Piper didn't
specify whether the Gimli naval base was on the planet or not, and so
it's pretty much open to any interpretation we want to make.
Let's look at what Piper actually wrote in FOUR-DAY PLANET:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"What
I did was send my friend, who is a Colonial Constabulary detective, to
Gimli, the next planet out. There's a Navy base there..."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I
note that naval bases are found on uninhabitable (presumably barren and
airless) moons of inhabited planets in both LITTLE FUZZY (Xerxes), and
SPACE VIKING:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Marduk had three
moons; a big one, fifteen hundred miles in diameter, and two
insignificant twenty-mile chunks of rock. The big one was fortified, and
a couple of ships were in orbit around it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Therefore,
my assumption -- in absence of anything specific from Piper -- would be
that the naval base at Gimli is likewise on an uninhabitable moon. The
first quote above, from FOUR-DAY PLANET, does not actually specify the
naval base is *on* Gimli; it could easily mean merely that the base is
*at* Gimli, which would certainly fit with the practice of putting naval
bases on uninhabited moons.
Of course, if a writer wants to make
Gimli a moon of a gas giant, then the naval base can't be on a natural
satellite. Moons don't have their own moons!
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Clear ether!
David "Lensman" Sooby
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-18-2017
01:33 UT
|
~
John "Calidore" Anderson wrote:
> That’s possible, but is there a statement in Piper that
> says the Company had to build the Xerxes Naval base?
No,
I'm aware of no such reference and I didn't mean to imply that there
was one. I was simply suggesting that some of the Federation's
"infrastructure" might have been constructed in a manner similar to that
used for much of the public infrastructure around us (at least here in
North America). If the Federation Navy is indeed more like a "public
safety" force--intent upon protecting against domestic unrest rather
than aimed at an "outside" adversary--then perhaps the model used for
contemporary "public safety" infrastructure in particular is a better
one.
> It was my impression that since the Federation ‘owns’
> Xerxes, it used its own construction battalions to build
> the base.
Well,
Beam tells us that the Federation "retained" Xerxes for the naval base
but he tells us nothing about how its was constructed (or how that
construction was funded). When you say its your impression that the
Federation constructed the base itself, you seem to be relying upon a
model of contemporary military construction practice. But we've already
begun to discuss the possibility that, without an "outside" adversary,
the Federation military may not be much like our contemporary models of
the military (and thus may not _have_ any "construction battalions").
> One would think the fledgling Zarathustra Company had
> enough on its plate, developing the planet below. In the
> same vein, I don’t recall a statement that the CZC built
> the civilian spaceport on Darius. Again, there may be
> one, but I would guess that Terra-Baldur-Marduk
> Spacelines built the spaceport. It is possible that the
> CZC had to contribute some raw materials and labor,
> but this would likely have been offset by the fees it
> charges in leasing the moon to TBMS.
Again,
these are assumptions. We get no details from Beam, either at
Zarathustra or for other "public infrastructure" in the Federation. It
could be that _both_ CZC _and_ TBM paid for construction of the Xerxes
base. The question would seem to revolve around whether the Federation
navy is more like a contemporary navy or more like (a space-borne
version of) a contemporary police force, with the corresponding
differences in the models used to construct the infrastructure. It
could go either way--or even some other way; we simply don't know.
> True. But Gimli is also where Princess Bentrik and
> Count Steven escape to, before proceeding to Tanith.
> And this is *before* Prince Bentrik orders the Mardukans
> to rally there.
Yes,
but it seems to have occurred at about the same time that the Mardukan
Navy is dispersed to the trade-planets by the Makannists.
> Why else would Lucille and Stephen go to Gimli, if they
> did not believe it to be a relatively secure way-station?
Uh, perhaps because it's close?
> These facts,
You've
mixed a great many suppositions in there with what we get from Beam.
Your assumptions may be correct but they're by no means obvious. What
we get from Beam does not suggest anything other than that Gimli is
close to Marduk (and maybe Tanith too, relatively) and, perhaps, that
Loyalists naval forces there understand that Trask would likely provide
sanctuary to Bentrik's family. Beam doesn't tell us that Gimli has a
Mardukan naval base--much less that it's a remnant from the Federation
era--or that it is any more "important" to Marduk than are its other
trade-planets. It _might_ be, sure, but that's an assumption you're
making, not something we get from Beam.
> Its location, plus its uranium supplies, could mean
> that Royal Mardukan Navy visits are more frequent
> here than on Marduk’s other trade planets. That
> could explain why Dunnan did not raid Gimli, as
> he’d be more likely to get into a fight. It can also
> explain why Princess Bentrik and her son transit
> through here, rather than another trade planet.
> On Gimli they’d be more likely to find friendly forces
> that can help them.
All possible, yes. But more likely than several other possible explanations? I don't believe so.
> > Gimli may not have
> > a moon, sure, but I don't think Beam was telling
> > us that in ~Four-Day Planet~.
>
> That seems to be a pretty sweeping statement;
No, it's a _conservative_ statement, one that is careful not to make claims beyond what Beam has left for us.
> I would like to see an actual quote. Where did
> Piper use the name of the planet to describe the
> whole system?
Sorry,
no. You're the one making the leap here, not me. If Beam was
signalling to us that the Federation naval base was on the planet's
surface when he wrote simply "Gimli" then _you_ have to demonstrate that
claim with evidence--not assumptions--from Beam's work (instead of
insisting that I demonstrate a negative claim).
This is silly
though, John. I'm not interested in arguing with you about this. We
simply have different opinions, in the face of a dearth of details from
Beam. I'm willing to admit the possibility of your views being correct,
even if I don't agree with them. I hope you can grant me the same
courtesy.
Be well,
David
--
"No one of us can
actually get inside Piper's head and any assumptions we make are made
from our own mindset, not his." -- David Wright, Sr.
~
|
Jon Crocker 08-18-2017
00:51 UT
|
Gimli does figure in Norse mythology, which predates Tolkien. So there are a few places he could have gotten it.
|
jimmyjoejangles 08-17-2017
22:16 UT
|
I always assumed that Piper had a bootleg copy of Lord of the Rings, and that he just liked the name Gimli from there.
|
Calidore 08-17-2017
16:10 UT
|
David "Piperfan" Johnson wrote:
>There may be a naval base there for reasons similar to why
>there are fire stations in new housing developments (even
>when that may not be the most ideal location for them): the
>government granting the concession insists that the commercial
>venture receiving the concession build them as a condition of
>the concession. This parallel to fire stations in housing
>developments works especially well for a Federation with a
>military that isn't tasked with defending against foreign foes. . . .
That’s
possible, but is there a statement in Piper that says the Company had
to build the Xerxes Naval base? I don’t recall such a reference, and
would like to be instructed. It was my impression that since the
Federation ‘owns’ Xerxes, it used its own construction battalions to
build the base. One would think the fledgling Zarathustra Company had
enough on its plate, developing the planet below. In the same vein, I
don’t recall a statement that the CZC built the civilian spaceport on
Darius. Again, there may be one, but I would guess that
Terra-Baldur-Marduk Spacelines built the spaceport. It is possible that
the CZC had to contribute some raw materials and labor, but this would
likely have been offset by the fees it charges in leasing the moon to
TBMS.
>Or, it could be that the Mardukan Navy ships gathered at Gimli
>because it hadn't yet been raided by Dunnan's Vikings as the
>other Mardukan trade-planets had been. That may be simply
>because Gimli was closer to Marduk than were planets like
>Tetragrammaton and Audhumla. We just don't know.
True.
But Gimli is also where Princess Bentrik and Count Steven escape to,
before proceeding to Tanith. And this is *before* Prince Bentrik orders
the Mardukans to rally there. Why else would Lucille and Stephen go to
Gimli, if they did not believe it to be a relatively secure
way-station? These facts, plus that Gimli is not raided by Dunnan (not
to mention all the other references to Gimli in other stories, in which
it plays important ‘behind the scenes’ roles), give me the distinct
impression that the planet and/or its location is special.
Its
location, plus its uranium supplies, could mean that Royal Mardukan Navy
visits are more frequent here than on Marduk’s other trade planets.
That could explain why Dunnan did not raid Gimli, as he’d be more likely
to get into a fight. It can also explain why Princess Bentrik and her
son transit through here, rather than another trade planet. On Gimli
they’d be more likely to find friendly forces that can help them.
>The Interstellar Wars were not a conflict between the Terran
>Federation and some external foe. The Interstellar Wars were
>a series of civil wars between various parts of what had been the
>Terran Federation. This means that _every_ battle was one with
>(former) Terran Federation Navy ships on _both_ sides (as would
>have been the case for the Alliance Navy in the System States
>War). Because Gimli wasn't a major Federation planet, the Navy
>forces at Gimli were most likely pulled from there at some point
>as the rump Federation retrenched. If they weren't pulled from
>Gimli by the Federation then they were probably taken over by—
>or joined up themselves with--one of the "civilized planets" as it
>broke away from the Federation and were perhaps also pulled
>from Gimli to defend the "home" planet. That may have been
>Marduk or it could have been another "civilized" planet. Again,
>we just don't know.
I
am well aware of who fought the Interstellar Wars. Apparently, you
misunderstood my post. There are obviously many possible scenarios for
Gimli’s role after the Federation breakup; I did say the planet “may”
have escaped unscathed, and that it is well defended “at least at
first.” My scenario is simply an extrapolation based on the meaning of
the planet’s name.
>I agree that Gimli's fissionable ores will be attractive to the
>"civilized planets" which survive the Interstellar Wars but
>whether it was controlled continuously from the time of the
>withdrawal of the Federation to the Viking era by the same
>"civilized planet" is something we just don't know. In fact,
>those ores make it seem more likely that it was a planet
>that was often fought over during those dark centuries. . . .
Yes,
very possible. But since Gimle (Icelandic Gimli) means “place
protected from fire”, Gimli itself may not suffer damage. Or, if not
taking the name too literally, not much damage.
>Beam refers to the Sol System and to the various parts of the
>Gartner Trisystem. There is the System States Alliance, of course.
>There is some discussion of the Beta Hydrae system (interestingly,
>not the Beta Hydri system Clark introduces) in ~Uller Uprising~.
>There is some discussion in ~Space Viking~ of the Tanith and
>Marduk systems when the issue of Dunnan's hiding ships is
>examined. (Beowulf's off-world settlements in its system are
>briefly mentioned when the "civilized" nature of Beowulf is
>remarked upon.) There is some discussion of the Aditya system
>in "A Slave is a Slave" when the issue of Imperial control is
>being explained. There is some discussion of the Kwannon
>system which is pertinent to the voyage around the planet
> to view the two suns. If I recall correctly, at no point in three
>novels does Beam refer to the Zarathustra system--despite
>the Naval Base being on Xerxes (and the Terra-Baldur-Marduk
>spaceport on Darius).
>I guess what I'm trying to say is that in most cases Beam
>does not distinguish between the planet--Fenris, Freya,
>Svantovit, Gram, Odin, Zarathustra, Indra, Ashmodai, Osiris,
>Baldur, Ishtar, Fafnir, Aton, Belphegor, Mimur, Xochitl, etc.,
>etc., etc.--and its system. It does not therefore seem obvious
>that Beam is telling us that Gimli has no moon just because
>he didn't identify it as the "Gimli system." Gimli may not have
>a moon, sure, but I don't think Beam was telling us that in
>~Four-Day Planet~.
That
seems to be a pretty sweeping statement; I would like to see an actual
quote. Where did Piper use the name of the planet to describe the whole
system? And by that I mean where does he say “Fenris”, or “Freya”, or
“Svantovit”, and from the context one can tell he means the whole
system, not just the planet? Such references may exist, but not that I
recall. In Space Viking, for example, when characters talk about going
to Marduk, or Khepera, or Amaterasu, or Beowulf, their destination is
the planet, and not anywhere else in its system. Your examples of the
Sol System, Gartner Trisystem and Beta Hydrae actually suggest that Beam
used the *star* name to refer to the system, not the habitable planet’s
name.
And I didn’t say that in Four-Day Planet, Beam was
telling us Gimli has no moon, I said he was indicating that the
Federation Navy base is on the planet. That Gimli is moonless is
partially extrapolated from that. The other reason I believe Gimli is
moonless is from the Norse myths. During Ragnarok, both the sun and
moon are destroyed. The new world that arises after Surtur burns the
old is lighted by a new sun, the daughter of Sol, born before Sol was
killed. But there is no mention of a new moon in the sky over Gimle.
Now
to the possibility that Gimli’s Navy base is somewhere else in its
system. Leaving aside The Cosmic Computer, I believe Piper always
located his Space Navy bases on a habitable planet or its moon. The
military installations in CC that are off Poictesme are an exception to
this rule, since they are built during the System States War, when the
Federation Navy undergoes a substantial expansion in order to deal with
the 90 breakaway systems. After the war, these facilities are all
abandoned. Gimli’s base in Four-Day Planet is built centuries before
that, when the Federation itself was much smaller, its authority was
unchallenged, and consequently there was no need for a large Space Navy.
The base is therefore almost certainly on Gimli.
Assuming I’m
right about the planet having an important location, the Gimli system
may become more heavily fortified during the System States War. But if
so, these facilities will all be abandoned afterward, like those in the
Trisystem.
As far as Zarathustra is concerned, its star is
probably named Mallory, after the discoverer. Mallory’s Star would then
match Mallory’s Port (Mallorysport), the capital and main city. Piper
may not have mentioned it because Mallorysport is referred to quite
often in the Fuzzy novels, making the star name somewhat redundant.
John
|
David Sooby 08-17-2017
12:54 UT
|
Dale Ridder said:
> I suspect that Calvin Morrison's views of religion closely
> reflects Piper's personal view.
I'd
say Piper had an even more negative view of religion than Kalvan did.
Kalvan, a Pennyslvania preacher's son, was careful to never ridicule or
even challenge the religious beliefs of Hos-Hostigos, and in fact he
even went so far as to show the outward signs of respecting the local
gods:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
He didn't believe in Dralm, or any
other god, but now, besides being a general and an ordinance engineer
and an industrialist, he had to be a politician and no politician can
afford to slight his constituents' religion. If nothing else, a
parsonage childhood had given him a talent for hypocritical lip-service.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
-- LORD KALVAN OF OTHERWHEN ch. Eight-II
Note
that almost all the references to religion in the Piperverse stories
are to native religions which are wildly superstitious. Most notably,
the religion of the Ullerans, and in "Oomphel in the Sky", the native
religion of the Kwanns, which is depicted as not only superstitious, but
downright self-destructive to the point of insanity.
The worship of Merlin in THE COSMIC COMPUTER is described in terms scarcely less pejorative or less scornful.
One
thing that greatly surprised me the first time I read SPACE VIKING is
that Gram and the Sword Worlds are depicted as so civilized, without any
hint of the religion and superstition that you'd expect to arise during
a galactic "dark ages". And yet Gram isn't even one of the "civilized
worlds"!
Even the downfall of Marduk in SPACE VIKING is told in
terms of a political upheaval, rather than a religious one; clearly an
analog of the Nazi takeover of the Weimar Republic of Germany. Despite
it happening during a galactic "dark ages", there's no hint that
superstition or religion played a significant part in that.
It
seems fairly clear to me that Piper was a rationalist, someone who
regarded all forms of religion as superstition, with some being more
benign than others. Or at least, Piper wrote from that viewpoint,
whether or not it perfectly fit his personal views on religion.
That
should come as no surprise to anyone who is familiar with the
philosophy espoused by John W. Campbell during his editorship of
Astounding/Analog. Piper was very much of that rationalist school of SF
writers.
(It is of course amusing and ironic to note that
Campbell himself, for a time, fell under the spell of L. Ron Hubbard and
the Dianetics pseudo-religion! It is insightful to read Campbell's
letters, published as THE JOHN W. CAMPBELL LETTERS, and to note the
abruptness with which he suddenly questions the (as best I can recall)
"Hubbardian" principles of Dianetics in one letter, after which he never
mentions Dianetics again in any subsequent letters in the collection.)
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Clear ether!
David "Lensman" Sooby
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-15-2017
14:40 UT
|
~
Terry "Tanith in Oz" Glouftsis wrote:
> Being that he was a heavy proponent of the idea
> of history repeating itself I find it improbable that
> he would not have looked at the Medieval period
> one day coming again, warts and all. We can
> argue Space Viking deals with elements of the
> Medieval era, but the really "dark" parts of the
> Dark ages would likely return if his theory holds true.
>
> So though I can accept the idea of religion in the
> late Federation being a stretch, I'm not convinced
> it's impossible.
By
the time of "The Keeper" Terro-human civilization has gone through
several "dark ages." It could be that had Beam written yarns in one of
those eras "between empires" he might have created an interstellar
religious institution modeled on the Church(es) of the European Medieval
period. By that time, of course, it wouldn't look in the details much
like any religion we would recognize today.
It is as Yah the Almighty wills.
David
--
"Oh,
my people had many gods. There was Conformity, and Authority, and
Expense Account, and Opinion. And there was Status, whose symbols were
many, and who rode in the great chariot Cadillac, which was almost a god
itself. And there was Atom-bomb, the dread destroyer, who would some
day come to end the world. None were very good gods, and I worshiped
none of them.” - Calvin Morrison (H. Beam Piper), ~Lord Kalvan of
Otherwhen~
~
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-15-2017
14:30 UT
|
~
Dale Ridder quotes:
> Their society seemed to be a loose theo-socialism, and
> their religion an absurd potpourri of most of the major
> monotheisms of the Federation period, plus doctrinal
> and ritualistic innovations of their own.
Which makes clear that there were in fact several "major monotheisms" in the Federation era.
It is as Yah the Almighty wills.
David
--
"Let's see yours. Draw--soul! Inspection--soul!" - Foxx Travis (H. Beam Piper), "Oomphel in the Sky"
~
|
Tanith in Oz 08-15-2017
13:03 UT
|
Ok that's fair enough.
I couldn't find much on this myself and
it's good to know that I'm not that far off the mark. Yes I can
certainly see how the concept of religion might have died out during the
centuries of the Federation.
Perhaps we can say that as
civilization spreads out in to the stars, the need for a creator does
diminish in importance. I guess by the time of Space Viking it's
virtually non existent and could be considered a stretch to suggest a
"seed" of religion one day blooming in a new dark age. That's fair
enough. I'm just not willing to drop the idea that Piper may have
envisioned this happening though.
Being that he was a heavy
proponent of the idea of history repeating itself I find it improbable
that he would not have looked at the Medieval period one day coming
again, warts and all. We can argue Space Viking deals with elements of
the Medieval era, but the really "dark" parts of the Dark ages would
likely return if his theory holds true.
So though I can accept the idea of religion in the late Federation being a stretch, I'm not convinced it's impossible.
But
be that as it may, I was just a thought I had. Gimli is not religious
in my story, but I had to think about this. Religion would help with
certain plot points, but in this era of the Federation it might be
unlikely. Though I can see how religious minded people might have come
to the name of Gimli a lot more quickly (especially if they saw it as
heavenly as John Anderson suggests) it was early on before the
settlement (which I feel was much later anyway).
Oh well.
Terry
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-15-2017
05:44 UT
|
~
Terry "Tanith in Oz" Glouftsis wrote:
> So far I haven't found much in the way of references
> to it, and it seems to me that protestant countries
> such as South Africa and Australia and the Catholic
> South Americans wouldn't have completely stopped
> being religious.
I
think that's a reasonable assumption early in the Federation era. As
Federation civilization becomes something more than merely "Southern
Hemisphere Terran" civilization that could change.
> I'm not certain but I've always had the feeling from
> Piper's writing that religion was something he down
> played.
That's
accurate, but he dealt with it nonetheless. Consider the negative way
Rakeed the Prophet is portrayed in ~Uller Uprising~. On the other hand
there is the nuanced way Miles Gilbert treats the Shoonoon on Kwannon.
> However he did make some references. There's,
> for example, mention of Terran cocktail hour being
> viewed by other races as a "religious observance".
Yes,
that's sort of a joke, but there is also the Rev. Hiram Zilker, a
"Monophysite-Orthodox preacher," and an unnamed, gun-toting Zen Buddhist
priest on Fenris.
> It's clear from Space Viking that worlds destroyed
> "reverted" to earlier civilization indexes, and some
> of these would include religion.
The
most obvious example here is the Gilgameshers. They're presented
pejoratively mostly by the other characters (but it seems pretty obvious
that Beam is using an historical example here).
> Yet I can't find a direct reference to religion on
> the developed worlds. So does Aton, Baldur,
> Marduk, Baldur etc carry any kind of religious
> legacy?
Those
two minor characters in ~Four-Day Planet~ are the only instances of the
contemporary Terran religious I recall in the Terro-human Future
History.
> I ask because when I think of Gimli getting a
> paradisaical name it may imply some sort of
> religious leaning on behalf of the explorers.
I
don't see why that would contradict anything Beam has left us. It
might not be the sort of yarn he would have written, but it doesn't
contradict him.
> And given the concept of a new dark age following
> the fall of the Federation is it fair to assume that
> concurrently a rise in religious belief might occur as
> it did in Medieval Europe? If this is the case there
> would have to be seeds of those religions in the
> Federation for the proverbial flowers to bloom later
> on.
This
seems more of a stretch (than a given character with religious views
among those who discovered Gimli) because we get no indications of this
sort of thing from Beam. The Space Vikings don't encounter this and
there's no suggestion of it in the early Empire era of "A Slave is a
Slave" (nor in the later Empire era of "Ministry of Disturbance").
> Does this make sense, or am I looking at this wrong? Or have I missed something I should have noticed?
In
Medieval Europe the Church(es) rivalled any political authority. There
doesn't seem to be any such institution in the Federation, Viking or
(First) Empire eras.
It is as Yah the Almighty wills.
David
--
"Let's see yours. Draw--soul! Inspection--soul!" - Foxx Travis (H. Beam Piper), "Oomphel in the Sky"
~
|
Dale Ridder 08-15-2017
05:43 UT
|
At Terry:
"You are picking up the impression, I trust, that as
planets go, Fenris is nobody's bargain. It isn't a real hell-planet, and
spacemen haven't made a swear word out of its name, as they have with
the name of fluorine-atmosphere Nifflheim, but even the Reverend Hiram
Zilker, the Orthodox-Monophysite preacher, admits that it's one of[6]
those planets the Creator must have gotten a trifle absent-minded with."
4
Day Planet has the only references that I know of in Piper's Future
History series of a religious figure. However, in combining Orthodox
and Monophysite, Piper is essentially combining two opposing views, as
Monophysites are not viewed as Orthodox by the Roman Catholic Church,
the Protestant Churches, or the Greek Orthodox Church. It is a bit like
saying that someone is a Fascist Communist, or a Capitalist Communist,
or a Free Market Socialist. Unlike Heinlein's Starship Troopers
chaplain, Space Viking has no chaplains.
In the Paratime series,
you do have the story Temple Trouble, although that is the case of the
First Level Civilization using religion as a facade to mine uranium,
where clearly the First Level Personnel view religion as a tool and not a
belief. Calvin Morrison in Gunpowder God and Down Styphon is basically
an agnostic, but uses religion as a weapon, while the head of the
Church of Styphon is clearly depicted as a non-believer. The heads of
Hostigos' Cult of Dralm and Cult of Galzer Wolfhead are depicted
favorably.
The Gilgameshers in Space Viking get the following description:
Their
society seemed to be a loose theo-socialism, and their religion an
absurd potpourri of most of the major monotheisms of the Federation
period, plus doctrinal and ritualistic innovations of their own. Aside
from their propensity for sharp trading, their bigoted refusal to regard
anybody not of their creed as more than half human, and the maze of
dietary and other taboos in which they hid from social contact with
others, made them generally disliked.
Not exactly a flattering
description by any means. I suspect that Calvin Morrison's views of
religion closely reflects Piper's personal view.
|
Tanith in Oz 08-15-2017
04:07 UT
|
A thought occurred to me over the last few days and I've had some trouble confirming it.
What
is the status of religion in the Terro-Human universe? So far I
haven't found much in the way of references to it, and it seems to me
that protestant countries such as South Africa and Australia and the
Catholic South Americans wouldn't have completely stopped being
religious.
I'm not certain but I've always had the feeling from
Piper's writing that religion was something he down played. However he
did make some references. There's, for example, mention of Terran
cocktail hour being viewed by other races as a "religious observance".
I've always been amused by this, but it's logical given aliens would not
understand the concept of a regular daily "recreational" activity being
any thing but some sort of culturally significant event, ie religious.
But much more broadly would religion have been carried to the
worlds of the Federation? It's clear from Space Viking that worlds
destroyed "reverted" to earlier civilization indexes, and some of these
would include religion. And then there is the worship of the Cosmic
Computer, so it's not like Beam didn't talk about it.
Yet I can't
find a direct reference to religion on the developed worlds. So does
Aton, Baldur, Marduk, Baldur etc carry any kind of religious legacy? I
ask because when I think of Gimli getting a paradisaical name it may
imply some sort of religious leaning on behalf of the explorers.
And
given the concept of a new dark age following the fall of the
Federation is it fair to assume that concurrently a rise in religious
belief might occur as it did in Medieval Europe? If this is the case
there would have to be seeds of those religions in the Federation for
the proverbial flowers to bloom later on.
Does this make sense, or am I looking at this wrong? Or have I missed something I should have noticed?
Terry
|
David Sooby 08-13-2017
14:43 UT
|
I wrote:
> The idea of one small group of primitive natives being able to negotiate away
> the rights for settlement and mineral exploitation for an entire planet is of
> course absurdly cynical, altho absolutely what we should expect from a colonial
> power like the Terro-human Federation. I'm sure Piper had in mind the similar
> situation with Europeans negotiating to "buy" huge swaths of territory from
> some random group of Amerinds that they encountered in the New World.
Oops!
Well now I really *should* be embarrassed, because the situation Piper
set up was not at all that cynical, nor that dismissive of the
territorial rights of the natives.
To quote from "When in the Course--":
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"What
we will have to have is some kind of a treaty with some more or less
sovereign power, guaranteeing us rights of entry and trade. Once we have
that, we can get a charter. But on an inhabited planet, we must contact
the inhabitants and establish friendly trade relations with at least
some of them."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
So no, that's not at
all close to the European explorers in the New World making a "treaty"
with a small group of Amerinds to buy a region of land the size of a
English county or even an American State.
I should check my Canon
more carefully before posting criticisms like that, or y'all are going
to think I don't really love Piper's stories! 8-O
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Clear ether!
David "Lensman" Sooby
|
Jon Crocker 08-13-2017
06:48 UT
|
>Smash the traitors first!
Space Viking had a number of good lines like that.
Where else would you see, during the battle with the Enterprise, Nemesis and Victrix, "I'll fix the expurgated unprintability!"
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-13-2017
04:43 UT
|
~
Dale Ridder wrote:
> In 4 Day Planet, you have two different speeds. One
> is 6 months or circa 180 days to cover 650 Light-years,
> or "A spaceship can log a light-year in sixty-odd hours,
> but radio waves still crawl along at the same old
> 186,000 mps."
Actually,
I don't think these two bits of information necessarily contradict each
other. That "six months to Terra" is likely along the "milk-run" route
rather than via the direct, 650 light-year route (which would take only
about a hundred hours at that "sixth-odd" hours per light-year rate).
Rather than being a contradiction this may actually give an indication
of the scale of variation from a straight line in the regular milk-run
route.
> The best assumption is that Piper's habitable planets
> are pretty spread out, with a lot of star systems with
> nothing worth while to look at.
Agreed. At least nothing worthwhile to folks who aren't members of "irreconcilable minority-groups." ;)
> Gram to Tanith is 3,000 light years, while Tanith to
> Gimli is 450 light-years, and Gimli to Marduk is 350
> light-years, going with the Space Viking light-year an
> hour.
Well,
one thing to keep in mind here is that the Alliance refugees who
settled the Sword-Worlds were fleeing the Federation and hoped to get
far enough away to never be found. Thus, they likely passed up more
than a couple Terra-type worlds along the way.
> From Space Viking: "The Old Federation area was full
> of non-Terra-type planets, and why should anybody
> bother going to any of them? Any planet that wasn't
> oxygen-atmosphere, six to eight thousand miles in
> diameter, and within a narrow surface-temperature
> range, wasn't worth wasting time on. But a planet like
> that, if one had the survival equipment, would make
> a wonderful hideout."
These
observations are made in the context of wondering where Dunnan might
have gone and they already know he's in the Old Federation. What this
highlights is the fact that the Space Vikings are raiders, not
explorers. If they were just looking for attractive planets they likely
could have found some _on_the_way_ to the Old Federation. Instead,
they probably pass by several uninhabited Terra-type planets as a matter
of routine.
Smash the traitors first!
David
--
"You are my chieftain. That's another mark of the barbarian." - Otto Harkaman (H. Beam Piper), ~Space Viking~
~
|
David Sooby 08-13-2017
01:49 UT
|
David Johnson said:
> ...mostly what we see in Beam's yarns are the Terra-type
> planets that were selected for colonization _after_ a rather
> substantial survey of various sorts of, shall we say, "more
> probable" alternatives. When Beam takes us to a planet like
> Zarathustra--or Fenris, for that matter--any assumption that
> "all the planets are like that" is _our_ mistake, not Beam's.
You're
absolutely right, and my apologies for my implied but entirely mistaken
criticism of Piper. For every Terran type world colonized during the
Federation era, such as Zarathustra or Freya or Poictesme, there's one
that is decidedly not, such as Fenris or Koshchei or Uller.
Of
course, Uller and Niflheim were not Piper's choices, but Dr. Clark's.
However, Piper followed through on the implications behind the human
colonization of Uller, by showing us other "hell-hole" worlds which
humans colonized, by choice or by necessity. And it's entirely possible
that Piper would have given us "interesting" worlds even if he had not
been following Clarke's treatise for his first Piperverse story. Just
think about how much of the story of FOUR-DAY PLANET comes from the fact
that it is decidedly *not* Earth-like; that it *is* a "hell-hole".
Without that "man vs. nature" part of the story, the novel would be much
less interesting.
Now, in SPACE VIKING, as I recall we don't see
much if anything at all of these marginally habitable worlds, other
than some barren moons with military bases on them. But as Dale Ridder
quoted in his post below, Piper himself explains why the space vikings
ignore non-Terran worlds:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Old Federation
area was full of non-Terra-type planets, and why should anybody bother
going to any of them? Any planet that wasn't oxygen-atmosphere, six to
eight thousand miles in diameter, and within a narrow
surface-temperature range, wasn't worth wasting time on.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Rich
worlds, the ones worth raiding, are mainly if not entirely going to be
worlds pretty closely resembling Terra in their ecosystems, because only
such worlds will support a really large population of Terro-humans.
* * * * *
David Johnson quoted the following from "Naudsonce"
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
...they
had been out, now for four years which was close to maximum for an
exploring expedition. They had entered eleven systems, and made landings
on eight planets. Three had been reasonably close to Terra-type. There
had been Fafnir; conditions there would correspond to Terra during the
Cretaceous Period, but any Cretaceous dinosaur would have been cute and
cuddly to the things on Fafnir. Then there had been Imhotep; in twenty
or thirty thousand years, it would be a fine planet, but at present it
was undergoing an extensive glaciation. And Irminsul, covered with
forests of gigantic trees; it would have been fine except for the fauna,
which was nasty, especially a race of subsapient near-humanoids who had
just gotten as far as clubs and /coup-de-poing/ axes. Contact with them
had entailed heavy ammunition expenditure, with two men and a woman
killed and a dozen injured.
As for the other five, one had been
an all-out hell-planet, and the rest had been the sort that get
colonized by irreconcilable minority-groups who want to get away from
everybody else.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Well, that's precisely the
sort of thing that I think isn't realistic. Out of 11 systems surveyed,
two had Terran-type worlds (I'm ignoring the icy Imhotep) which merely
had nasty inhabitants. That would be tough on the first colonists, but
if our ancestors could out-compete and eventually exterminate the
Neanderthals with nothing better than slightly superior stone-age
weapons and (I think likely) better communication through more
sophisticated language, then the Federation colonists should certainly
be able to kill off the competing local life forms with rifles and
aircars equipped with heavy weapons! Actually, that's a brute-force
approach that's wasteful of resources. Poison carefully tailored for
maximum effect on the local animals, or even individual species, would
be much more cost-effective and less risky for the colonists, even if it
doesn't make as good a story.
A survey mission finding Terran
worlds *that* frequently, when they aren't doing any sort of long-range
telescopic observation, simply doesn't fly. It implies a very dense
packing of fully habitable worlds in the Federation. Yet we know this
simply isn't so. Look at all the references to Federation trade routes
being hundreds of light-years long. There are hundreds of stars within
50 light-years of Terra; why would they have to travel so far to make a
profitable trade if it was reasonable to expect to find a fully
inhabitable world in two out of every 11 systems surveyed?
Of
course, we can assume they will ignore the majority of stars and not
bother surveying them. About 3/4 of stars are M-type red dwarfs, which
according to Dole are never going to be inhabitable. (One might of
course find an exception, but then you'd wind up with something like
"Down" in Niven's Known Space series, where the light from the star is
so dim that the colonists have to use artificial lighting to grow crops.
If it's that bad, why bother colonizing it at all? If you have to use
artificial lighting to grow crops, then you might as well practice
hydroponics and do it indoors, in an artificial habitat floating in
space -- an O'Neill type colony habitat -- or on a barren moon.)
But
even if surveyors ignored everything but the ones Dole indicates might
have inhabitable worlds, F2-9, G0-9, and K0-1 type stars, and even if
they ignore all the binary stars -- which would leave out most stars
right there, as over 50% of stars are in systems with two or more stars
-- that still leaves an awful lot of stars to explore for every one that
could reasonably be expected to have a fully inhabitable world around
it. We know that colonized worlds in the Federation are not so densely
packed within the same volume of space as the
one-in-six-surveyed-systems ratio implies. The average spacing is much
farther apart than that.
(Actually, I think I saw a reference to a
colonized world in a binary system in one of the Piperverse stories, so
it may well be that explorers are not ignoring binary systems. Dole
doesn't actually rule them out, he merely notes that stable orbits have
to be within certain parameters. More modern astrophysicists theorize
that planetary orbits around binary stars are not stable over the
lifetime of planets... but that may not apply to the Piperverse, if we
assume physics work as they were thought to when the stories were
written.)
I'd be much happier if Piper specified they were using
telescopes to observe stars, searching for the tell-tale spectrum of an
oxygen-rich world before traveling there, even if their astronomical
observation techniques are not as advanced as ours, and they could not
actually observe planets at an interstellar distance. But we know, per
"When in the Course--", that they are doing no such thing. They are just
striking out blindly and hoping for the best.
As it is, we must
simply assume the crew of the /Stellex/ was either so ignorant that they
thought they had a reasonable chance of finding an inhabitable star in
just a few tries, before their tired old ship broke down, or they were
so desperate that they gambled on a one-in-several-hundred chance... and
got very, very lucky. Or some of both.
Even though Piper doesn't
specify it, I'd prefer to assume that more organized survey missions,
such as the one in "Naudsonce", *did* use at least primitive telescopic
surveys of the systems they were planning to visit. As I said, looking
for that tell-tale spectrum of an oxygen-rich planet, even if they
couldn't see other details of planets at a distance. That would make the
2:11 ratio of habitable worlds to surveyed systems much, much more
believable.
|
Dale Ridder 08-12-2017
14:46 UT
|
To David "Lensman" Sooby
Thanks for the link to the Dole book. I
have that in hard copy but having it on the computer does help a lot.
While some of the science is dated, I think that the parameters for a
habitable planet stand up pretty well.
Second, with respect to
the number of habitable planets, remember that a ship could cover a lot
of ground with the hyperdrive, although Piper was more than a bit
inconsistent with how far a ship could go in a given period of time. In
Space Viking, it is a light-year an hour, which would put Alpha
Centauri about 4.5 hours away. In 4 Day Planet, you have two different
speeds. One is 6 months or circa 180 days to cover 650 Light-years, or
"A spaceship can log a light-year in sixty-odd hours, but radio waves
still crawl along at the same old 186,000 mps." So sixty hours per
light-year or about 3.5 light-years per day. You have something similar
in Uller Uprising. The best assumption is that Piper's habitable
planets are pretty spread out, with a lot of star systems with nothing
worth while to look at. Gram to Tanith is 3,000 light years, while
Tanith to Gimli is 450 light-years, and Gimli to Marduk is 350
light-years, going with the Space Viking light-year an hour. Given the
number of stars within 22 light-years of Earth, those distances are
quite large, so there are a lot of stars with no settlements or what is
viewed as usable planets.
From Space Viking: "The Old Federation
area was full of non-Terra-type planets, and why should anybody bother
going to any of them? Any planet that wasn't oxygen-atmosphere, six to
eight thousand miles in diameter, and within a narrow
surface-temperature range, wasn't worth wasting time on. But a planet
like that, if one had the survival equipment, would make a wonderful
hideout."
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-12-2017
04:01 UT
|
~
Terry "Tanith in Oz" Glouftsis wrote:
> The very idea that we would head out into the
> universe and find almost earth like worlds (I call
> this Roddenberryism) which are ready made for
> colonisation, with little or no issues, to be absurd.
Agreed,
but I don't think this characterization can be applied fairly to Beam's
work (or Roddenberry's, for that matter, but that's a discussion for
another forum). Here's a bit from "Naudsonce":
". . . they had
been out, now for four years which was close to maximum for an exploring
expedition. They had entered eleven systems, and made landings on
eight planets. Three had been reasonably close to Terra-type. There
had been Fafnir; conditions there would correspond to Terra during the
Cretaceous Period, but any Cretaceous dinosaur would have been cute and
cuddly to the things on Fafnir. Then there had been Imhotep; in twenty
or thirty thousand years, it would be a fine planet, but at present it
was undergoing an extensive glaciation. And Irminsul, covered with
forests of gigantic trees; it would have been fine except for the fauna,
which was nasty, especially a race of subsapient near-humanoids who had
just gotten as far as clubs and _coup-de-poing_ axes. Contact with
them had entailed heavy ammunition expenditure, with two men and a woman
killed and a dozen injured.
"As for the other five, one had been
an all-out hell-planet, and the rest had been the sort that get
colonized by irreconcilable minority-groups who want to get away from
everybody else."
And here's Roger Barron speaking to the crew of the ~Stellex~ on Freya:
"We came out to find a Terra-type planet. We spent four years and visited six systems, now we've found one."
The
point being, of course, that mostly what we see in Beam's yarns are the
Terra-type planets that were selected for colonization _after_ a rather
substantial survey of various sorts of, shall we say, "more probable"
alternatives. When Beam takes us to a planet like Zarathustra--or
Fenris, for that matter--any assumption that "all the planets are like
that" is _our_ mistake, not Beam's.
'Ware the mantichore!
David
--
"When
somebody makes a statement you don't understand, don't tell him he's
crazy. Ask him what he means." - Otto Harkaman (H. Beam Piper), ~Space
Viking~
~
|
David Sooby 08-12-2017
00:55 UT
|
Terry "Tanith in Oz" said:
> I too subscribe to the idea that earth like worlds tend to have features that
> makes living there difficult. Some would be minor, but others would be
> significant (ie high levels of CO2, constant destructive winds, extreme cold,
> toxic viruses and flora/fauna).
For
anyone wishing to explore this idea, I highly recommend reading Dole's
HABITABLE PLANETS FOR MAN (Second Edition). It has been correctly
criticized for the science being outdated in many respects, but it's
still the most comprehensive coverage of the entire subject that has
ever been published.
It's available for free online as a .pdf file:
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs...07/RAND_CB179-1.pdf
Dole
does a great job of covering all the parameters within which a
habitable planet must fall. Some of them are not at all obvious. For
example, insolation (the intensity of sunlight) must not merely be
bright enough for humans to see, and not too intense to blind them, but
must be sufficiently strong and within the proper spectrum to grow
Terran food plants... or else, to move beyond Dole and into the realm of
SF, the inhabitants must use specially genegineered plants which will
grow in the light provided by the planet's sun, if the spectrum is too
different from Terra's. (This won't help if it's too dim. The sunlight
must provide sufficient energy to grow plants rapidly enough for yearly
harvesting, and genegeneering can't overcome that limitation.)
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Clear ether!
David "Lensman" Sooby
|
David Sooby 08-12-2017
00:54 UT
|
I received the message below from John F. Carr, which I'll happily pass along to the group.
ATTN
MODERATOR/LIST OWNER: John is having problems signing in to post here;
I'm sure he would appreciate it if you'd contact him about the problem.
=================================
Hi David,
I
tried to post this reply to your question on the List server, but it
never went out. When I went to the Zarthani pages, it wouldn't let me
sign in....?
Anyway, here's my reply.
Feel free to post it on the list.
John Carr
*********************************************************************************
When
I wrote that, I was not nearly as familiar (now having written about a
dozen Piper follow-ons) with Beam's work as I am now.
> "John Carr has said Piper never did anything by accident, and suggesting the
> notion of an error flies in the face of that."
>
> Perhaps we can get John to clarify that; I suspect y'all are reading much more
> into it than John intended. What John was talking about in that passage was the
> idea of "parallel evolution", which was rather outdated at the time Piper wrote
> "When in the Course--" yet much discussion of that theory figures prominently
> in the story.
Lensman
has it right: I was referring to the parallel evolution thread. Nor, I
did mean to say that Piper never made any mistakes. He was writing a
complicated history of the future in random leaps and jumps. None of his
stories were written in a deliberate fashion to shine light upon some
future historical event. The Terro-Human Future History slowly evolved
in a haphazard fashion.
Piper's biggest problem was coming
up with salable story ideas. Once he had a good idea, he ran with it and
could turn out a short story in a week or so. If, the plot didn't go
wonky on him. His big story problem was that he often wrote his stories
before he plotted them out -- not an unusual problem. Except, that in
Beam's case, he often lost the story thread and had to start them over,
and over again....
This problem became excruciating when his financial state grew increasing severe.
Some
of Piper's stories do have inconsistencies; these were not put in there
as secret messages (i.e. the math errors) or to confuse readers. Since
Piper wrote his stories at a feverish pace, often rewriting them again
and again, errors were going to pop up.
The trick for
those following in his footsteps is to remain as true to Piper's vision
as we can. This is what I've always tried to do.
John Carr
|
Tanith in Oz 08-11-2017
17:26 UT
|
Yes those are all very good points.
And you're right Oomphel does suggest a possible solution, how did I miss that? Lol.
David
Scooby has already hit upon an idea that I was in the process of
developing. I too subscribe to the idea that earth like worlds tend to
have features that makes living there difficult. Some would be minor,
but others would be significant (ie high levels of CO2, constant
destructive winds, extreme cold, toxic viruses and flora/fauna). The
very idea that we would head out into the universe and find almost earth
like worlds (I call this Roddenberryism) which are ready made for
colonisation, with little or no issues, to be absurd.
The Gimli
I'm developing is closer to its star due to an ancient orbit change.
Therefore it is hotter and drier with much (but not all) of its surface
water lost. Therefore large deserts cover the surface in dried sea beds
except for two habitable polar regions where the Terrans settled, and
where Brannerton is located in the North.
I must admit I hadn't
considered an asthma issue, but Australia is has one of the world's
largest populations of asthma suffers per capita. No one is exactly
sure why, perhaps it's the flora? But in my mind the deserts of Gimli
were already analagous to those in the outback of Australia. I
certainly could accept this asthma premise (or something like it) as
being a part of the reasons for why Gimli wasn't settled early. Add
the radioactivity in some areas as well (found after settlement), then
there certainly would be some significant problems Terran would have to
overcome living there.
I like it. Kudos.
As always I appreciate the thoughts. Insightful as ever.
Terry
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-11-2017
14:16 UT
|
~
Terry "Tanith in Oz" Glouftsis wrote:
> I can imagine finding the Gimlians might have been
> a reason as to why the planet was not immediately
> settled. Attempts may have been made to argue
> over their intelligence, but it probably proved futile.
> Because of this no corporation wanted the hassle
> of negotiating, (as the world at that time wasn't
> considered worth it) and so no one bothered to try
> to make a settlement there. But perhaps some
> biologists years later went to Gimli to observe the
> Gimlians and in doing this the first Uranium
> discovery was made?
There
is a brief discussion in "Oomphel in the Sky" about why Kwannon does
not have a Chartered Company which might be helpful here.
Speak on, Grandfather!
David
--
"You
know, most of the wars they've been fighting, lately, on the
Europo-American Sector have been, at least in part, motivated by rivalry
for oil fields." - Verkan Vall (H. Beam Piper), "Temple Trouble," 1951
~
|
David Sooby 08-11-2017
12:45 UT
|
Terry "Tanith in Oz" said:
> Is there any margin for a dispute over what constitutes an
> intelligent race? I know this is explored in Little Fuzzy, but
> this is after the Fuzzies are found. Is there any evidence of
> this happening from the first discovery of a race before
> Terran settlement?"
I
think we can state pretty confidently that no such case ever arose
before the Pendarvis Decision in LITTLE FUZZY, because there are a lot
of legal arguments and references to legal precedent in that story, and
not one word about any previous case in which the sapience of a species
was ambiguous.
The (in my opinion, rather specious) argument in
LITTLE FUZZY that sapience is like boiling water: either a species is
fully sapient or it isn't at all, and there isn't any state in between;
that also would seem to indicate that there had never been any previous
case of ambiguity over the question of sapience.
Contrariwise, we
have a reference from one of the Empire stories that the Fuzzies are
not considered sapient by the Empire. I always thought that was an
indication that the Empire was less willing than the Federation to grant
sapient status to an alien race, that the Empire has more stringent
criteria; this would seem to fit in with the very idea of a human Empire
as opposed to a Federation.
But someone on this forum suggested
in a recent post that the info about Fuzzies having been found to be
sapient was lost during the Interregnum, and that's why the Empire
thinks Fuzzies aren't sapient. I suppose that is a scenario which also
is plausible, altho I still prefer mine.
Someone writing a new
Piperverse story might suggest, of course, that a new case of ambiguous
sapience might have arisen in the Federation after the time of LITTLE
FUZZY, but I don't think it's defensible to suggest there was any
previous example.
* * * * *
> But perhaps some biologists years later went to Gimli to
> observe the Gimlians and in doing this the first Uranium
> discovery was made?
>
> I could imagine a mineral rush might have happened.
>
> But as there was no Terran settlement on the planet, nearby
> companies would have rushed to make a mining agreement
> themselves. I'm contending the first to do this was the
> Chartered Marduk Company. The Marduk Company then
> develops the world as a commercial operation only, creating
> a small Terran settlement at Brannerton.
>
> Does that make sense?
Sure.
There would be a rush to make a treaty with some group of natives on
the planet, just as happened in "When in the Course--".
The idea
of one small group of primitive natives being able to negotiate away the
rights for settlement and mineral exploitation for an entire planet is
of course absurdly cynical, altho absolutely what we should expect from a
colonial power like the Terro-human Federation. I'm sure Piper had in
mind the similar situation with Europeans negotiating to "buy" huge
swaths of territory from some random group of Amerinds that they
encountered in the New World.
One thing that I will suggest you
consider is that Gimli might be a planet only marginally habitable by
Terro-humans. Perhaps it's mostly too cold or too hot, with only a
narrow band at the equator or areas at the poles that are warm or cool
enough for humans and their food crops.
Or perhaps the atmosphere
is tainted, so that most people get asthma or emphysema or some other
debilitating or fatal respiratory condition with long-term exposure, but
some Terro-humans can tolerate the conditions.
Or perhaps it's a
world almost entirely covered with water, so there is little land to
live on or grow crops on. Or, conversely, perhaps there is too little
water, so that the day/night temperature differential is terrific, like
Death Valley all over the world.
Uller is of course an even more
extreme example; Terro-humans can't even eat the native silicon-based
plants, and so are utterly dependent on food grown on their own
carefully tended plantations. But what if it wasn't quite as bad as
Uller, yet still a place few would volunteer to colonize?
One
thing I think that all too much space-faring SF ignores is that there
will likely be a lot more marginally habitable worlds than fully
inhabitable, Earth-like worlds. What if Gimli was one of those? It might
have been thought too marginal to bother with, especially since it was
already occupied by a native sophont species. It wasn't until the
discovery of uranium that any company thought it was worth the trouble
to establish a colony or outpost on a world with so little to offer.
Just a suggestion for your perusal, of course. It's your story!
~~~~~~~~
Clear ether!
David "Lensman" Sooby
|
David Sooby 08-11-2017
12:45 UT
|
Terry "Tanith in Oz" said:
"John Carr has said Piper never did anything by accident, and suggesting the notion of an error flies in the face of that."
Perhaps
we can get John to clarify that; I suspect y'all are reading much more
into it than John intended. What John was talking about in that passage
was the idea of "parallel evolution", which was rather outdated at the
time Piper wrote "When in the Course--" yet much discussion of that
theory figures prominently in the story.
I don't want to put
words in John's mouth -- again, I hope he will write in himself and
clarify this -- but I think John was saying that Piper would not have
used a badly outdated theory like that as an important part of the
story, unless Piper had a good reason for doing so. I don't think John
was asserting that Piper never made any accidental mistakes.
Of
*course* Piper's stories contain contradictions and inconsistencies. He
was writing entertaining stories to earn a living; he wasn't writing a
"holy writ" canon intended to be pored over, with every word parsed for
hidden meaning, as we rather obsessive Piper fans sometimes do!
There
is one person contributing to these discussions who insists that Piper
literally never made a mistake, and that all his contradictions, even
the mathematical errors, were intentional on Piper's part, as some sort
of elaborate in-joke.
Well, that person is of course entitled to
his opinion, but real authors writing for a living don't write that way.
They have better things to do with their time.
Now, as a rather
obsessive Piper fan myself, I prefer to find a way to explain away the
contradictions (or errors, if you prefer) in the stories. While of
course we can always just dismiss such contradictions as Piper being
careless, it's a lot more fun to try to figure out some way in which
everything in the canon can be correct simultaneously!
Besides,
just throwing up your hands and saying "Well, Piper made a mistake"
doesn't help the writer who wants to write a story set within the
Piperverse. Of course, he can simply chose to ignore such
contradictions, as -- per the current discussion -- a writer could
simply chose one or the other reference to Gimli and expand on that,
ignoring the other.
But I think it's more interesting and more
challenging to figure out what I call "fanfix" solutions to explain away
the contradictions, much as David Johnson has given a very nice fanfix
that at least partially explains why the travel from one named planet to
another in the Piperverse appears to follow wildly zig-zagging courses,
or at least it appears that way if we try to reconcile all the various
references to planets and travel times in the various stories.
Or,
to put it another way: I prefer to find a subjective, in-story way of
explaining away inconsistencies, rather than an objective, out-of-story
observation that the author made a mistake. I won't claim that I always
succeed, but I always try!
* * * * *
I admit to being
strongly influenced here by reading THE ANNOTATED SHERLOCK HOLMES, which
contains many treatises from "The Baker Street Irregulars", a fan group
who take the conceit that Holmes was a real historical figure, and that
the Sherlock Holmes stories are actual history, and therefore any
(apparent) contradictions in the stories must be explained away by some
method *other* than simply saying Conan Doyle, the author, made a
mistake.
As one example: In one story, Watson said he was wounded
in the leg, and in another it was the shoulder. Surely Watson wouldn't
forget where his wound was? One of the Irregulars suggested that Watson
was "honorably wounded in the buttocks" as he, a doctor, bent over a
wounded soldier to administer aid in the field, and was shot. That would
explain the contradiction; Watson would never refer to that part of his
body in print, and it may be that he forgot which euphemism he used
when he wrote an earlier story.
~~~~~~~
Clear ether!
David "Lensman" Sooby
|
Tanith in Oz 08-11-2017
03:38 UT
|
Ok.
So I just would like to be clear.
Federation law prohibits the forming of a company on a world of sophonts unless there is a treaty struck with a ruling power.
So
this raises some questions. Is there any margin for a dispute over
what constitutes an intelligent race? I know this is explored in Little
Fuzzy, but this is after the Fuzzies are found. Is there any evidence
of this happening from the first discovery of a race before Terran
settlement?
I ask this because I can imagine finding the Gimlians
might have been a reason as to why the planet was not immediately
settled. Attempts may have been made to argue over their intelligence,
but it probably proved futile. Because of this no corporation wanted
the hassle of negotiating, (as the world at that time wasn't considered
worth it) and so no one bothered to try to make a settlement there. But
perhaps some biologists years later went to Gimli to observe the
Gimlians and in doing this the first Uranium discovery was made?
I could imagine a mineral rush might have happened.
But
as there was no Terran settlement on the planet, nearby companies would
have rushed to make a mining agreement themselves. I'm contending the
first to do this was the Chartered Marduk Company. The Marduk Company
then develops the world as a commercial operation only, creating a small
Terran settlement at Brannerton.
Does that make sense?
Again
as I've previously stated, I'm not ignoring the idea of a "Gimli
Company" as mentioned in Fuzzy Sapiens but it seems to me the Uranium on
Gimli wasn't found during the first survey of the planet (there is
evidence to suggest this in Piper's writing). Because of this no new
companies were positioned to exploit the planet. Only existing
companies could. This means in order for a mining operation to begin an
existing company nearby would need to settle the planet. This I think
is a reasonable hypothesis.
A Gimli company would then come at a
later time. My story will likely look into how this and the idea of a
"Native Court" happened.
Terry
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-11-2017
03:36 UT
|
~
Gregg Levine wrote:
> Even now several years after discovering Piper, his
> travel methods are confusing.
I
think at the heart of what makes so much of Federation era society
confusing to us is Beam's economic model, which is more like the
American economy between the end of the Civil War and the Depression
than it is like the "Welfare State" economy (love it or hate it, that's
not a discussion for this forum) from the second half of the 20th
Century with which most of us are familiar.
Of course, he doesn't
set his yarns in the interstellar analog to the Gilded Age Eastern
Seaboard either. His yarns are instead set in the periphery of the
Terran Federation where the political situation is more like that of the
European colonial empires. There's a great line in ~Uller Uprising~
where von Schlichten says he thinks Orgzild believes Niflheim is the
Terran home world. That's us trying to understand the Federation from
Uller, or Fenris, or Zarathustra, or Poictesme.
So, in the end, you have a Federation political economy that doesn't look like anything which is familiar to most of us.
And
then, we are now (re)reading his works more than a half a century after
he was writing them, so the "contemporary society" he took for granted
is itself an historical artifact for us--or just plain old history for
some of you whippersnappers! ;)
I remember an interview I read a
few years back with the creator of ~Mad Man~; he described the TV show
as "science-fiction." He meant that the society being depicted in the
show, though accurate, was so alien to contemporary folks that it seemed
like science-fiction. That's Beam's Terran-human society with it's
cocktail hours, and ubiquitous smokers, and huge computers, and wired
communications devices, and conservative politics, and traditional
gender roles. (Like the ~Mad Men~ creator, Beam knew that he was doing
this though. Consider the different ways he portrays Martha Dane,
Sylvie Jacquemont and Elaine Karvall).
These are all powerful
barriers to understanding Beam's work. And finally, he wrote so
Dralm-damned little of it because he died too soon (and got started too
late) so there simply isn't much of it to grapple with. Wouldn't it
have been grand if he'd been able to write those yarns for each century
of the Atomic Era. . . . .
Cheers,
David
--
"He
started for the kitchen to get a drink, and checked himself. Take a
drink because you pity yourself, and then the drink pities you and has a
drink, and then two good drinks get together and that calls for drinks
all around." - Jack Holloway (H. Beam Piper), ~Little Fuzzy~
~
|
Gregg Levine 08-11-2017
02:31 UT
|
Hello!
I agree!
The NY New Haven did once run their trains towards New England. The
New Haven Division reflects on service into CT, and Amtrak does the
rest....
Even now several years after discovering Piper, his travel methods are
confusing.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8@gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
|
Jon Crocker 08-11-2017
00:45 UT
|
>I think the references to the "Charterless Zarathustra Company" in ~Fuzzy Sapiens~ are really just Grego being snarky.
Don't forget the benefit of not having to re-brand all those vilderbeest...
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-11-2017
00:30 UT
|
~
James "jimmyjoejangles" Romanski wrote:
> The federation made the Uller company take Niff and
> exploit it in order to get any contract on Uller.
That
was a pretty huge concession! And despite there being a native sophont
race on Uller there is still a Chartered Uller Company. (I'm guessing
they negotiated their exclusivity treaty with some Kragans.)
Znidd Suddabit!
David
--
"You
either went on to the inevitable catastrophe, or you realized, in time,
that nuclear armament and nationalism cannot exist together on the same
planet, and it is easier to banish a habit of thought than a piece of
knowledge." - H. Beam Piper, ~Uller Uprising~
~
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-11-2017
00:25 UT
|
~
Terry "Tanith in Oz" Glouftsis wrote:
> So if I'm right then this means Federation Colonial
> control and it excludes a chartered companies
> running the planet. Is it then reasonable to suggest
> a company could be licensed to run the Uranium
> mines, an outsourcing if you will?
It
might help here to go back and read the discussion on this point in
"When in the Course--." The ~Stellex~ crew are hoping to get a Charter
to Freya by negotiating an exclusive agreement with the natives. They
mention that such arrangements had previously been negotiated on Thor,
Loki and Yggdrasil.
(I think the references to the "Charterless
Zarathustra Company" in ~Fuzzy Sapiens~ are really just Grego being
snarky. Sure, the terms of the Zarathustra Company's charter must have
changed substantially after Fuzzy sapience was recognized but they
hardly became "charterless.")
Yeek!
David
--
"You
know what Lingua Terra is? An indiscriminate mixture of English,
Spanish, Portuguese and Afrikaans, mostly English. And you know what
English is? The result of the efforts of Norman men-at-arms to make
dates with Saxon barmaids." - Victor Grego (H. Beam Piper), ~Fuzzy
Sapiens~
~
|
jimmyjoejangles 08-10-2017
19:23 UT
|
The federation made the Uller company take Niff and exploit it in order to get any contract on Uller.
|
Tanith in Oz 08-10-2017
14:59 UT
|
Hi all. I think Gimli is a Class IV world. It can't have a
sophont race and be a Class III because that contradicts Piper's own
rules that are used in Little Fuzzy. So if I'm right then this
means Federation Colonial control and it excludes a chartered company
running the planet. Is it then reasonable to suggest a company could be
licensed to run the Uranium mines, an outsourcing if you will? Is that consistent with Federation policy? I
am aware that it is mentioned in Fuzzy Sapiens that a Gimli Company
made an agreement with the natives to mine. I have a plan to explain
this (so don't fear I'm not going to contradict it) but I'm worried
about how the Colonial government would fit. Can anyone help? Does the Federation engage in outsourcing mineral extraction to private companies? Terry Edited 08-10-2017 15:41
|
|
|
Deleted by author 08-10-2017 14:33
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Tanith in Oz 08-09-2017
06:07 UT
|
~ John "Calidore" Anderson wrote: > Assuming I’m right, Gimli may have been intended to play a larger role sometime later in the Future History. > It is my belief that one day, Gimli will come out from its ‘behind the scenes’ role and be an important > planet in its own right. This idea is dealt with at length in my paper “Gimli the Unusual”, finished late > last year. I
love how Gimli looks to be coming out swinging in the next anthology.
That's awesome. I assume then John that your paper looks at the Future
and how Gimli fits in during the fall or even the interregnum?. I
completely understand if it's embargoed for the upcoming anthology, but
given what I've been talking about is there anything you think I should
incorporate or include so your paper matches the ideas I have for Gimli? I
love what you did in Rise of the Terran Federation, and if John Carr
likes the short story I come up with, then your paper and my story would
make an excellent fit together. Regards Terry Edited 08-09-2017 06:45
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-09-2017
03:58 UT
|
~
Terry "Tanith in Oz" Glouftsis wrote:
> It was not my intention to suggest that Piper was
> ever wrong,
Don't
sweat it, Terry. We all know Beam made mistakes. Was there only one
"para-peeping" Verkan Vall? How does Walt Boyd know what the
Zarathustran veldtbeest grown in the carniculture vats on Fenris is?
One
Piper fan has been telling us for years that Beam _intentionally_
introduced various "math errors" throughout his work. . . .
> Right now I'm conducting a lot of research on a
> historical underpinning for the story
I'm looking forward to reading it.
Be well,
David
--
"I
my 'teens, which would have been the early '20's, I decided that what I
really wanted to do was write; I wasn't quite sure what, but I was
going to write something. About the same time, I became aware of
science fiction, such as it was then, mostly H.G. Wells, and fantasy,
Bram Stoker, H. Rider Haggard, and then I began reading newer science
(more or less) fiction--Burroughs, Merritt, Ralph Milne Farley, Ray
Cummings, _et_al_. This was the Neolithic, or Hugo Gernsback Period of
science fiction, and but this time I was a real 200-proof fan." - H.
Beam Piper, "Double: Bill Symposium" interview
~
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-09-2017
03:17 UT
|
~
John "Calidore" Anderson wrote:
> Why build a Navy base on Xerxes when you have one
> on Gimli, not too far away?
There
may be a naval base there for reasons similar to why there are fire
stations in new housing developments (even when that may not be the most
ideal location for them): the government granting the concession
insists that the commercial venture receiving the concession build them
as a condition of the concession. This parallel to fire stations in
housing developments works especially well for a Federation with a
military that isn't tasked with defending against foreign foes. . . .
> Gimli’s strategic location seems to continue into the
> interregnum. In Space Viking, Gimli is where Prince
> Bentrik rallies the loyal Mardukan navy ships, which
> are then joined by Trask’s ships and go on to liberate
> Marduk.
Or,
it could be that the Mardukan Navy ships gathered at Gimli because it
hadn't yet been raided by Dunnan's Vikings as the other Mardukan
trade-planets had been. That may be simply because Gimli was closer to
Marduk than were planets like Tetragrammaton and Audhumla. We just
don't know.
> And since Gimli (or rather, Gimle) apparently means
> “protected from fire”, it may be that the planet survives
> the Interstellar Wars intact. Probably because it is
> well defended with TF Navy ships (who ‘Gimli’, or ‘fire’,
> on enemy vessels), at least at first.
The
Interstellar Wars were not a conflict between the Terran Federation and
some external foe. The Interstellar Wars were a series of civil wars
between various parts of what had been the Terran Federation. This
means that _every_ battle was one with (former) Terran Federation Navy
ships on _both_ sides (as would have been the case for the Alliance Navy
in the System States War). Because Gimli wasn't a major Federation
planet, the Navy forces at Gimli were most likely pulled from there at
some point as the rump Federation retrenched. If they weren't pulled
from Gimli by the Federation then they were probably taken over by--or
joined up themselves with--one of the "civilized planets" as it broke
away from the Federation and were perhaps also pulled from Gimli to
defend the "home" planet. That may have been Marduk or it could have
been another "civilized" planet. Again, we just don't know.
> Afterward, Gimli declines and becomes a simple
> trade-planet of Marduk. But seeing how the planet
> is an important source of uranium (which provides
> nuclear ‘fire’ for civilian and military use, another
> reason Piper may have used that spelling), I think it
> would make sense for the Mardukans to occupy the
> old TF base.
I
agree that Gimli's fissionable ores will be attractive to the
"civilized planets" which survive the Interstellar Wars but whether it
was controlled continuously from the time of the withdrawal of the
Federation to the Viking era by the same "civilized planet" is something
we just don't know. In fact, those ores make it seem more likely that
it was a planet that was often fought over during those dark centuries. .
. .
> Piper couldn’t have made it much clearer than that.
> He didn’t say he sent his friend ‘to the Gimli system’,
> he said ‘to Gimli, the planet’. The Navy base with its
> destroyers is on the planet Gimli, and not somewhere
> else in its system. I don’t see how that reference can
> be interpreted any other way.
Beam
refers to the Sol System and to the various parts of the Gartner
Trisystem. There is the System States Alliance, of course. There is
some discussion of the Beta Hydrae system (interestingly, not the Beta
Hydri system Clark introduces) in ~Uller Uprising~. There is some
discussion in ~Space Viking~ of the Tanith and Marduk systems when the
issue of Dunnan's hiding ships is examined. (Beowulf's off-world
settlements in its system are briefly mentioned when the "civilized"
nature of Beowulf is remarked upon.) There is some discussion of the
Aditya system in "A Slave is a Slave" when the issue of Imperial control
is being explained. There is some discussion of the Kwannon system
which is pertinent to the voyage around the planet to view the two suns.
If I recall correctly, at no point in three novels does Beam refer to
the Zarathustra system--despite the Naval Base being on Xerxes (and the
Terra-Baldur-Marduk spaceport on Darius).
I guess what I'm trying
to say is that in most cases Beam does not distinguish between the
planet--Fenris, Freya, Svantovit, Gram, Odin, Zarathustra, Indra,
Ashmodai, Osiris, Baldur, Ishtar, Fafnir, Aton, Belphegor, Mimur,
Xochitl, etc., etc., etc.--and its system. It does not therefore seem
obvious that Beam is telling us that Gimli has no moon just because he
didn't identify it as the "Gimli system." Gimli may not have a moon,
sure, but I don't think Beam was telling us that in ~Four-Day Planet~.
Monster Ho!
David
--
"A
girl can punch any kind of a button a man can, and a lot of them know
what buttons to punch, and why." - Conn Maxwell (H. Beam Piper),
~Junkyard Planet~
~
|
Tanith in Oz 08-09-2017
03:11 UT
|
Hi all. I just wanted to apologise to anyone I may have
offended by suggest Piper introduced "errors". It was not my intention
to suggest that Piper was ever wrong, and on reflection I do agree
saying that was a little harsh. John Carr has said Piper never did
anything by accident, and suggesting the notion of an error flies in the
face of that. I'm sorry for that. I have been asked to employ more complex ways of thinking, and I will take that advice to heart. In
my usual way I've tried over the last few weeks to reconcile radical
views on Gimli, some of them contradictory and competitive with one
another. In this attempt I've said a couple of things, whilst shooting
from the hip, that I never truly would have considered, but I said any
way whilst trying to come to a decision. If at times I have seemed contradictory I too apologise for this. But
after reading the input from all of you here (and I value everything
said), and having off board discussions with some others I'm relatively
happy with where I'm going now. There's only one Gimli. I have
become convinced of it, so this is the direction I will be going. And I
do believe Piper deliberately underplayed the importance of the planet;
this is a theme I'm going to explore. Gimli is strategic and is very
important to commerce due to the uranium deposits, but it has a nasty
little secret. Again I'm going to explore this. Gimli is very
near to Marduk, Space Viking makes that crystal clear. Though I've
struggled to reconcile the notion of Fenris also being close, David's
idea of zig zagging spacelanes makes the struggle moot. Gimli can be
near Fenris if you adopt 3 dimensional thinking and if you accept the
proclivity of people to under represent distance. By this method
characters who talk about Gimli being near Fenris are similar to people
who say Melbourne isn't far from Sydney, when in actual fact it is a
large distance. This is perfectly fine to accept and helps overcome
what appears to be an inconsistency that some of us may have overdulged
in and possibly conflated. Here I'm going to accept Piper didn't make
mistake, so I have to find a way to explain it. I think David's views
here are an excellent way to reconcile it. And David suggested a
number of ideas of why Gimli came to be named. I had already tried to
come to some sort of reason on my own, but I have now merged one of mine
with a ring hypothesis he floated (amongst other alternatives). I
will contend that Gimli has a debris ring caused not specifically by the
breakup of a moon but by an in system catastrophe eons ago that shifted
the orbit of the planet. This tectonic movement seriously changed the
planets ancient surface and also led to many debris being ejected into
orbit. (This of course doesn't preclude the possibility of a small moon
in orbit also being destroyed though, so I won't rule that out). As
such the natives have a religious belief in the ring. When they look
up they see a golden roof and so much of their literature and even their
homes have golden motifs, and arches (this mirrors the Egyptian idea of
Zeptepi - As in Heaven, so on Earth). When Terrrans made this
connection the Captain of the first survey team thumbed through Norse
myths until he found the name the planet now has. I've also
calculated Gimli is a 5 month journey directly from Terra. I feel this
makes some sort of sense as numerous sources does convince me its
slightly closer to Terra than Zarathustra. But the planet
wasn't colonised in a manner similar to the other worlds. It was
actually bypassed for a time until Uranium was found. Therefore I'm
creating the Chartered Marduk Company, and I'm contending they settled
Gimli as a mining settlement. Gimli has remained small for years, but
it has grown slowly over time. I'm aware by the Empire eras that
Gimli has a University at Brannerton. There's even evidence to suggest
Gimli had it's own chartered company in the Federation era. I will not
ignore these facts but I've come up with a way to make them fit in the
tale I'm crafting (I'm being vague on this, on purpose). But
going back to the mining theme of the planet I feel it's ripe for South
African and Australian colonists. I've always wanted Australians to
have more of a presence in the Terro-Human time line, and on Gimli I can
see an opportunity. As such I've already created a map, and I've even
sketched what the sophont race looks like, but for now I'm keeping the
circle small on all of that. It's been fun playing in the sand box, and I hope you all like the direction I'm going in. Right
now I'm conducting a lot of research on a historical underpinning for
the story (to keep it consistent with Piper's own beliefs) and soon I
hope to have something ready. Regards Terry Edited 08-09-2017 03:26
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-09-2017
01:48 UT
|
~
Terry "Tanith in Oz" Glouftsis wrote:
> I thought this might explain the weird notion
> of Galactic South West by trying to fix a location
> from which it might be measured.
Given
that Beam never used this sort of terminology elsewhere I'm wondering
if it wasn't actually the work of an editor at Putnam. It makes no
sense but it does sound like the sort of thing that was common in
science-fiction of that era aimed at "juveniles."
Monster Ho!
David
--
"Why
Walt Disney bought the movie rights to ['Rebel Raider'], I've never
figured out. Will Colonel Mosby be played by Mickey Mouse, and General
Phil Sheridan by Donald Duck? It's baffling. However, I was glad to
get the check." -- H. Beam Piper, The Pennsy interview, 1953
~
|
Calidore 08-08-2017
18:42 UT
|
Terry wrote—
>>Based on this I think Gimli is a free standing planet.
That is my feeling as well; I don’t think Gimli is a moon of a gas giant.
>My supposition is that Gimli has a large debris ring orbiting it. This golden
>ring is called the Golden Roof by the natives, and this is why the planet is
>called Gimli (Gimli means Golden Roof). From the surface looking up you'd
>see the ring and it literally would look like a golden roof.
I
like this idea very much. It’s in keeping with Piper’s practice of
naming planets (usually for gods), and then finding an ‘internal’
physical reason for the Terrans who discover it to give it that name.
Such as “Odin, with its two moons, Hugin and Munin”, named for the
Allfather’s news-gathering ravens; “or Freya, where…the women were so
breathtakingly beautiful”, paralleling the Norse goddess of beauty and
love. (UU, pp. 15)
Perhaps Gimli once had a large moon, but
tidal forces brought it too close to the planet, and it broke apart;
there’s a theory that this may some day happen to Luna. Alternately,
Gimli’s ring could be a mass of material that never coalesced into a
moon, though you might want to figure out why that is. The golden color
could be caused by whatever material the ring is made of, or perhaps
Gimli’s sun is a bit yellower than Sol, and sunlight is the reason.
As an aside, although the Norse hall of Gimle has a golden roof, the name appears to mean “the place protected from fire” (https://www.nordicnames.de/wiki/Gimle)
Probably reflecting the fact that Gimle escapes the world
conflagration set by Surtur after Ragnarok. That Piper uses the form
‘Gimli’ may be an example of his humor, as Gimli with an ‘i’ means
‘fire’. (www.thenamemeaning.com/Gimli) As the location of a Federation
Navy base, “fire!” is a command that one would presume is heard often
on Gimli, in naval training exercises at first, and later during the
Interstellar Wars.
I agree with those who think there is only
one planet Gimli. On the other hand, since Piper included two Asgards,
one a planet, the other a city on Odin, there could be a city named
Gimle, somewhere in the Federation. Perhaps on Ithavoll, the planet
named for another region which, like Gimle, survives the Norse Ragnarok.
But I would guess that Ithavoll's capital is more likely Gladsheim,
described in the Gylfaginning as a meeting hall in Ithavoll where the
male Aesir gather for council. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladsheimr)
Since the capital of the planet Odin is Asgard, I would further
speculate that the capital of the planet Asgard could be named Valhalla,
Odin's hall in Asgard; thereby connecting Piper's two Asgards through
Odin. (The capital of planet Asgard should perhaps rather be named
Hlidskjalf, Odin's high seat from which he observes the Nine Worlds.
But 'Hlidskjalf' seems an awkward name, while Valhalla is just flat-out
cool.)
>>I don't profess to be correct, but the planet having a majestic ring just
>>feels right to me. I want Gimli to be special and this way I think it would be.
I
believe Gimli is special. I disagree with those who assert that Piper
used Gimli simply as a go-to planet, or a convenient plot device.
Remember what John Carr said; “Beam…did nothing by accident.” (Fed, p.
200) Why is Gimli mentioned so often? I think because it’s at a
strategic location, somewhere between Terra and Odin (at the center of
the Federation) and planets like Zarathustra and Marduk (out near the
frontier), though closer to the former. From that location, Navy ships
can respond to problems in either direction with dispatch, as suggested
by Four-Day Planet. “There’s a Navy base there, and always at least a
couple of destroyers available.” (p. 199) One would presume they are
‘always’ available because Gimli is responsible for patrolling a large
sector of Federation space.
The Federation Navy base on Xerxes
is built a couple centuries later. Why build a Navy base on Xerxes when
you have one on Gimli, not too far away? One reason would be to more
closely monitor the important Terra-Baldur-Marduk Spacelines route,
which makes stops at Zarathustra but apparently not Gimli. Another
reason would be Federation expansion. Over time, the frontier has been
slowly getting farther out, which would mean the base on Gimli would
become responsible for patrolling more and more planets at greater
distances. At some point, perhaps when Zarathustra is colonized, the
Federation may have decided that it needs to build another base in this
strategically important sector. And from its Persian name, Zarathustra
is a bit farther out from Terra than Norse-named Gimli is. Placing it
closer to the present frontier.
Gimli’s strategic location seems
to continue into the interregnum. In Space Viking, Gimli is where
Prince Bentrik rallies the loyal Mardukan navy ships, which are then
joined by Trask’s ships and go on to liberate Marduk. Since Marduk
later founds the First Galactic Empire, this would seem to be a crucial
event in the Future History. In effect, though indirectly, ‘Gimli helps
save the galaxy’.
Although Piper portrays Gimli as a
‘lesser’ planet, not on the same level as Odin or Isis or Marduk or the
other major civilized worlds, it is my considered opinion that the many
references are his subtle way of saying “This planet is more important
than it seems.” Assuming I’m right, Gimli may have been intended to
play a larger role sometime later in the Future History. It is my
belief that one day, Gimli will come out from its ‘behind the scenes’
role and be an important planet in its own right. This idea is dealt
with at length in my paper “Gimli the Unusual”, finished late last year.
>>And because of this Gimli has to be a small Mars or Terra type planet.
Another
interesting idea, and quite possible. It would be even more
advantageous for the Federation to build a Navy base on
strategically-important Gimli if it is smaller, or at least less dense,
because either way it would have lower gravity. Lower gravity would
make it easier for Navy ships to operate from Gimli. It would
serendipitously also support my version of the Gimlian natives. I don’t
think Piper gave any details about them (and if he did, someone please
let me know), but in my paper I speculate they are taller than
Terro-Humans.
David wrote,
>>I think, perhaps, two (and a half?) data points
>>isn't quite enough to say "usually."
That’s
a good point, though it must be admitted that Piper didn’t give us many
data points to work with. A little further research reveals at least
six for certain. There’s the Federation base on Gimli, the base on
Xerxes, Barathrum Spaceport (which is probably a military spaceport,
since the volcano’s rim is defended by 250-mm guns and missile-launching
stations), and Marduk has at least three; the Moonbase, “the Malverton
Navy Yard” and “the Antarctic Naval Base”. (SV, p. 227) Two of these
six bases are on moons, a total of 33%.
We can add at least two
possibles. The US Lunar fortress built before WWIII, which I think
probably becomes the Federation Space Navy’s first off-world base after
that war. But this is balanced by Beowulf, which does not appear to
have a moon. When Trask’s ships approach for their raid, some of
Beowulf’s ships are in orbit, while others are rising from the surface.
(ibid., p. 95) This suggests that the Beowulf Space Navy has at least
one base on the planet.
Including these gives us 8 data points, 3
of which are on moons, or 37.5%. So it appears that Piper’s space navy
bases are located on planets more often than on satellites. If you
have a moon, great; a lunar base is certainly desirable, for the very
reason you mention. Lower gravity allows ships to come and go more
quickly and easily. But you can get along without them, as the cases of
Gimli, Poictesme and Beowulf seem to suggest.
>>There is also a Federation Navy proving-ground on Mars.
I
didn't include that in the above calculations, because I don’t think a
Navy base and a Navy proving ground are the same thing. The Federation
proving ground on Mars is for the testing of nuclear weapons (UU, p. 4);
I don’t think you’d want to base Navy ships and personnel close by!
Piper’s
Mars is mostly desert, which makes testing nuclear weapons there
perfectly reasonable. At least until the “First Terraforming” (Emp, p.
54) makes the planet more habitable.
>>We don't know if there is a Mardukan naval base in the Gimli
>>system at all. The Mardukan ships marshalling there, some of
>>them, at least, may have landed on the planet but that doesn't
>>mean there is a naval base on the surface. Gimli is described
>>as a Mardukan trade-planet, never as a naval base, and the
>>Mardukan Navy ships were there originally because they'd been
>>dispersed to the trade-planets by the Makannists.
True.
But it has always been my impression, perhaps because the allied fleet
is met by a Mardukan Admiral (Bargham), that they are at the old
Federation base on Gimli. I may be wrong, but that’s my impression.
And since Gimli (or rather, Gimle) apparently means “protected from
fire”, it may be that the planet survives the Interstellar Wars intact.
Probably because it is well defended with TF Navy ships (who ‘Gimli’,
or ‘fire’, on enemy vessels), at least at first. Afterward, Gimli
declines and becomes a simple trade-planet of Marduk. But seeing how
the planet is an important source of uranium (which provides nuclear
‘fire’ for civilian and military use, another reason Piper may have used
that spelling), I think it would make sense for the Mardukans to occupy
the old TF base.
You may well be right that the Mardukan Navy
doesn’t occupy the base in Space Viking. But if so, I submit that it
certainly would later on, when the rejuvenated monarchy begins the
expansion of Marduk, eventually becoming the Mardukan Empire. Gimli’s
apparent location more than halfway to Terra and Odin, plus its uranium
supplies, would be strong incentives for the Mardukans to fortify the
planet.
>>Bottom line is, I don't think we get anything from Beam
>>in ~Viking~ that tells us anything about where in the Gimli
>>system the Federation naval base mentioned in ~Four-Day
>>Planet~ might have been.
No,
but we do get in in Four-Day Planet. “What I did was send my friend,
who is a Colonial Constabulary detective, to Gimli, the next planet out.
There’s a Navy base there, and always at least a couple of destroyers
available.” (FDP, p. 199) Piper couldn’t have made it much clearer than
that. He didn’t say he sent his friend ‘to the Gimli system’, he said
‘to Gimli, the planet’. The Navy base with its destroyers is on the
planet Gimli, and not somewhere else in its system. I don’t see how
that reference can be interpreted any other way.
John
|
Tanith in Oz 08-08-2017
17:10 UT
|
Yes as more of you post about it, the more a zig zaging for the space
lanes makes sense. And I do like the idea of a railroad theme creeping
in from Piper's own experiences. It makes sense to me.
But I;m
forced to agree that trying to find the star of Fenris is an exercise in
futility. What I meant by suggesting Betelguese was that Orion, though
in the Northern hemisphere is also seen in the South. It's more
correct to call Orion equatorial, but from the Northern hemisphere it is
a much more southerly constellation than Ursa Major and even the pole
star in Ursa Minoris. I thought this might explain the weird notion of
Galactic South West by trying to fix a location from which it might be
measured.
But I'll cop to it not being a very strong idea, now
that I've been reminded Fenris has a G4 star, I stand corrected. So
it's not Betelgeuese then, it can't be. I'd thought the distance was
suspiciously similar, but it turns out to be rather insignificant.
Sometimes if it's too good to be true....
Oh what we'd all give to see that map Piper once had!
However
the idea of Gimli being near the middle of a number of zig zagging
space lanes does offer food for thought. By this method we can then
reasonably suggest its both "near" Marduk and "close" to Fenris. It's a
good solution. Kudos.
Terry
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-08-2017
15:21 UT
|
~
Jon Crocker wrote:
> I would also expect there to be ships on direct
> Terra-Odin or Terra-Marduk or anywhere else
> where there was enough of a market able to pay
> a premium for direct travel/shipping to avoid
> taking forever.
Agreed, though Beam never showed us these ships/lines because he didn't tell yarns set on the "rational" or "civilized" planets.
There
were also various sorts of "independent" freighters who apparently
plied the spaceways in irregular ways. This is how folks are worried
news of the Fuzzies would get to "the nearest planet," Gimli, and how
disreputable folks might begin a trade in Fuzzy furs.
How these
folks got around the apparent local monopolies of the large spacelines
is a bit of a mystery. Perhaps there were regulations which governed
the sizes or capacities (or frequencies) of itinerant traders or
something like that.
Yeek!
David
--
"Why not everybody make friend, have fun, make help, be good?" - Diamond Grego (H. Beam Piper), ~Fuzzy Sapiens~
~
|
David Sooby 08-08-2017
15:09 UT
|
Terry "Tanith in Oz" asked:
> I can't recall if the star of Fenris is actually mentioned or
> not, but could it be in orbit of Betelguese? Beteleguese is
> roughly 650 light years from Earth.
It's
best to just forget about using any named star as the star around which
a habitable planet orbits, unless it happens to be very, very near
Terra; for example, Alpha Centauri. (Dr. John D. Clark specified Beta
Hydri as the star for Uller. Clark gives the distance as 21 light years;
more modern measurements put it at ~24.33 ly.)
Without
exception, prominent stars in the sky such as Betelguese and Sirius are
very hot, very bright stars which will burn thru their life cycle much
too fast to ever allow complex life to evolve on planets orbiting them,
as well as putting out so much lethal radiation that nothing bigger than
a microbe -- one well buried far underground -- would be likely to
survive long enough to reproduce.
Habitable planets will orbit
boring dwarf stars, which are much too dim and too numerous to be given a
unique name by people peering thru telescopes. Such dim stars will be
merely assigned a catalog name-and-number. Individual names would be
given to stars by those explorers actually going out and surveying
planets, and likely they would only bother naming stars which had
planets worthy of exploitation or settlement. In fact, I think it would
be the usual case that the planet would be named first, and the star
only later. Perhaps even then, the star might remain without a unique
name unless and until early colonists decided it needed one.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Clear ether!
David "Lensman" Sooby
|
David Sooby 08-08-2017
13:53 UT
|
David "Piperfan" Johnson said:
> If the "Galactic southwest" means something like that
> quadrant of space above the southern half of the Western
> Hemisphere then we're talking about a huge volume of
> space--essentially one quarter of all of Terro-human space.
> (That region would seem to revolve as Earth revolves on its
> axis but let's put that odd detail aside for the moment and
> assume we're taking a snapshot at, say, noon GMT on Day
>One of the Atomic Era.)
This
would be an entirely unreasonable, not to mention pretty useless,
interpretation of what "Galactic southwest" would mean. North and South
in relation to the galaxy -- not to Terra -- would refer to the shape
and rotation of the entire Milky Way galaxy, not to our little planet.
The axis of rotation of the galaxy is well-known, as is the direction of
the galactic center. The direction of "Galactic north" and "Galactic
south" is pretty obvious.
That doesn't necessarily mean that
Federation astrogators use the galactic core as the origin point for
interstellar astrogation. Since the core is tens of thousands of
light-years away, it would make far more sense to use Terra's sun (Sol)
as the origin point, and draw a line thru Sol to use as the north/south
axis; an axis parallel to the galactic axis. The rotation or orbit of
Terra around Sol would be irrelevant here, as would be the actual angle
of Sol's axis of rotation.
East and west would be more arbitrary,
but obviously a line drawn between Sol and the galactic core would be
something on which to to base directions. One might suggest that
galactic "east" would be the direction in which the galaxy rotates, just
as Terra revolves to the east as the sun rises and sets. But that would
be pretty arbitrary and the Federation might well use some other
direction for "galactic east".
The problem with the term
"Galactic southwest" is it indicates two-dimensional thinking, whereas
space astrogation must involve three dimensions. Perhaps it is an
indication of which quadrant of the Federation contains a star and its
planets, but that doesn't help much if you want to point the direction
to that star, or travel there. Three dimensions must include an "up" and
"down" direction -- or "in" and "out" if we have already chosen "north"
and "south" for galactic "up" and "down". In practice, those talking
about galactic directions would have to invent new terms to avoid
constantly using awkard phrases such as "galactic north" or "galactic
out". We can be pretty sure that no such directional terms are in common
use in the Piperverse, because they are not mentioned in any story.
Apparently
in the Piperverse, only astrogators (and the Astrographic Commission)
worry about the actual location of stars in three-dimensional space. ;)
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Clear ether!
David "Lensman" Sooby
|
David Sooby 08-08-2017
13:26 UT
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson said:
> ...we know that the spacelines of the Federation era were
> oligopolistic entities which generally enjoyed a local
> transport monopoly on the planets they visited. It seems
> likely that the regular spaceline ships only visited planets on
> which their companies had negotiated specific commercial
> arrangements.
>
> There were likely complex economic reasons why a
> Terra-Odin Spacelines ship traveled between Fenris and
> Gimli and a Terra-Baldur-Marduk Spacelines ship traveled
> between Volund and Zarathustra that had little to do with
> the actual locations of those planets in interstellar space.
> Rather, there were markets on Gimli--and beyond--for ships
> headed outbound from Terra (and Fenris) just as there were
> markets on Volund--and beyond--for ships headed inbound
> from Marduk (and Zarathustra).
David,
I've got to hand it to you: This is a brilliant fanfix! In fact, it's
one of the best that I've ever seen, because not only does it (at least
partially) explain why travel between various planets in the Piperverse
does not seem to bear much relation to their actual distance from each
other in different stories; it also appears to explain why it was so
difficult in FOUR-DAY PLANET for the locals to bypass the monopoly of
the local tallow-wax buyers. Well, I'd have to go back and re-read the
story to be sure, but from memory this does appear to dovetail neatly
into that story, and helps plug what I've always thought was a huge hole
in the story: Why didn't the locals just hire an independent freighter,
or several of them, to bypass the local monopoly and take the
apparently highly valuable tallow-wax to other markets for sale?
Perhaps
there's a similar situation with the melon wine from Poictesme in THE
COSMIC COMPUTER, altho that's a lot harder to defend because part of the
story is the locals finally building their own merchant ships to take
the wine to market directly, so clearly the Federation isn't enforcing
any trade monopoly. But then, in that book the Federation is breaking
down, and enforcement of Federation authority is very noticeably lacking
in the story. In the latter case at least, it seems to be a matter of
the starship owners or captains refusing to pay a higher price for the
melon wine simply because they can, or because they've formed a sort of
guild or cabal to engage in price-fixing, much like how -- to give a
real-world example -- the De Beers company controls the commercial price
of diamonds, keeping it at what by any objective standard is a vastly
inflated price.
The idea of widely zig-zagging commercial routes
in the Federation certainly harkens back to our early colonial era, with
the classic "triangular trade route" of textiles, rum and manufactured
goods from Europe to Africa; slaves from Africa to the Americas; and
sugar, tobacco, and cotton from the Americas to Europe. Perhaps it's an
error to think that a reference to "the next planet out" in a Piperverse
story indicates the straight-line distance from Terra.
It's a
bit harder to explain why passenger ships would follow the same or
similar zig-zagging routes, rather than going directly from one
planetary port to another, but if we follow your suggestion, David, we
could suggest this is caught up in a... I think you called it
"Byzantine"... commercial arrangement that has its origins in the
Federation charters for exploiting each planet.
It also dovetails neatly into this bit from ULLER UPRISING:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Of course, there were worse planets than Uller. [...]
Or
Niflheim. The Uller Company had the charter for Niflheim, too; they'd
had to take that and agree to exploit the planet's resources in order to
get the franchise for Uller, which furnished a good quick measure of
the comparative merits of the two.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
--ULLER UPRISING ch. I
Also,
note the historical analogy with the very powerful Honourable East
India Company, which in the era of Great Britain controlled trade not
only with India, but also with China. I would argue this supports my
contention that the Federation exercises control over its colony worlds
that is in some ways -- perhaps many ways -- closer to an Empire than a
true Federation, and helps explain why the Federation has a powerful
Navy with a lot of personnel in it, regardless of how many or how few
capital ships it maintains in any era.
I don't think the Roman
Empire is a good analogy for the Federation. The Federation Navy doesn't
influence Federation politics or rule as the Roman Army did in its
Imperial period, nor does the Federation have an Emperor or a
dictatorial President. But I'd argue that the Federation exercises
control over its colonies like Great Britain, or any of the Great Powers
of Earth's colonial era. Not really a Federation, but a colonial
empire. The analogy between the Honorable East India Company and the
Chartered Uller Company is much too strong to ignore, as is the strong
central (albeit distant) control by the Federation in ULLER UPRISING
(and also LITTLE FUZZY and sequels), which seems much more like a
colonial empire than an actual Federation.
For example:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Damnit,
he didn’t want to have to intervene. No Space Navy C.O. did. Justifying
intervention on a Colonial planet was too much bother—always a board of
inquiry, often a courtmartial. And supersession of civil authority was
completely against Service Doctrine. Of course, there were other and
more important tenets of Service Doctrine. The sovereignty of the Terran
Federation for one, and the inviolability of the Federation
Constitution. And the rights of extraterrestrials, too. Conrad
Greibenfeld, too, seemed to have been thinking about that.
“If
those Fuzzies are sapient beings, that whole setup down there is
illegal. Company, Colonial administration and all,” he said.
“Zarathustra’s a Class-IV planet, and that’s all you can make out of
it.”
“We won’t intervene unless we’re forced to. Pancho, I think the decision will be largely up to you.”
Pancho Ybarra was horrified.
“Good
God, Alex! You can’t mean that. Who am I? A nobody. All I have is an
ordinary M.D., and a Psych.D. Why, the best psychological brains in the
Federation—”
“Aren’t on Zarathustra, Pancho. They’re on Terra,
five hundred light-years, six months’ ship voyage each way.
Intervention, of course, is my responsibility, but the sapience question
is yours. I don’t envy you, but I can’t relieve you of it.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
--LITTLE FUZZY ch. VI
It
seems pretty clear that the planetary authorities on Zarathustra are
exercising semi-independent, local authority in the name of the
Federation's central government, and are answerable to them. Anyone who
as read any of the Hornblower or Richard Bolitho novels should recognize
the same relationship to the central government that a British Navy
captain had, having semi-independent authority granted by -- and
answerable for his actions to -- the Admiralty of the British Navy, and
ultimately in theory the British Crown, altho in reality the British
Prime Minister and Parliament.
The relationship between a
military commander and a democratic government in the modern real world
is quite different, because instant communications allow any military
commander to check with his superiors or the Pentagon if he's unsure
about what action to take, and the Pentagon can use a phone call to kick
the decision up to the Secretary of Defense or even the President if
necessary.
The lack of instant interstellar communications in the
Piperverse mandates a certain amount of local control; the real
question is just how much or how little control Terra exercises at a
distance, and how much military power it can project to back up that
control; military power in the form of troops and military ships. From
ULLER UPRISING, it seems the Federation -- just like the British Empire
-- relied mostly on locally recruited native troops to fight ground
battles and maintain order.
It may well be that the relationship
between Terra and the "civilized worlds", such as Odin and Baldur, was a
true Federation, with the older "civilized" worlds having equal or
near-equal political status with Terra. But certainly the outer frontier
worlds had no such equal status, and there is no pretense of any actual
independence by any of them until the Federation breaks down following
the System States War. And then, as we see in THE COSMIC COMPUTER, that
independence may not be very welcome!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Clear ether!
David "Lensman" Sooby
|
David Sooby 08-08-2017
13:25 UT
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson said:
> Bottom line is, I think we could come up with an
> explanation for how two planets ended up with the
> same name. But first, we'd need to sort out that
> there _are_ actually two Gimlis.
As I believe I suggested the last time this debate came up, there is a compromise solution:
Perhaps
the "Gimli" mentioned in FOUR-DAY PLANET is just the *regional* name
for the planet, not the official one. As has already been pointed out
earlier in this discussion, there could well be a delay of at least
months, if not years, between the time that a planet was named by the
discoverer, and when news of the official Federation Astrographic
Commission having given that name to a planet, would filter out to
outlying worlds. In the meantime, another planet might well have been
named "Gimli", and perhaps those in that region of the Federation would
choose to keep referring to it by the original name, rather than the
official name given to "their" planet by the Astrographic Commission.
Surely
everyone knows of historical examples of a place which is called by one
name by the locals, but on official maps it's labeled something
different.
In fact, a few months back I was helping a relative
with genealogy, and ran into that problem: A city/town listed as the
birthplace of someone; a city/town which did not come up in a Google
search. (Even if the name was changed, it should still come up there,
assuming it was changed within the last century-and-a-half or so.) It
probably was the local name for a local area that's part of, or a suburb
of, a larger city.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Clear ether!
David "Lensman" Sooby
|
Jon Crocker 08-08-2017
13:24 UT
|
Orion is visible in the northern hemisphere, I'd have to check where
'galactic north' is with respect to our north pole. But the range on
the stars is a fair bit, Wikipedia says that Bellatrix is a mere 250 ly
away, a couple stars in the 643-650 ly range, one at 860 ly, then 1200
and 1260 ly, and then one at about 2000 light years.
In the
book, the star of Fenris is G4, Betelguese is M1-2. Wikipedia says it's
only about 10 million years old, so it wouldn't have a planet people
could live on, even as messed up as Fenris is.
|
Jon Crocker 08-08-2017
13:24 UT
|
Terra-Baldur-Marduk was a shipping company, they ran ships that carried
freight and people. We never see a Chartered Marduk Company, but we do
see the Chartered Zarathustra Company from Little Fuzzy. CZC had no
ships, they ran the planet, so if there was a CMC, I don't think it
would have had ships either. The TBM would have been separate. There
was an old railroad in the US, New York New Haven New Hampshire, I think
was the name, the railroad didn't run any of those places.
I
think we finally puzzled it out and David hit it on the head. The 'milk
run' ships followed the arc of colonies and federation member republics
wherever they actually were, they probably went the long way 'round
with crazy zig-zag courses.
I would also expect there to be ships
on direct Terra-Odin or Terra-Marduk or anywhere else where there was
enough of a market able to pay a premium for direct travel/shipping to
avoid taking forever.
Local and express, not unlike railroads, which I understand Mr. Piper did some work at... Yeah, should have seen it sooner.
So
probably one Gimli, that was near the heart of a tangle of routes
because A) the routes had more to do with controlling interest in
various holding groups and interlocking cartels, B) see above, C) Piper
liked the name.
Probably D) all of the above. :)
|
Tanith in Oz 08-08-2017
04:40 UT
|
One thing I just wanted to ask the group in terms of a fact check.
TBM
is a star freight company. But TBM isn't the company on Marduk, it
that right? There should be a Chartered Marduk Company, shouldn't there
be?
I fairly sure TMB wasn't in the business of administering planets.
Terry
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-08-2017
03:34 UT
|
~
Jon Crocker wrote:
> Yes, we only found it recently, but for a lot of systems,
> we know a great deal about what planets are there
> before we ever send a ship. This doesn't bode well
> for the crew of the Stellex I'm afraid.
Agreed.
Beam's Terro-human Future History is clearly "alternate history" at
this point more than half a century after he was writing. It seems
apparent that Federation space was explored in the absence of any
ability to know much about a planetary system at interstellar distances.
> If there is only one Gimli, the trade routes must really
> take a curved path.
The
more I've thought about it the more I've come to believe that it was
only by happenstance that trade routes in the Federation era ever
followed anything like a "straight (or even curved) path" at all.
First, there is the difficulty of using what we know about the planets
on trade routes to make any clear guesses about their actual locations
in space. Second, we know that the spacelines of the Federation era
were oligopolistic entities which generally enjoyed a local transport
monopoly on the planets they visited. It seems likely that the regular
spaceline ships only visited planets on which their companies had
negotiated specific commercial arrangements.
There were likely
complex economic reasons why a Terra-Odin Spacelines ship traveled
between Fenris and Gimli and a Terra-Baldur-Marduk Spacelines ship
traveled between Volund and Zarathustra that had little to do with the
actual locations of those planets in interstellar space. Rather, there
were markets on Gimli--and beyond--for ships headed outbound from Terra
(and Fenris) just as there were markets on Volund--and beyond--for ships
headed inbound from Marduk (and Zarathustra).
In those
circumstances the routes from Terra to Odin and from Terra to Marduk via
Baldur may have meandered in ways which followed no discernible
pattern. (It could even be that a spaceline ship traveling, say, from
Terra to Odin was closer--by direct voyage--to Terra when it reached
Odin than it was at some mid-point in the "milk-run.") This sort of
model fits with what we know from Beam about the interstellar economy in
the Federation era and might also account for the difficulties we have
in sorting out the relative locations in actual space of various
planets.
On the other hand, it makes for some interesting
narrative drama. Recall the competition back on Terra represented by
Glenn Murell's effort to travel to Fenris to negotiate access to the
tallow wax trade. Imagine what happens when one spaceline makes a play
for the local trade on a planet currently served by a different
spaceline.
It's also likely that the spacelines had specific
commercial arrangements with the chartered companies.
Terra-Baldur-Marduk (TBM) has negotiated a lease for the spaceport from
the Chartered Zarathustra Company (CZC). It seems likely the investors
behind the CZC and TBM were a jumbled mix of many of the same folks.
(Think of the various holding companies organized by Rodney Maxwell on
Poictesme.) Oftentimes, the transport rights on a given planet were
probably determined at the time the chartered company was being
organized. It's not a stretch to assume that the ~Stellex~ crew would
welcome investment from a major spaceline in return for monopoly
transport rights at their spaceport (to be built with capital provided
by the spaceline).
Put those investment relationship together
with the various raw materials available and in-demand imports on a
given planet and you end up with a "milk-run" that resembles any sort of
regular spatial pattern only by chance.
There she is!
David
--
"A
lot of technicians are girls, and when work gets slack, they're always
the first ones to get shoved out of jobs." - Sylvie Jacquemont (H. Beam
Piper), ~Junkyard Planet~
~
|
Tanith in Oz 08-08-2017
03:24 UT
|
Sorry all. Galactic Southwest became Polar South when I was
discussing this earlier. That's my error. Lol. But I too have puzzled
over this because what did Piper mean by it? If Fenris is 650 light
years in this direction, where exactly is it? I can't recall if
the star of Fenris is actually mentioned or not, but could it be in
orbit of Betelguese? Beteleguese is roughly 650 light years from Earth.
Would Orion then be considered in a South Westerly direction? Terry Edited 08-08-2017 04:08
|
Jon Crocker 08-08-2017
02:15 UT
|
Galactic Southwest - yes, that's a one-off. And since the main disk of
the Milky Way is about a thousand light-years thick, yes, we can be
fairly sure the major orientation of the Federation + Sword Worlds isn't
from galactic north to galactic south.
I think we can conclude
that the science of astronomy really never recovered after WW3 & WW4
- as of now, we know of about 2300+ exoplanets, some of them fairly
nearby. The famous seven planet Trappist system is a mere 39 light
years distant, for example. Yes, we only found it recently, but for a
lot of systems, we know a great deal about what planets are there before
we ever send a ship. This doesn't bode well for the crew of the
Stellex I'm afraid.
If there is only one Gimli, the trade routes
must really take a curved path. Which does make sense if people go to
systems to actually see what is there, not just to confirm what they've
seen from the telescopes back home.
|
Tanith in Oz 08-08-2017
02:15 UT
|
Yes I can see the argument there. And you're right trying to work out a galactic map with scant evidence is difficult.
Whilst
it's been fun speculating on what could be I'm more interested in the
facts. And at the end of the day there isn't enough evidence to prove 2
Gimlis, but then again there isn't enough to support just one. At some
point you have to make up your own mind, and that's ok.
I'm
happy to support the Gimli near Marduk idea. The best way to avoid any
confusion is to not talk about Fenris or the milk runs. I think this
way any new tale can be its own thing. It doesn't preclude people's
leanings towards to the 2 planet theory, but acknowledging it could open
a proverbial can of worms.
And as John Carr has pointed out to
me, trying to adopt a 2 planet theory anyway is in his opinion "out of
cannon". I tend to agree with this position. Though it's fun to
entertain wild speculations, it's one Gimli for me.
Regards
Terry
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-08-2017
00:47 UT
|
~
Terry "Tanith in Oz" Glouftsis wrote:
> Given the Space Viking's pathway in to the old
> Federation and the travel time mentioned from
> Marduk to Gimli, it makes me think Fenris isn't
> near Marduk, or else it would have been mentioned.
This
is an interesting point. From the perspective of internal chronology
the last time Fenris is mentioned is in the Fuzzy novels. Jack Holloway
had been on Fenris some years before coming to Zarathustra and the
basic circumstances of the failure of the original Chartered Company are
recounted. It's also described as a sort of backwater, a remote place
where Hugo Ingerman might go to escape pursuit by Federation
authorities. Fenris "disappears" after that.
~Uller Uprising~
also has some interesting things to say about Fenris. Written before
~Four-Day Planet~ but occurring later in the internal chronology there
are two instances in ~Uprising~ when a serious catastrophe on Fenris is
alluded to. Both the use of nuclear weapons and intervention by the
Federation Navy are mentioned, though it's unclear whether one provoked
the other or was its result.
Fenris was already a rugged, severe
place. A nuclear conflagration makes those circumstances even more
precarious. Fenris seems to have survived whatever the catastrophe was
that's described in ~Uprising~ but it wouldn't take more than one
"planetbuster" dropped on Port Sandor for Terro-human civilization on
Fenris to be extinguished during the Interstellar Wars. Or perhaps the
Jarvis's sea-monsters were hunted into extinction. Or perhaps an
artificial substitute for tallow wax was in fact developed eventually.
Perhaps a bit of all three. . . .
Bottom line is that it should
not surprise us that Fenris doesn't appear in the Viking era (or the
Empire era). Even if it wasn't attacked itself it looses its markets in
the Interstellar Wars (unless it became a "trade-planet" of one of the
"civilized planets" like Baldur). Its ecosphere makes it the sort of
place which would not attract additional colonists. Its only product
likely becomes less valuable with time.
Monster Ho!
David
--
"Good things in the long run are often tough while they're happening." - Otto Harkaman (H. Beam Piper), ~Space Viking~
~
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-07-2017
19:56 UT
|
~
Terry "Tanith in Oz" Glouftsis wrote:
> We learn that Fenris is 650 light years polar south
> of Terra.
Well,
what the text says is "to the Galactic southwest of the Sol System."
This seems to be the only place in the Terro-human Future History where
Beam used that sort of terminology and it's something I've never
understood. Put "Galactic southwest" into your favorite search engine
and it will give you all sorts of science-fiction and gaming sites where
the phrase appears. Look closely and you'll find a couple of
scientific papers which use the term but don't seem to explain it.
Whether any of these meanings is the same as what Beam had in mind is
beyond me.
If the "Galactic southwest" means something like that
quadrant of space above the southern half of the Western Hemisphere then
we're talking about a huge volume of space--essentially one quarter of
all of Terro-human space. (That region would seem to revolve as Earth
revolves on its axis but let's put that odd detail aside for the moment
and assume we're taking a snapshot at, say, noon GMT on Day One of the
Atomic Era.) That's a region of space bounded by a line from the center
of the Earth passing through the South Pole, by another line from the
center of the Earth passing through a point in the Atlantic Ocean
southwest of the Gulf of Guinea in western Africa, and by another line
from the center of the Earth passing through a point in the Pacific
Ocean near the Phoenix Islands southwest of Hawaii. (Of course, in no
terrestrial sense are the South Pole, the Gulf of Guinea and the Phoenix
Islands "near" one another.) Draw those three lines into space for 650
light-years and you may have the corners of the surface of the
spherical quadrant upon which lies Fenris. (I'll leave it to the
mathematicians among us to calculate the area of that spherical
quadrant.)
> This puts the planet in a completely different direction from
> Zarathustra.
As
Jon says, I don't think we know what direction Zarathustra is from
Terra. We know it's five hundred light years away, which is interesting
because this puts it closer to Terra than is Fenris. That's odd
because Zarathustra was settled well after Fenris. Given that
Zarathustra's sun is somewhat like Sol this suggests that expansion into
space wasn't generally uniform in all directions and that, perhaps,
Zarathustra lies in a somewhat different direction from Fenris.
If
we assume Fenris and Zarathustra are _directly_ opposite Terra (the
_most_ conservative but unlikely assumption), then they are 1150
light-years apart. For Space Vikings who must travel over three
thousand light-years from the Sword-Worlds just to reach the Old
Federation that's not very far. . . .
> From this there is no way Gimli can be near both planets.
We
know that Gimli is "the nearest planet" to Zarathustra. We don't know
how "near" Gimli is to Fenris. It is, rather, "the next planet out"
from Fenris on the regular Terra-Odin Spacelines transport route. We
don't know much about these "milk-runs" except that they probably don't
run in straight lines. (Gimli may be the nearest planet to Zarathustra
but the next stop toward Terra on the Terra-Baldur-Marduk Spacelines
route from Zarathustra is Volund.) What seems reasonable is that for a
line drawn between Terra and Odin, the variance in the distance of the
planets which are destinations along that "milk-run" from that line is
roughly the same. In this sense Gimli is "near" Fenris. But Gimli may
be off in one direction from that straight-line between Terra and Odin
while Fenris is off in another. And "off" a little further in the
direction of Gimli may be Zarathustra. In other words, Gimli may be
somewhere "in between" Zarathustra and Fenris. Half of something less
than 1150 light-years isn't very far at all for a Space Viking.
Again,
bottom line is there is a lot of uncertainty here and a lot of
supposition about most everything. But for me it's not obvious that
Gimli can't be both "the nearest planet" to Zarathustra _and_ "the next
planet out" from Fenris on the meandering Terra-Odin Spacelines route.
We simply don't have enough details from Beam here to conclude he
contradicted himself.
> Marduk is near the Sword Worlds and we know they
> are not polar south.
Again,
don't know about that "polar south" but Marduk is at least three
thousand light-years from Gram. It's five hundred light-years from
Tanith. We don't get may details about Marduk's location with respect
to Terra or other planets in the Old Federation. We know from its name
that it was settled after most of the planets named from Norse mythology
and can reasonably assume--Zarathustra aside--that it's farther from
Terra than are major, Norse-named planets like Odin or Baldur. We know
that Marduk was a key planet, perhaps the capital planet, in the System
States Alliance, again suggesting its relative distance from Terra. The
Terra-Baldur-Marduk Spacelines in the Fuzzy novels also suggests this.
Furthermore, when folks on Zarathustra are hoping for the replenishment
of key ingredients of Extee Three in the later Fuzzy novels they're
expecting them to arrive from Marduk, suggesting that Zarathustra is
closer _on_this_milk-run_ to Marduk than it is to Baldur.
None of
this suggests that Marduk's trade-planet in ~Space Viking~ can't be the
same Gimli that is "the nearest planet" to Zarathustra.
> Based on this I do consider Fenris being near both
> Zarathustra and Gimli to be in error.
I'm
still not understanding what the "error" is here. We can certainly
make some assumptions which would make it more difficult for "the next
planet out" from Fenris to be the same as "the nearest planet" to
Zarathustra but then it would seem to be that the "error" was in those
assumptions, not in what Beam left for us.
---
> Another possibility that occurred to me today is that
> the second Gimli (if it exists) isn't a planet at all.
> What if it's a city, or a trading port on another planet?
Well,
I don't think this leap is called for and it certainly doesn't seem to
fit with how the word "Gimli" is used through the Future History but
there is some precedent for this sort of thing. Asgard is mentioned as a
planet in "Graveyard of Dreams." It's the only place in the
Terro-human Future History where the planet Asgard appears. In
"Ministry of Disturbance" and "A Slave is a Slave," written after
"Graveyard," Asgard is the capital city of Odin. Beam himself resolved
this discrepancy when he wrote ~Junkyard Planet~ in which Conn Maxwell
travels from Odin to Poictesme on the ~City of Asgard~.
What's
perhaps most important about this example is that it demonstrates that
Beam himself sometimes recognized when he made errors and worked to
address them in subsequent works. If he made an error with Gimli at
some point he certainly never found it important to address it in
subsequent yarns.
Cheers,
David
--
"You know what
Lingua Terra is? An indiscriminate mixture of English, Spanish,
Portuguese and Afrikaans, mostly English. And you know what English is?
The result of the efforts of Norman men-at-arms to make dates with
Saxon barmaids." - Victor Grego (H. Beam Piper), ~Fuzzy Sapiens~
~
|
Tanith in Oz 08-07-2017
06:51 UT
|
Yes it's sad we don't have that map. But I'm pretty sure
there's something somewhere that gives us an idea where the Sword Worlds
are, and it's not polar south of Terra. Given the Space
Viking's pathway in to the old Federation and the travel time mentioned
from Marduk to Gimli, it makes me think Fenris isn't near Marduk, or
else it would have been mentioned. You're right about Zarathustra
not having a specific direction so it's hard to be 100 percent sure.
But I tend to err on the side of caution here. Until proven otherwise I
believe Fenris being near Zarathrustra and Marduk is a mistake. This
is quite possible because we do have to take into account that when
Piper wrote the stories some of the future time line may not have been
fully fleshed out. Given this there's a chance he introduced this error
and never corrected it. If we look to his contemporary authors
like Heinlein, Asimov, and Herbert they all have inconsistencies in
their future time lines. In part this is due to them all having stories
published across different magazines in a time when cranking out tales
got you paid. Back then authors weren't as concerned with building
future time lines and linking everything together. It was only the
passage of time that compelled them to link their stories, giving us
those timelines we all now read - Asimov is a big one for this. When I
look at Piper's work I can see evidence of this with him too. Certainly
HBP was way more organised a lot earlier than some of his
contemporaries and did take much more time and care to build his future
time lines. But he has inconsistencies. For example he does contradict
travel time to the same planets, in the same era but in different
stories. Then there are the issues with his chronology - when did the
30 days war happen? 1971, 1972, 1973? We may never truly know because
he provides contradictory evidence. So where there are mistakes like
this, is it absurd to consider he made an error with Gimli too? An
error that once printed could not be undone? I think this is
something we must consider. Yes HBP is awesome, but he wasn't
infallible. He certainly could have introduced this type of error, but
have been unable to correct it. But I totally understand that
won't sit well with some, and that's understandable. So if it suits some
of you perhaps we should just split hairs and let it be. Perhaps
Gimli (the Icelandic spelling) is the planet near Marduk. But what if
Gimlé (a different spelling, but which is consistent from the Norse
myths) is a planet/city/asteroid near Fenris. Now that I can get
behind. Maybe it's just a question of an incorrect spelling and it is
just getting mixed up with another site with a very similar name. This I
could accept as a good compromise that keeps everyone satisfied. I
could envision that the Fenris near "Gimlé " may even be abandoned. Or
in the rush to name worlds no one noticed Gimli got taken (and this is a
fair consideration given evidence suggests the Marduk near Gimli wasn't
settled until much later after discovery. So it's plausible that when
looking through the colony names someone could have missed it being in
use and then went with it). In the end this is all conjecture. What I'd give just to get just 5 mins with HBP to ask him directly! Terry Edited 08-07-2017 08:24
|
Jon Crocker 08-07-2017
03:51 UT
|
Yes, Gimli the small Manitoba town is about a two hour drive from
Winnipeg, and I have been there a couple times. It's in the middle of
the Icelandic festival right now, so it's a good time to have this
discussion. And there's a nice beer from Iceland they have there,
called "Gull".
A couple of questions, though - if there's an
agreement that "there is no way Gimli can be near both planets", but we
have black-letter statements that both Fenris and Marduk have a nearby
Gimli, how do we get around having two Gimlis?
Also, I don't
recall if it ever said anything definate about where Zarathrustra's
location relative to Terra - I do remember it was about six month's
travel time away.
I'd have loved for a galactic map of Piper's to have seen print, but alas...
|
Tanith in Oz 08-07-2017
02:30 UT
|
Yes I certainly agree. I don't think there are two Gimlis.
We
learn that Fenris is 650 light years polar south of Terra. This puts
the planet in a completely different direction from Zarathustra. From
this there is no way Gimli can be near both planets. Marduk is near the
Sword Worlds and we know they are not polar south.
Based on this I do consider Fenris being near both Zarathustra and Gimli to be in error.
However
this doesn't discount a few possibilities as mentioned in previous
posts. Another possibility that occurred to me today is that the second
Gimli (if it exists) isn't a planet at all. What if it's a city, or a
trading port on another planet?
I'm not so keen on this idea
but given the way things get named there's no reason for both a planet
and a city not getting the same name. Consider the state of Georgia and
the Country of Georgia. Also the District of Columbia and the Country
of Colombia.
We do it here, so it's plausible that this could be a possibility.
Terry
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-06-2017
18:38 UT
|
~
Jon Crocker wrote:
> I don't know if it's a matter of 'fake Gimli' - there are
> a few names of towns that crop up a lot in different
> US states, for example. There are 41 Springfields in
> the US, 4 towns with that name in Wisconsin alone.
Let's not forget this place:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/vik...ark-gimli-1.4234001
:)
> They were probably both settled during the time
> when everything was six months away by hypership,
> so by the time each found out about the other, it
> was far too late.
I
suspect that, even with that sort of delay, when the proposal for a
second Gimli got back to the "Astrographic Commission" mentioned in
"When in the Course--," they'd've taken action along the lines of that
which ended up with Washington state not being called "Columbia":
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_pol...the_same_name_.html
On
the other hand, there is the Sword World Sacnoth in Traveller's Third
Imperium role-playing campaign setting. The world's name, for a sword
in a short story by Lord Dunsany, was chosen by the original settlers
from Gram. But officials back on Gram forced them to name the world for
the legendary sword Balisarda. When Sacnoth eventually came to
supplant Gram's dominance some years later they not only changed the
name back to Sacnoth, but also abandoned the practice of naming colony
worlds for legendary swords, instead naming several additional Sword
Worlds colonized from Sacnoth for swords which appeared in Tolkein's
fictional Middle Earth yarns. . . . [Let's be clear here that this was
all _post_hoc_ rationalization by subsequent writers in the official
campaign setting.]
Bottom line is, I think we could come up with
an explanation for how two planets ended up with the same name. But
first, we'd need to sort out that there _are_ actually two Gimlis.
Yash'm!
David
--
"You
know what Lingua Terra is? An indiscriminate mixture of English,
Spanish, Portuguese and Afrikaans, mostly English. And you know what
English is? The result of the efforts of Norman men-at-arms to make
dates with Saxon barmaids." - Victor Grego (H. Beam Piper), ~Fuzzy
Sapiens~
~
|
Jon Crocker 08-06-2017
17:49 UT
|
I don't know if it's a matter of 'fake Gimli' - there are a few names of
towns that crop up a lot in different US states, for example. There
are 41 Springfields in the US, 4 towns with that name in Wisconsin
alone.
They were probably both settled during the time when
everything was six months away by hypership, so by the time each found
out about the other, it was far too late.
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-06-2017
17:28 UT
|
~
Terry "Tanith in Oz" Glouftsis wrote:
> the inconsistencies of Gimli being near Fenris and
> Marduk (both of which we know are in opposite
> directions from one another).
Can
you remind us where we learn that Fenris and Marduk are in opposite
directions (presumably with respect to Terra) from each other?
> Could a second false Gimli have been promoted
> to confuse people from the location of all that
> Uranium?
We
learn about the uranium mining on Gimli in ~Fuzzy Sapiens~ and ~Fuzzies
and Other People~. It's common knowledge to folks on Zarathustra so it
doesn't seem like it's information anyone is trying to hide from anyone
else at that point in the Federation era.
(We also learn that
Gimli is "the nearest planet" to Zarathustra in ~Fuzzy Sapiens~. We
have no real idea though of the relative proximity of Zarathustra to
Fenris or to Marduk.)
> The only possibility that I can see is that the
> Uranium Gimli wasn't settled until later.
I
don't think it's too much of a stretch to assume that the naval base on
Gimli that we learn about in ~Four-Day Planet~ existed in conjunction
with the uranium mining we learn about subsequently in the Fuzzy novels
more than a century later. The naval base may not have been put there
_because_ Gimli was a source of uranium but it would seem odd that there
were, already, "two Gimlis" by the time of the Fuzzy novels.
> and the other is a mining colony of Marduk.
We
don't know that "Marduk's" Gimli is a mining colony. It's a
trade-planet. We assume it is the same Gimli we knew from the
Federation era yarns and therefore is a source of uranium for Marduk.
This brings us back to:
> and I consider the report of it being near Fenris
> to be in "error".
Because
I'm not familiar with the reference which suggests that Fenris is "too
far away" from Marduk for the Gimli mentioned in ~Four-Day Planet~ to be
the Gimli which appears in ~Space Viking~ I can't comment here.
I
would point out though that "nearby" meant something very different in
the time period when ~Four-Day Planet~ occurred and that it does when
~Space Viking~ occurs. Recall that the Vikings cross a "gulf" to the
Old Federation which was large enough to lead their ancestors--late
Federation era folks--to believe that the Federation would never cross
it. And as it turned out, they were correct. Given that the Space
Vikings _begin_ their voyages to the Old Federation crossing that gulf
as a matter of course, many, many of the planets in the Old Federation
will seem "nearby" to another Old Federation planet from the Vikings'
perspective.
Monster Ho!
David
--
"We talk glibly
about ten to the hundredth power, but emotionally we still count, 'One,
Two, Three, Many.'" - Otto Harkaman (H. Beam Piper), ~Space Viking~
~
|
Tanith in Oz 08-06-2017
16:48 UT
|
I must admit that's an interesting idea. 2 Gimlis. Based on the scant
evidence from the books it certainly would explain the inconsistencies
of Gimli being near Fenris and Marduk (both of which we know are in
opposite directions from one another).
But inconsistency does
occur in Piper's works. He contradicts the distances of planets across
stories and he certainly introduces ambiguity over the dates of certain
events (the 30 Day War being the prime example).
This may have
happened with Gimli too. David has pointed out that Gimli was Piper's
go to story device and it's possible that he may not have been as
careful when applying it.
Of course that's difficult for us to accept.
So
is there 2 Gimlis? Could a second false Gimli have been promoted to
confuse people from the location of all that Uranium? If so, who were
they confusing? We've spoken recently of the Federation not having any
rivals, so creating a second Gimli for this purpose doesn't make sense.
The
only possibility that I can see is that the Uranium Gimli wasn't
settled until later. It's possible another planet got the name instead.
Later the "second" Gimli became important because of the Uranium and
was settled, but the name wasn't changed.
So if there are 2
Gimlis, one is a settled world and the other is a mining colony of
Marduk. I don't suggest this as definitive proof of 2 Gimlis, but it
might be a way to explain the inconsistencies.
But I must admit
that I'm not a fan of this idea. I remain to be convinced, but right
now I'm on the side of there only being one Gimli, and I consider the
report of it being near Fenris to be in "error".
But hey, I'm happy to discuss this further. Fire away.
Terry
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-05-2017
04:07 UT
|
~
Jon Crocker wrote:
> I think earlier on the board we'd concluded there could
> be two different worlds named Gimli, the one that was
> next door to Fenris, and the other one near Marduk.
> It's been a long week so I can't think of it now, but I
> remember a reference to one near Baldur, too, but
> that might have been the one near Marduk.
Gimli
really only shows up four times in Beam's Terro-human Future History
yarns. It's the remote home planet of Klenn Faress in "Ministry of
Disturbance." In ~Four-Day Planet~ it's the "next planet out" (toward
Odin on the Terra-Odin milk-run) from Fenris and the site of a
Federation naval base. It's one of Marduk's trade-planets in ~Space
Viking~ and near enough to Marduk to be a marshalling point for Trask's
fleet. It's another planet with an exploited native sophont race in
~Fuzzy Sapiens~ and is mentioned briefly as having a Chartered Company
in ~Fuzzies and Other People~.
Baldur is mentioned many, many
times throughout the Future History. We never get much detail about the
planet, except that it seems to be a beautiful place (including its
capital city, Paris-on-Baldur). It is identified as one of the major
planets of both the Federation era _and_ the Empire era and is also one
of the "civilized" planets in the Old Federation in the Viking era. I
don't recall it ever being mentioned in connection with Gimli. (There
is the Terra-Baldur-Marduk Spacelines in the Fuzzy novels but what we
can gather from that is that Zarathustra must be closet to the Marduk
"nexus" on that milk-run and, perhaps, that Gimli itself isn't served by
that service--which may tell us a bit about the nature of the routes on
"milk-runs.")
We did have a discussion just a bit over two years
ago about the possibility of there being more than one "Gimli." The
discussion then was centered around the fact that some folks found the
different appearances of Gimli outlined above to be incompatible. In
particular, the apparent proximity of Gimli to Fenris _and_ Zarathustra
seemed to be too much of a stretch for some. Like many of our
discussions, we never came to a shared conclusion. At the time, I
remained unconvinced.
Monster Ho!
David
--
"We talk
glibly about ten to the hundredth power, but emotionally we still count,
'One, Two, Three, Many.'" - Otto Harkaman (H. Beam Piper), ~Space
Viking~
~
|
Jon Crocker 08-05-2017
03:12 UT
|
I think earlier on the board we'd concluded there could be two different
worlds named Gimli, the one that was next door to Fenris, and the other
one near Marduk. It's been a long week so I can't think of it now, but
I remember a reference to one near Baldur, too, but that might have
been the one near Marduk.
|
Tanith in Oz 08-04-2017
13:06 UT
|
Ahh perhaps I misunderstood.
So there is a Federation base on Gimli then.
Ok.
No problems. I can accommodate that. I did set aside a small place
on the map I drew just in case. It's in the middle of no where and far
away from the population centers (just like a lot of military
installations in the Aussie outback are).
All good.
Terry
|
Tanith in Oz 08-04-2017
13:05 UT
|
Maybe not a big problem, but it certainly would have some effects.
In the end it doesn't really matter (and no that's not Linkin Park lyrics), I like the ring idea anyway.
This mad hatter is going to follow Alice down the rabbit hole on that one and see where the journey takes him.
I hope you all like what I come up with...
Regards
Terry
|
David Sooby 08-04-2017
13:05 UT
|
David Johnson said:
"No non-Humans at all are mentioned in ~Space Viking~."
And
I think that's the strongest evidence for why we don't see any mention
of non-numan colony worlds in any Piperverse story. In the Piperverse,
it appears only Humans are interested in expanding their territory to
other worlds. The Ullerans may be hostile to Terrans having control over
their world, but all they want to do is wipe out the "infidel" Terrans
and restore Uller to their own control.
Likewise, the Empire (if I
recall correctly) uses Thorans as guards and troops, but there's no
indication that the Thorans have any ambitions of interstellar travel on
their own, let alone ambitions of founding their own colony worlds.
As
for the Fuzzies... Ummm, seriously? 10-year-old kids who don't even
know how to make fire are not gonna build starships, period. William
Tuning had an interesting scenario in FUZZY BONES where Fuzzies were
pets or trained animals belonging to alien spacefarers who got stranded
on Zarathustra (and again, that has unfortunately been rendered contrary
to Canon by publication of FUZZIES AND OTHER PEOPLE, which states
Fuzzies are native to Zarathustra), but Fuzzies are not going to set out
on their own to establish a colony on an alien world.
Now,
that's not to say there isn't room in the Piperverse for a story about
conflict with an aggressive, expansionist alien species. Perhaps one
iteration or another of the Empire did run into one... and wiped it out.
Given the expansionist tendencies of Humans, they would *have* to wipe
out any competing expansionist species... or get wiped out themselves.
Conflict would be inevitable, even if the other species preferred
non-Terran worlds. For example, the Ullerans didn't prefer Terran
worlds, but any expansionist species would be trying to exploit
uninhabitable but mineral-rich worlds like Uller, Niffleheim and
Koshchei, for the same reasons Humans did.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Clear ether!
David "Lensman" Sooby
|
David Sooby 08-04-2017
13:04 UT
|
David Johnson said:
> If we think about these Federation warships as more like Eighteenth
> Century sailing ships than as Twentieth Century diesel-powered
> ships what other factors lead us to believe the Terran Federation
> Navy is a huge force? Sure, the ~Penrose~ is a huge ship but then
> so is the ~Cape Canaveral~.
>
> Just some points to contemplate given that we're already reaching
> to find a rationale for what we (perhaps mistakenly) believe to be a
> large Federation military.
LITTLE
FUZZY contains references to the Xerxes Naval Base, as well as "a Navy
landing craft for Xerxes". Both LITTLE FUZZY and FUZZY SAPIENS show the
Navy has undercover intelligence officers keeping an eye on
Zarathustra, which is a frontier world. This rather strongly suggests
there is a permanent Naval garrison at Zarathustra, and presumably at
many or perhaps every Federation frontier world.
Contrariwise, in
FOUR-DAY PLANET, there is no Naval base; the local peace-keeping
authority is described as the "police", perhaps the same thing as the
"Colonial Constabulatory", and the nearest Naval base is at "Gimli, the
next planet out"... whatever "out" means in this case; presumably the
next colony world out from Terra, or the core civilized worlds.
So,
this suggests that on planets settled long enough to have a stable
population, order is kept by planetary police, but on frontier worlds
such as Zarathustra, the Navy enforces Federation law and order.
However,
the underground city in FOUR-DAY PLANET is pretty small in terms of
population, only "twenty-odd thousand", and I get the impression that's
the only place on the planet where humans live. It may be that Fenris
doesn't rate a Naval base simply because its population is so small.
You
have a good point that FOUR-DAY PLANET mentions only a couple of
destroyers at the Naval base on Gimli. Perhaps there are not multiple
large fleets of warships around until the time of the System States War.
Still, the Navy does have enough ships to keep piracy and interstellar
raiding rare enough that it doesn't seem to be a concern of either
interstellar passengers or starship owners before the System States War.
That is, interstellar raiding and piracy are rare to the point of
non-existence, even out among the frontier worlds.
But consider
the case of LITTLE FUZZY: There may or may not be capital ships kept on
station at that Naval base -- the story doesn't call for them, so their
presence or absence is irrelevant to the story -- but there is a
permanent garrison there, and the "Navy landing craft" rather strongly
suggests that part of the garrison is marines, or at least Navy
personnel trained for ground combat.
So we might suggest the Navy
could be outsized in terms of personnel in relation to the capital
ships, with lots of bases but relatively few capital ships.
I
can't say that I have a good "feel" for what it's like out on the
fringes of the Federation, and beyond. Are there lots of uncharted
colonies where a splinter group has established a colony far beyond the
reaches of the Core Worlds? Or does the Federation keep such a close eye
on every single hypership that it's almost impossible to escape the
Federation's notice?
"When in the Course--" seems to suggest that
the frontier is pretty open, and anybody can go anywhere they like
without Big Brother watching over their shoulder. But then, that story
is set pretty early in the days of the Federation; perhaps the Navy
started keeping a much closer eye on independent ships in later
centuries.
At any rate, we do have strong evidence that there
wasn't a problem with "Outie" worlds constantly trying to break free of
Federation control, as with Pournelle's Empire of Man. If there was such
a problem, then there would have been sufficient concern about
interstellar raiders that frontier colonies would have had to have been
equipped with orbital or moon-based military bases, and likely hardened
bases on the ground, both equipped to fight off interstellar raiding
ships. Also, civilian interstellar ships surveying new worlds and both
freighters and passenger ships making trade runs to newly established
colonies would have had to have been "armed merchant" or "armed scout"
ships.
One could argue that a large Naval fleet was not needed
because there were no (or very few) interstellar raiders and no
breakaway colony worlds, but I'd argue the reverse: There were no (or
very few) interstellar raiders and no breakaway colony worlds *because*
the Federation maintained a strong Navy, and furthermore I'll argue that
the lack of such is an indication that the Navy *was* strong enough to
maintain a presence nearly everywhere there was a human colony.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Clear ether!
David "Lensman" Sooby
|
Jon Crocker 08-04-2017
05:55 UT
|
As long as your moon wasn't close in to the gas giant, or the giant
wasn't as big as Jupiter, I don't think radiation would be a big
problem.
|
Tanith in Oz 08-04-2017
03:29 UT
|
Lol.
True you've probably found the flaws in the reasoning I had
there to reject the moon orbiting a gas giant. Perhaps I was clutching
at straws in order to preserve the rings notion, which I think is far
better story idea.
Yes I'm completely aware of Titan orbiting
Saturn. My biggest concern with the moon theory is the inherent
radiation the planet would get and how that would affect the development
of life.
It's one thing to find a planet like this and colonise
it, but its totally another considering how evolution would be affected.
It doesn't mean it couldn't be, but I think it opens up some questions
I'd rather not bog the story down with.
So I'm going with the rings idea.
Terry
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-04-2017
03:29 UT
|
~
Terry "Tanith in Oz" Glouftsis wrote:
> I agree with David that Four Day Planet doesn't actually
> confirm the existence of a base.
~Four-Day
Planet~ explicitly mentions a Federation naval base at Gimli. It's
~Space Viking~ which tells us nothing about the Federation-era naval
base there.
Sorry.
David
--
"We talk glibly about
ten to the hundredth power, but emotionally we still count, 'One, Two,
Three, Many.'" - Otto Harkaman (H. Beam Piper), ~Space Viking~
~
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-04-2017
03:03 UT
|
~
Terry "Tanith in Oz" Glouftsis wrote:
> If Gimli orbited a gas giant gravitational forces would
> wreck any type of ring.
Saturn has a planet-sized moon.
> So the only other way the planet could be called this
> would be that the gas giant it orbited would have to
> be yellow.
In every color photograph I've seen of it, Saturn has been yellow.
> But if this was the case there's a high chance it would
> be tidally locked, so only one part of the planet would
> see the gas giant. And that side would be in perpetual
> darkness/twilight.
Well,
no. One side (mostly) would see the gas giant overhead all the time
and one side (mostly) wouldn't ever see the planet (but still might see
the ring if it orbited beyond the moon's orbit). Both sides would get
sunlight and darkness from the _sun_ in accordance with their orbital
period / axial rotation. On occasion the gas giant would eclipse the
sun.
In the end, the decision is yours to make, of course. You're writing the story there. ;)
Ad astra,
David
--
"Considering
the one author about whom I am uniquely qualified to speak, I question
if any reader of H. Beam Piper will long labor under the
misunderstanding that he is a pious Christian, a left-wing liberal, a
Gandhian pacifist, or a teetotaler." - H. Beam Piper, "Double: Bill
Symposium" interview
~
|
Tanith in Oz 08-04-2017
02:28 UT
|
The Uranium inspiration for Brannerton is interesting and I could see
that too, though the link to the Brannerton mining disaster in New
Zealand might also be a factor. (Perhaps its a flukely happenstance that
its both - I think Piper intended the disaster more than the ore, and
it also fit with the ore as well, a fact he might have found
interesting).
It could then mean other towns like Uraninton,
Coffiniton, Daviditon and Thucoliton might be in existence too. But I'm
not convinced. It's clear Gimli didn't get settled for quite some
time, and it only did after the discovery of Uranium. Naming towns like
this does make some type of sense, but I've always felt Gimli's capital
was a solitary settlement for sometime.
So taking this into
consideration I could see these other names being used as suburbs within
Brannerton itself. This makes sense to me.
And on the
Federation base on Gimli , this is a tough one. I agree with David that
Four Day Planet doesn't actually confirm the existence of a base.
Gimli is used a lot by Piper as a marshaling point. David and I have
had a discussion about this and I am convinced he is right.
What
I can see as being realistic is that Gimli has a large industrial port
like Port Kembla. This port is for the shipping of ore and can
accommodate some military vessels. But the Federation hasn't set up a
base by the time of Little Fuzzy.
However having said that I can
totally accept the establishment of one as the Federation declines,
largely to secure the Uranium ore. So though we can't prove the
existence of a base, one certainly could be there by the time of the
System States War.
I'm comfortable with that.
Terry
I could see Brannerton starting out a small research settlement
Yes Brannerton I c
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-04-2017
01:19 UT
|
~
John "Calidore" Anderson wrote:
> Gimli has a Federation Navy base (FDP), and in Piper,
> these are usually on satellites; the Moonbase of Marduk,
> and the Federation Navy base on Zarathustra’s moon
> Xerxes. Tanith’s missile-launching stations on its small
> moon in Space Viking may be the beginnings of a similar
> base.
I
think, perhaps, two (and a half?) data points isn't quite enough to say
"usually." There is also a Federation Navy proving-ground on Mars.
What seems clear is that the Federation likes to place its navy bases on
_smaller_ bodies (probably because, even with lift-and-drive it takes
less energy to take-off--and land--on a lower-gravity world).
> In that novel, when the allied fleet arrives at Gimli, they
> meet with the Mardukan Admiral Bargham. This is
> almost certainly at the Navy base, but the Admiral is
> referred to as being ‘on’ Gimli. (“There was a little
> difficulty on Gimli with Fleet-Admiral Bargham.” And,
> “You’ll remain here on Gimli in any case, Admiral”, SV
> p. 222) This suggests that Gimli has no moon; the
> Navy base is on the planetary surface.
We
don't know if there is a Mardukan naval base in the Gimli system at
all. The Mardukan ships marshalling there, some of them, at least, may
have landed on the planet but that doesn't mean there is a naval base on
the surface. Gimli is described as a Mardukan trade-planet, never as a
naval base, and the Mardukan Navy ships were there originally because
they'd been dispersed to the trade-planets by the Makannists.
Bottom
line is, I don't think we get anything from Beam in ~Viking~ that tells
us anything about where in the Gimli system the Federation naval base
mentioned in ~Four-Day Planet~ might have been.
> Assuming Piper derived Brannerton from brannerite,
> then the name really means “Brannerite-Town”, and the
> city was founded not far from a source of uranium ore.
That is a fascinating connection! I'm convinced. ;)
> Marduk probably gets a lot of its uranium from Gimli.
Yep.
David
--
"You
had a wonderful civilization here. . . . You could have made almost
anything of it. But it's too late now. You've torn down the gates; the
barbarians are in." - Lucas Trask (H. Beam Piper), ~Space Viking~
~
|
Tanith in Oz 08-03-2017
17:47 UT
|
Awesome that all helps regarding Gimli, thanks for your input.
I
must admit the fact that the Federation have a naval base there is
interesting. You're right that they are usually on moons, but Gimli has
always struck me as an exception to that rule. Having a future
University there has always made me think this is more of a planet than a
moon.
Yes it's possible it orbits a gas giant, but there's a
problem with that. If Federation bases are on moons, not planets, why
would they use Gimli? Gas giants normally have more than one moon, and I
find it unlikely that the Gimli system would be any different. Even if
Gimli were to be a large moon, there would also be little moons or
asteroids at least. A base would be on one of them in my opinion as it
would be much easier for the Federation to set up a base on another moon
of that "Jovian" system. That way they wouldn't have to bother with
the native race on Gimli. - But Gimli has a Native Title court and this
has to be factored in.
Based on this I think Gimli is a free
standing planet. The planet's proximity to Marduk, and the Uranium
there might be reasons as to why they set up a base. It also suggests
to me that the Gimli system might not have a lot of planets and this is a
theory I'm happy to follow though with.
I think this is much more logical.
My
supposition is that Gimli has a large debris ring orbiting it. This
golden ring is called the Golden Roof by the natives, and this is why
the planet is called Gimli (Gimli means Golden Roof). From the surface
looking up you'd see the ring and it literally would look like a golden
roof.
If Gimli orbited a gas giant gravitational forces would
wreck any type of ring. So the only other way the planet could be
called this would be that the gas giant it orbited would have to be
yellow. But if this was the case there's a high chance it would be
tidally locked, so only one part of the planet would see the gas giant.
And that side would be in perpetual darkness/twilight. The aliens
would then have to live in a zone between the light side and the dark
side (but this light side would eclipse regularly when the moon would
orbit the gas giant.) I feel that this would be difficult for sentient
life to develop. It's not impossible, but there would be so much going
against it. And because of this Gimli has to be a small Mars or Terra
like planet.
I don't profess to be correct, but the planet
having a majestic ring just feels right to me. I want Gimli to be
special and this way I think it would be. The ring theory is one of a
few supposed by David, and I like it. Other ideas aren't as grandiose,
and the majesty of ring just opens so many story possibilities that
orbiting a gas giant does not provide.
Terry
|
Calidore 08-03-2017
15:04 UT
|
A reply to the discussion on Gimli.
I agree with David that
Brannerton is probably the capital of Gimli. It seems very similar to
the capitals of Marduk (Malverton) and Tanith (Rivington).
Gimli
has a Federation Navy base (FDP), and in Piper, these are usually on
satellites; the Moonbase of Marduk, and the Federation Navy base on
Zarathustra’s moon Xerxes. Tanith’s missile-launching stations on its
small moon in Space Viking may be the beginnings of a similar base. In
that novel, when the allied fleet arrives at Gimli, they meet with the
Mardukan Admiral Bargham. This is almost certainly at the Navy base,
but the Admiral is referred to as being ‘on’ Gimli. (“There was a
little difficulty on Gimli with Fleet-Admiral Bargham.” And, “You’ll
remain here on Gimli in any case, Admiral”, SV p. 222) This suggests
that Gimli has no moon; the Navy base is on the planetary surface.
In
“Ministry of Disturbance”, it is interesting that Professor Faress got
his degree from Brannerton, then went on to do research into “the
velocity of subnucleonic particles”. (Emp, p. 151) Because the name
‘Brannerton’ may be a reference to brannerite, one of the primary
minerals of uranium, along with uraninite (pitchblende), coffinite,
davidite and thucolite. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_ore)
Uranium, of course, is closely connected to the velocity of
subnucleonic particles—through the smashing of atoms, whose subatomic
pieces cause chain reactions; either for power generation or warfighting
purposes.
Assuming Piper derived Brannerton from brannerite,
then the name really means “Brannerite-Town”, and the city was founded
not far from a source of uranium ore. This ties in the Gimlian natives,
which were moved off their original reservation when uranium was
discovered there. (Fuzzy Sapiens, p. 189) Uranium may therefore be
plentiful on Gimli, and this can explain why Gimli is one of Marduk’s 14
trade planets (SV). In the ‘Atomic’ Era, a fully civilized planet
would need lots of uranium to keep things running, and Marduk probably
gets a lot of its uranium from Gimli.
John
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-03-2017
05:38 UT
|
~
Terry "Tanith in Oz" Glouftsis wrote:
> That's what I always liked about Piper's ship names from
> this period. I've always thought had he used Australian
> specific names in the same vain, then there might have
> been ships called ~Matthew Flinders~, ~James Cook~
> and maybe ~Charles Sturt~.
Given
the make-up of the (second) Terran Federation, if there was a T.F.N.
destroyer named ~Bolivar~ then there was likely also a ~Flinders~, a
~Cook~ and a ~Sturt~. There may also have been a ~Parkes~ and a
~Monash~.
_Sub_Cruce_Lumen_,
David
--
"I was born in
Antarctica, on Terra. The water's a little too cold to do much
swimming there. And I've spent most of my time since then in central
Argentine, in the pampas country." - Glenn Murell (H. Beam Piper),
~Four-Day Planet~
~
|
Tanith in Oz 08-03-2017
05:09 UT
|
~
David "PiperFan" Johnson wrote:
> Here's just one question to ponder. Were there any enclaves of non-Humans who had made it off their native
>
planets by the time the Federation collapsed? Fuzzies on Terra? Lokians
on Baldur? Ullerans on Freya? Thorans > on Odin? Gimlians on Marduk?
Kwanns on Ishtar? Svants on Aton?
> Imagine, say, a Kragan pirate running into a Space Viking!
I
like you're thinking here David because I'm on the same wavelength. I
do absolutely think this could have happened, but the real test is
whether it happened in the Federation Era. I do think the length of
time until "The Keeper" means it is impossible to ignore the possibility
of it happening a least a few times, with one or two actually becoming a
problem to be dealt with. Now whether this is from their homeworld or a
enclave on a Terran world is the question.
Certainly there's a
possibility a few specimens went back to Terra of alien races
encountered, but as it has been pointed out before the Federation never
seemed to care that much about the sophont races. But it doesn't
exclude the odd person or do who did care. So I could absolutely accept
the premise.
Especially Gimlians on Marduk, given my interest.
|
Tanith in Oz 08-03-2017
04:22 UT
|
That's what I always liked about Piper's ship names from this period.
I've always thought had he used Australian specific names in the same
vain, then there might have been ships called ~Matthew Flinders~, ~James
Cook~ and maybe ~Charles Sturt~.
And on the Greek city states
and the Phoenician colonies, yes I can see a parallel there. Perhaps it
might be more accurate then to suggest the Federation lines up better
with the Greek City Sates, and the Empire with the Roman period then.
Though there is a lot of bleed in either direction.
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-03-2017
04:22 UT
|
~
Terry "Tanith in Oz" Glouftsis wrote:
> Let's not forget that between "Ministry of Disturbance"
> and "The Keeper" there is 26 thousand years. That's a
> lot of time for nothing to happen. 26 thousand years
> would allow an alien race to develop and go on to
> challenge humanity in some form.
Sure,
but the other side of that coin is that that's such a long time with so
little information from Beam that it's virtually impossible to draw any
conclusions about what may or may not have happened other than what
Beam's tells us explicitly in "Keeper." Heck, it could even be that the
fifth Empire which prevails at that point is a multi-species empire.
We just don't know.
> Piper's own civilzation index allows for societies to
> rise and crumble and even rise again, so why couldn't
> aliens do this too? Future Fuzzies, or Lokans? or Thorans?
Here,
it seems to me, is the more interesting--and more accessible--question.
No non-Humans at all are mentioned in ~Space Viking~. We have
Marduk's trade-planet Gimli but no mention of its natives. We have
Zarathustran sunstones but no mention of Fuzzies. We have Uller organic
opals but no mention of Kragans.
And then no non-Humans in "A
Slave is a Slave," in the early decades (or centuries?) of the first
Empire. Yes, the "fifteen plus the Fuzzies" are mentioned in "Ministry"
and we have the Thoran guards but no details of their experience in the
interregnum between Federation and Empire.
Here's just one
question to ponder. Were there any enclaves of non-Humans who had made
it off their native planets by the time the Federation collapsed?
Fuzzies on Terra? Lokians on Baldur? Ullerans on Freya? Thorans on
Odin? Gimlians on Marduk? Kwanns on Ishtar? Svants on Aton?
Imagine, say, a Kragan pirate running into a Space Viking!
Yeek!
David
--
"Why not everybody make friend, have fun, make help, be good?" - Diamond Grego (H. Beam Piper), ~Fuzzy Sapiens~
~
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-03-2017
03:52 UT
|
~
Jon Crocker wrote:
> > (What Genji Gartner was doing in the Trisystem is beyond me!)
>
> Hiding? He was described as a 'scholarly and half-piratical
> space-rover' so perhaps he was lying low for a while after
> a deal went sideways.
I like it!
> But yes, the Roman model discussed earlier would be a lot
> better argument for a large fleet.
The
Romans were trying to keep restive, conquered peoples in check. That's
not a model which fits the Terran Federation. A better example would
be the ancient Phoenician or Greek colonies in the Mediterranean.
Perhaps
the Federation Navy (and Army) isn't as large as we believe (at least
not until the System States War is underway). In truth, whatever the
Navy did to Mimir (and Fenris, apparently, at some point) may have been
accomplished by just a handful of warships--or even just one. Warships
with planetbusters don't need a lot of ships to keep colinial planets
without naval industries of their own in check.
Perhaps the
destroyer ~Simon Bolivar~, which came from Gimli to get Gerrit from
Fenris, is the largest warship at any point on the Terra-Odin milk-run
other than at Terra (and perhaps Odin). Perhaps the battle-cruiser
~Hubert Penrose~ is the only ship of its class in that region.
If
we think about these Federation warships as more like Eighteenth
Century sailing ships than as Twentieth Century diesel-powered ships
what other factors lead us to believe the Terran Federation Navy is a
huge force? Sure, the ~Penrose~ is a huge ship but then so is the ~Cape
Canaveral~.
Just some points to contemplate given that we're
already reaching to find a rationale for what we (perhaps mistakenly)
believe to be a large Federation military.
Remember Ashmodai! Remember Belphegor!
David
--
"You
either went on to the inevitable catastrophe, or you realized, in time,
that nuclear armament and nationalism cannot exist together on the same
planet, and it is easier to banish a habit of thought than a piece of
knowledge." - H. Beam Piper, ~Uller Uprising~
~
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-03-2017
03:23 UT
|
~
Terry "Tanith in Oz" Glouftsis wrote:
> It's unusual that Piper mentioned Gimli a lot in Space
> Viking, but he never actually said anything about the
> planet itself. We hear about the Queen of Marduk, but
> any social structure seems absent on Gimli. Unless I've
> missed something?
I
think Gimli was simply a dramatic device in ~Space Viking~ which meant
something like "marshalling point near Marduk." It served that purpose
well and no details about the planet itself (or its inhabitants) were
required.
Gimli first appears in "Ministry of Disturbance."
There we also get very little detail about the planet. In this case I
think it's serving as a dramatic device meaning "parochial planet a long
way from the capital." We do learn the name of the university there,
presumably located at what is the planet's capital city in the Empire
era.
The interesting thing is that "Ministry" seems to have been
written less than a year after the idea of the first Terro-human colony
worlds being named from Norse mythology was introduced in "Graveyard of
Dreams" (and also seems like Beam trying to make sense of "Uller" and
"Niflheim" which apparently were given to him by Pratt or Clark for his
first Terro-human Future History yarn).
Gimli next appears in
~Four-Day Planet~ and again seems to be serving in this instance simply
as dramatic device meaning "nearby military base." We still get no
details.
So, by the time he was writing ~Viking~ Gimil was
already well-established not as a planet in its own right but rather as
Beam's "go to" dramatic device!
It's not until ~Fuzzy Sapiens~,
written at near the end of Beam's life, and apparently written against
his artistic inclinations (though in pursuit of economic gain), that we
learn that there is a native sophont species on Gimli.
Go, Brannerton!
David
--
"Ideas
for science fiction stories like ideas for anything else, are where you
find them, usually in the most unlikely places. The only reliable
source is a mind which asks itself a question like, 'What would happen
if--?' or, 'Now what would this develop into, in a few centuries?' Or,
'How would so-and-so happen?' Anything at all, can trigger such a
question, in your field if not in mine." - H. Beam Piper, "Double: Bill
Symposium" interview
~
|
Tanith in Oz 08-03-2017
02:48 UT
|
Many excellent point there all.
I like to throw ideas out there
to see if some get traction. But I don't think though that a red scare
is mutually contradictory from a military build up. One only needs to
look at North Korea right now to see that they are exactly doing that,
based largely on historical fears from the Korean War. That Un tries to
claim current US aggression is mere fluff to the greater objective of
finally taking out South Korea.
I can totally see how scares can
drive military build up. But yes you're right that over time such a
build up continuing is hard to defend when no actual threat emerges. So
let's junk that thought then.
What I've always wondered though
is what it means when the Emperor said he was "not concerned" by any
aliens within the Empire by "Ministry of Disturbance". Did that mean
there are no threats? Or could it mean threats were neutralised? One
of the biggest shames is that we've never had anyone tell a story in the
large gaps of time in the Empire era. Though Piper never mentioned it
(and yes we all speculate on it), I could see a conflict with aliens
possibly occurring in the 1400 years after Space Viking. Especially if
that threat was much more localised to one system and kept quiet - A
private little war.
But if we are to accept the Emperor at his
word, then it might be more reasonable to suggest that any such conflict
would have happened after "Ministry of Disturbance". Let's not forget
that between "Ministry of Disturbance" and "The Keeper" there is 26
thousand years. That's a lot of time for nothing to happen. 26
thousand years would allow an alien race to develop and go on to
challenge humanity in some form. I think there's plenty of room for us
to consider that possibility, given the time frames involved. This
would then allow us to consider the plausible idea that information
became lost during the many rise and fall of Empires, before the rise of
the Fifth one.
I think there is room to consider an alien
threat when we take that in account. So yes I now agree that nothing in
the Federation, the Space Viking Era and even the League of Civilized
Worlds period can be reasonably defended. But the Imperial period is a
completely different consideration, especially during 3050 AE to 30000
AE.
To me it seems inplausible that in 26 thousand years
something didn't happen. Piper's own civilzation index allows for
societies to rise and crumble and even rise again, so why couldn't
aliens do this too? Future Fuzzies, or Lokans? or Thorans?
This
far off time, using the very idea of history repeating itself could
cast these aliens in manner similar to the Indians, the Malaysians and
the Chinese throwing off colonial imperialism and striking out on their
own. In this regard the aliens would have learnt from humans, and now
don't need or want them around anymore. Wars for independence I
suppose, possibly leading to a larger war that tore down one of the
Empires? A war or string of wars that wrecked information sites that
over time lead to information being lost?
To me this is feasible.
|
Jon Crocker 08-02-2017
23:29 UT
|
> (What Genji Gartner was doing in the Trisystem is beyond me!)
Hiding?
He was described as a 'scholarly and half-piratical space-rover' so
perhaps he was lying low for a while after a deal went sideways. After
all, trisystem, must have a lot of planets, right? Surely one of them
would have breathable air. And if anyone asked why he hadn't been
around to settle that outstanding debt, why, he was surveying a new
system for the Federation, good sir!
Piracy - the more we discuss
it, the less I think ship-to-ship piracy is feasible. Raiding sites on
a planet would be a way to go, but if there were a lot of Navy ships
around... "Well, of course we haven't had any piracy here on Terra,
look at the size of our fleet! Now, if you are suggesting that we
reduce the size of the fleet, why, that would open up the worlds to any
unscrupulous merchant to sack and pillage all the way out past Gimli!"
I'd
still argue the only way to make humans and freyans interfertile would
be if someone moved people to Freya. But yes, the Roman model discussed
earlier would be a lot better argument for a large fleet.
|
David Sooby 08-02-2017
21:27 UT
|
Terry "Tanith in Oz" Glouftsis wrote:
> What if senior military figures know something that had them
> scared? What if they found evidence of a grave alien threat and they
> are hiding it?
> [...]
> Of course it's speculation but a "red menace" scare... could have
> started the policy and though the scare petered out in time the
> Federation Bureaucracy kept the building going, because... hey
> bureaucracies.
The problem here is you are talking about two very different, and mutually contradictory, scenarios.
A
threat known only to senior military officers is very, very different
than using a "red scare" to motivate the population at large to be
willing to pay taxes to support an otherwise unnecessary military. If
it's a threat known only to a handpicked few, then it can't be used to
motivate voters and taxpayers to spend all that money. Yet there is not
the slightest hint in any Piperverse story of "ancient aliens"; it's
just something we Piper fans came up with as a fanfix for how the human
species appeared on Freya, coupled with an inspiration about "ancient
alien spacefarers" from William Tuning's delightful FUZZY BONES, which
very unfortunately has been rendered incompatible with Piper's canon by
the belated publication of Piper's frankly inferior (to Tuning's story)
FUZZIES AND OTHER PEOPLE. :(
If there really was a publicly
promoted alien boogeyman scare, something like the "red" scare during
the McCarthy era, and if it was the reason *why* the Federation has a
large Navy, then that fact should have been mentioned in one or more
stories from the Federation era. Piper isn't one to omit such historical
parallels from his stories when he is thinking of them!
While I
absolutely support the idea of ancient alien spacefarers as a fanfix to
explain why the human species is found on Freya, at the same time I
think there are far better and much more defensible reasons why the
Federation really does need a large Navy, as I've detailed in my last 2
or 3 posts here.
* * * * *
I'd like to point out that
Piper isn't the only SF writer proposing a large interstellar culture
with a sizable space navy despite not having any alien outsiders as a
threat. In Niven & Pournelle's THE MOTE IN GOD'S EYE and its sequel
THE GRIPPING HAND, the Empire of Man has built and maintains a large
Navy to contend with "Outie" colonies trying to break away from the
Empire's control.
Of course, one could argue that an Empire by
its nature must depend more on using the iron fist of military control
than a Federation does, but if you actually read MOTE, the political
situation seems quite similar to Piper's Federation. Pournelle's Empire
of Man has a parliment, and the various political discussions in the
books make it clear that the aristocracy rules only with the consent of
the people, much like the latter days of the British Empire.
Of
course, that doesn't "prove" that an interstellar culture maintaining a
large navy only to maintain internal order is a realistic idea, but it
does show that Piper isn't the only SF writer to use the idea.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Clear ether!
David "Lensman" Sooby
|
David Sooby 08-02-2017
19:17 UT
|
Terry "Tanith in Oz" Glouftsis wrote:
>...in the declining years of the Federation (lets say within one
> hundred to two hundred years after Little Fuzzy) piracy could have
> begun. Let's then say the Federation (who always had a large
> fleet...) used the fleet to wipe out a large gathering of pirates. This
> would put the encounter within the years leading up to the System
> States War. So perhaps some disaffected governments began
> backing piracy to pin prick the Federation? A testing of the defenses
> if you will before the Hot War.
Again
an interesting idea, but I think your scenario is better described as
privateering rather than piracy. Strong nations don't back piracy
because of political reasons; weak ones back them for economic reasons.
Nations which can support themselves with their own resources or trade
don't turn to piracy to support their economy. Only desperately poor
nations turn to piracy out of desperation; Somalia is of course the
obvious current example.
Contrariwise, you can certainly find
plenty of historical examples for privateering by healthy nations, both
cases of officially sanctioned privateers as well as cases where they
were either officially ignored or, like Sir Francis Drake vs. the
Spanish, officially decried but unofficially supported by the English
crown.
However, it should be noted that historically, ships
engaged in privateering often, after they had been doing that awhile,
tended to blur the line between privateering and piracy. The temptation
to take a rich prize that did not belong to the nation against which the
privateer had permission to attack, often became too much to resist.
And
again we're talking here about raiding other worlds rather than
actually capturing ships, which could only occur when the target ship
was sitting on a planet, or approaching or leaving a planet. As has been
said, an interstellar ship in hyperspace is immune from piracy.
However,
note that interplanetary shipping is not! Perhaps the Poictesme -
Koshchei run and the Niffleheim - Uller run were not the only rich
interplanetary trading routes, and may have been worth the trouble of an
interstellar pirate raiding ships on those runs. In such a case, the
pirate might well establish a forward base on an airless world or moon
in the target system.
Pirates of the asteroids, arrrrr! :)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Clear ether!
David "Lensman" Sooby
|
David Sooby 08-02-2017
19:17 UT
|
Jon Crocker said:
> Or maybe the reason we don't hear about piracy in Golden Age
> Federation was because of the large Navy.
[Please
note that altho I'm starting this post as a reply to Jon, my comments
are intended address the recent discussion here more generally, and for
all readers, not just Jon.]
Interesting that both you and I
posted a comment about interstellar piracy or space vikings only as a
sort of afterthought to our main comments.
Perhaps we all should
give more consideration to the problem of interstellar raiding, or
"space vikings", in the Federation era. Pirates may be a good analogy,
but only if we consider that much of pirates' income came from raiding
coastal towns, which was much easier than capturing a ship on the high
seas, and could be done at any time. In fact, I've heard it said that
most of a typical pirate's plunder came from coastal raids rather than
capturing ships, but I don't know if that's true or not.
At any
rate, consider just how prevalent the problem of piracy has been over
the centuries. In the history of the United States, the U.S. Marine
Corp's first overseas combat mission was against Barbary Pirates.
President Thomas Jefferson, and newspapers supporting him, popularized
the battle cry "Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute",
also against the Barbary Pirates**. And of course, there was the golden
age of piracy in the Caribbean, as well as modern Somali pirates.
However,
as a caveat, I should note that historically, despite the defiant
"...not one cent for tribute" slogan, the U.S. did wind up paying
tribute to the Barbary Pirates for a time, when its warships were
otherwise occupied during the War of 1812. Presumably the Federation's
response to such a threat was to build more ships for its navy.
With
the Barbary Pirates, the line between a Great Power nation using its
navy against other Great Powers vs. using it to protect its shipping
against pirates, becomes blurred. The Barbary States of northern Africa
were not collectively a Great Power, but it certainly was a case where
those nations (or port city-states) actively supported piracy and
raiding by ships based in their ports, much as happened during the
height of the Pirates of the Caribbean era, in pirate-friendly ports
such as Tortuga.
It's easy to see a similar situation arising
during the Federation era, with a distant colony world turning to
supporting and even becoming dependent on interstellar raiding for its
income, such as happened with the Sword Worlds during he Space Viking
era. In fact, wouldn't it be inevitable that this would happen if there
was not a strong Federation navy to stop it?
So that's another
reason the Federation needs more than just a token few ships in its
Navy. I don't find defensible the idea that the Federation shouldn't
need many more ships than would be required to put down a rebellion on
just a single world. The Federation needs to back up its authority with
the threat of Naval action *everywhere* there is a human colony, not
just here and there.
And the fact that a major rebellion did
eventually occur, the System States War, which did signal the collapse
of the Federation, underscores just how much the Federation did need a
strong Navy.
* * * * *
Altho it's an intriguing idea that
the Federation might have built a large navy because it was frightened
by the boogeyman of the mysterious ancient aliens who apparently
transported humans to Freya, tens or hundreds of thousands of years
before Terra developed interstellar travel, I don't think it's a
defensible one. Countries don't support large military forces against
some imaginary threat (North Korea might be an exception to that rule);
in fact, nations tend to let their military languish rather quickly and
to a shocking degree following a major war. Just look what happened to
American forces during the Korean War, caught unprepared and displaying a
shocking degree of incompetence not very long after WW II.
**The
"Millions for defense..." quote actually originated during the earlier
XYZ affair, but Jefferson adopted it for a later cause.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Clear ether!
David "Lensman" Sooby
|
David Sooby 08-02-2017
18:16 UT
|
Terry "Tanith in Oz" Glouftsis wrote:
>I was just thinking about everyone's comments about
>the size of the Federation Navy.
>
> ...Economics. The best way to keep control is to keep people happy.
> And how do you do that? You provide jobs. It does occur to me that
> to keep planets in line you have them building ships, staffing them
> and providing the support infrastructure that help keep the ships
> running.
>
>Therefore the size of the fleet could also have a lot to do with Terran >Federation economic policy.
An
interesting suggestion, but looking at historical examples, nations
which build large armies just to keep the otherwise unemployed occupied,
nations such as Third Reich Germany and, currently, North Korea, become
military dicatatorships, which the Federation quite clearly is not.
I have an alternative scenario:
Consider
the situation in LITTLE FUZZY: It's a distant colony world, far from
Terra, but all the legal and political discussion in the story make it
quite clear that the Federation and its laws are firmly in control of
the planet. And in fact, the denouement of the story *requires* the Navy
to hold ultimate power and authority on Zarathustra.
Without a
large Navy, this wouldn't happen. It takes too long for fleets of Navy
ships to travel from one system to another, and also too long for
messages (such as news of defiance or outright rebellion against the
Federation's authority) to travel that distance, since they have to be
carried by ships. If Terra had only a single, or only a few, sizable
fleets, then it would wind up playing Whac-a-Mole** with outlying
planets, many or most of which would simply ignore Federation control
until a Navy fleet showing up there, then toe the line only until the
fleet inevitably left after receiving news of a more recent defiance or
rebellion in another system.
Without a large Navy, frontier
worlds would in reality have a large amount of independence. Some might
well only give lip service to following the laws and regulations of the
Federation, and in practice mostly ignore them. And if that happened
then the Federation would HAVE TO build and maintain a large Navy.
But
I'd say, rather than "if" that happened, we should say WHEN that
happened. This seems inevitable to me; there are plenty of historical
examples during Europe's colonial era. If Great Britain had not had
garrison forces in America, wouldn't the American colonies have become
functionally independent much sooner than the American Revolution?
So,
really, I don't think there's much of a conundrum here. As the
Federation expanded, it was starkly faced with two choices: Either build
a large navy so that it could have forces strong enough to control
*every* inhabited planet, or else resign itself to the reality that it
could control only the core worlds with outer worlds being functionally
independent.
The Federation clearly chose the former. If it had
chosen the latter, then the Space Viking era would have started much,
much earlier.
**That's how it's spelled on the actual game, not "Wac-a-Mole" nor "Whack-a-Mole".
~~~~~~~~
Clear ether!
David "Lensman" Sooby
|
Tanith in Oz 08-02-2017
06:23 UT
|
Ah yes that's right. Terra is 500 light years away, a 6 month journey
from Zarathustra. Fenris is 650 light years to the galactic southwest
of Terra. And it takes 450-500 hours (about 3 weeks) to travel from
Marduk to Gimli in Space Viking.
If we assume then that the
Terra-Odin Milk Run does zigzag about then this discrepancy of distance
makes sense. That way though Gimli is closer to Terra than Fenris the
milk run would have to zigzag.
So using the 500 light years mark
for Zarathustra, taking 6 months - we could estimate 1 month roughly
equals 83 light years. If we also assume that in Federation era the
distance from Gimli to Marduk is roughly a month (travel time being 1/3
slower than Space Viking) then we could would suggest Gimli is about
420-440 light years from Earth. So I don't think it's absurd then to
suggest Gimli would be a 5-5.5 month journey from Terra.
(I'm
going to ignore the travel time to in system jump points for now as I do
think that might be standard in the Terran system. This would be
factored in to the Zarathustra journey, so even if that might reduce he
distance of Gimli to Terra to say 400 light years I don't think it would
really affect the calculation I've come up for the travel time to Gimli
- Or does someone think otherwise?)
Anyway this math works for me. 5 months to Gimli.
It's
unusual that Piper mentioned Gimli a lot in Space Viking, but he never
actually said anything about the planet itself. We hear about the Queen
of Marduk, but any social structure seems absent on Gimli. Unless I've
missed something?
Thanks David for your observations.
It's appreciated
Terry
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-02-2017
04:47 UT
|
~
Terry "Tanith in Oz" Glouftsis wrote:
> How far is Gimli from Terra? Is there any references
> to that?
I
think we learn how far Fenris is from Terra in ~Four-Day Planet~. Then
we know that Gimli is the next planet out on the Terra-Odin milk-run.
That won't tell us exactly, even if we knew the specific distance
between Gimli and Fenris because it seems pretty clear that those
"milk-runs" seldom ran in a straight line. . . .
Besides Gimli
being "near" Fenris we also know from ~Fuzzy Sapiens~ that it is the
closest planet to Zarathustra. I believe we know the distance from
Terra to Zarathustra.
Put that all together and you should be able to sort out a general sense of the distance between Terra and Gimli.
> So attached to that then would be how long would it
> take to get there
That depends upon which era you're talking about. In general, hypership speeds increase with time. . . .
> and how close is it to Marduk?
I
think we learn the distance between Gimli and Marduk in ~Space Viking~
from the time it takes Trask's fleet to travel from Gimli to Abaddon in
Marduk's inner system.
> Is it closer to Terra or further out from Marduk?
Given
that Gimli was named from Norse mythology and Marduk was named from
Babylonian mythology, it's likely Gimli was discovered / settled before
Marduk was, which suggests it's probably closer to Terra than Marduk is
(though it may still be closer to Marduk than it is to Terra).
> I don't think Gimli has any moons but has anyone
> found any reference to what the star system is like?
I'm
not aware of any details about Gimli itself or its system. Heck, it
could _be_ a moon (of a larger planet). It could be a close-in planet
of a red-dwarf star. It could be a far-out planet of a blue-white
giant. It could be in a middling orbit around a red giant.
On
the other hand, we can make some broad, educated guesses about Gimli's
star system from the way Federation exploration unfolded generally. We
know Federation explorers had to choose their exploration targets from
interstellar distances--and there's no indication they could detect
planets (with any degree of detail, at least) at those distances. This
suggests they tended to explore star systems with a star rather similar
to Sol. (What Genji Gartner was doing in the Trisystem is beyond me!)
Thus, Gimli _probably_ orbits a single, yellow-orange star like Sol.
Given that it has a native sophont species it would have to be in the
"Goldilocks zone" of that star, which means something like the second to
fourth orbits. (That would still allow it to be a moon of a small gas
giant.)
Ad astra,
David
--
"Do you know which books
to study, and which ones not to bother with? Or which ones to read
first, so that what you read in the others will be comprehensible to
you? That's what they'll give you [at university]. The tools, which
you don't have now, for educating yourself." - Bish Ware (H. Beam
Piper), ~Four-Day Planet~
~
|
pennausamike 08-01-2017
15:17 UT
|
~
Mike "pennausamike" McGuirk wrote:
> So Piper's space pirates/ space vikings are mostly port raiders.
What
I want to know is, when the Federation collapses, does Volund's
Sturmadler Design and Development become a pirate arms supplier or a
pirate target? ;)
Ahoy!
David
Following Piper's
model, by then, some of the owner's kids will have decided they should
live as well in their twenties as "grandad" did in his sixties, and the
partner union will have decided they aren't getting their fair share;
and both sides will be more interested in "projects" and "programs" than
making and selling a product...and Volund Arms will have run itself out
of business.
|
Tanith in Oz 08-01-2017
13:03 UT
|
Oh I have a question or two, or three, or... well a few then for the group.
How
far is Gimli from Terra? Is there any references to that? So attached
to that then would be how long would it take to get there and how close
is it to Marduk? Is it closer to Terra or further out from Marduk? I
don't think Gimli has any moons but has anyone found any reference to
what the star system is like?
Any pointers would be helpful.
Thanks all....
Terry
|
Tanith in Oz 08-01-2017
06:26 UT
|
Ah yes all of those are salient points. It's probably why the concept
of piracy has been a difficult one to tackle in the Terro-Human
universe. It's true using our own history since Piper does color the
debate somewhat. I still think there's a story there, but what that
would be depends on the time period too I guess. But I'm willing to
tilt my head to those who have a better grasp of military matters than I
would, being a novice as I am in that arena.
But in terms of the
large Navy I still like the economic stabilization idea. Yes it would
seem logical to invest more on local infrastructure but that doesn't
sell the ideology of the Federation as well. I think the large Navy is a
show of force, but is also a type of Romanization. It reminds people
that the Federation is in charge and that they are the cops on the beat
so do as the Romans do. But you're right it's the rationale for the
size of the Navy that is the rub.
Without a threat it doesn't
make as much sense to keep building it. Though I think it could be an
extension of economics I guess we have to consider radical
possibilities. What if senior military figures know something that had
them scared? What if they found evidence of a grave alien threat and
they are hiding it? But what if it was an ancient threat? Something
that scares them but isn't imminent, but has profound and complex
implications. This could go in a number of directions, but it's
possible something about the Freyans became known? Or maybe something
found on Mars?
Of course it's speculation but a "red menace"
scare (ah the pun!) could have started the policy and though the scare
petered out in time the Federation Bureaucracy kept the building going,
because... hey bureaucracies.
I'm just shooting from the hip
here but that could be a part of it, but I agree it's still a massive
thing to explain adequately.
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-01-2017
04:58 UT
|
~
Mike "pennausamike" McGuirk wrote:
> So Piper's space pirates/ space vikings are mostly port raiders.
What
I want to know is, when the Federation collapses, does Volund's
Sturmadler Design and Development become a pirate arms supplier or a
pirate target? ;)
Ahoy!
David
--
"Let's see yours. Draw--soul! Inspection--soul!" - Foxx Travis (H. Beam Piper), "Oomphel in the Sky"
~
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-01-2017
03:28 UT
|
~
Terry "Tanith in Oz" Glouftsis wrote:
> The same would apply to the Federation with the pirates cast
> as the Barbarians (like Attila or Hannibal or even Vortigern).
> I would envision numerous pirate wars, and other uprisings
> in and around the System States War eventually bleeding the
> Federation of blood and treasure.
Keeping
in mind that one person's "privateer" is pretty much another person's
"pirate," I suspect this is what the closing years of the Federation
looked like. There will be pirates in a "traditional" sense, mercenary
freebooters out for their own enrichment, and there will be "pirates"
who are actually irregular forces from breakaway planets preying upon
their less powerful neighbors.
> Planets would secede and the collapse would come
> culminating in Terra being sacked.
You
mean "when the last Federation President, Elisabet Stauber, was deposed
by Admiral Otto Ward, Tyrant of Uller"? (A little something I wrote
introducing an essay I've been working on for years now called "A
History of the Terran Federation.")
Cheers,
David
--
"You
had a wonderful civilization here. . . . You could have made almost
anything of it. But it's too late now. You've torn down the gates; the
barbarians are in." - Lucas Trask (H. Beam Piper), ~Space Viking~
~
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-01-2017
03:03 UT
|
~
Jon Crocker wrote:
> Of course, there's also that throwaway line about how many
> sapient races are in the Empire - plus the Fuzzies, which were
> almost ready to call sapient under the talk-and-build-a-fire
> rule. [I always hated that line.] So obviously the Empire had
> lost some information.
I
think you've found it here. Ideas about "ancient starfarers" for which
there was scarce physical evidence, and perhaps which was being
systematically suppressed by those "in the know," is very much the sort
of information which might not survive the collapse of Federation
civilization.
The Emperor speaks!
David
P.S. Interesting to see that "talk-and-build fire" comment in "Ministry," published four years _before_ ~Little Fuzzy~.
--
"We
talk glibly about ten to the hundredth power, but emotionally we still
count, 'One, Two, Three, Many.'" - Otto Harkaman (H. Beam Piper), ~Space
Viking~
~
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 08-01-2017
02:41 UT
|
~
Terry "Tanith in Oz" Glouftsis wrote:
> It does occur to me that to keep planets in line you have them
> building ships, staffing them and providing the support
> infrastructure that help keep the ships running.
Perhaps,
but wouldn't it make more sense to spend on local infrastructure?
Folks on Odin or Baldur or Freya or any other colony planet would get
more out of every tax dollar spent on schools, hospitals, power
generation, transportation infrastructure and water and wastewater
facilities than on warships that waste their time traveling between
Federation planets. It would also mean more "local happiness" for every
tax dollar raised on Terra--or collected from interstellar
commerce--which would make the effort more popular (or at least less
unpopular) back on Terra too.
The "economic argument" works for
military spending in our world because it's easy for folks to see where
and when that military force might be needed. That's a lot more
difficult for folks living in a Terran Federation that has no
adversaries. . . .
Still, we know the Federation military exists so there must be some rationale.
> The rise of worlds who grow in power and in rivalry to the
> Federation, and the ascendancy of regimes on others that
> passionately dislike the Federation. Mix them together and
> things like the System States War happen.
The
discussion between Conn Maxwell and his father in "Graveyard of Dreams"
makes it pretty clear that what sparks the System States rebellion is
the refusal of the Terran "metropole" to share equitably the benefits of
interstellar commerce with the planets of the "periphery." In other
words, Beam's model here was pretty standard imperial-colonial conflict,
the sort of thing that led the American Thirteen Colonies to throw off
their British colonial masters.
Nor is there any suggestion in
Beam's work that any colonial planets grew to rival Terra. In the end
we know from Klem Zareff's commentary that the Alliance was outclassed
by the Federation throughout the war--there's that out-sized military
again--and only hoped to "escape" from Federation rule. The Alliance
was never going to _defeat_ the Federation.
Remember Ashmodai! Remember Belphegor!
David
--
"You
either went on to the inevitable catastrophe, or you realized, in time,
that nuclear armament and nationalism cannot exist together on the same
planet, and it is easier to banish a habit of thought than a piece of
knowledge." - H. Beam Piper, ~Uller Uprising~
~
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