Jon Crocker  05-26-2018
17:36 UT
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For some reason, that makes me think of some of the old Bob Newhart telephone-call comedy bits.
"He-
Hello, sir? Yes, sir, this is Manager Slarth, down at the Central Zoo?
You know how you'd asked us to supply a wolf for a fourth level
outtime operation, one canis lupis, from the fourth level? Turns out,
funny story, one of the new hires made a slight mistake, and sent along a
canis khiftus. Ye- Yes sir, that's one of the not-quite wolves left
over at the second-level Khiftan wars. No sir, we're not sure which
Khiftan war it was. And we're pretty sure they don't know any more
either. But back to the wolf, sir, it is pretty close, and unless you
really know what you're looking at, it's just a big shaggy wolf, so we
don't think- what do you mean, they've found out?"
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David "PiperFan" Johnson 05-26-2018
05:29 UT
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~
Verkan Vall Strikes Again
Montana authorities scratching their heads over discovery of wolflike creature
https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2018/05...flike-creature.html
Nice touch too, with the conspiracy theories.
Down Styphon!
David
--
"Unsolved
mysteries are just as good as explanations, as long as they're
mysterious within a normal framework." - Verkan Vall, ~Lord Kalvan of
Otherwhen~
~
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Jon Crocker 05-20-2018
23:31 UT
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I had a bit of a re-read of Lord Kalvan. On page 2, during Chief Karf's setting up of the book:
"It
all had to be policed. Some Paratimers were less than scrupulous in
dealing with outtime races - he'd have retired ten years ago except for
the discovery of a huge paratemporal slave-trade, only recently
smashed."
So it looks like Vall had wrapped everything up, and everyone had been merged back into the main force.
Sadly,
the lack of Mars expedition leads me to conclude that 'our home time
line' is not in Piper Future History. The flip side of that is, I'm not
minding the lack of 3rd or 4th world wars! And since there's no more
Soviet Union to launch a trans-polar invasion of Ottawa and get Allan
Hartley blasted at Buffalo, I think we're clear on that one.
When I google Martha Dane, I do get a lot of results. No, I'm not going to email them and ask if they've been to Mars.
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jimmyjoejangles 05-20-2018
19:54 UT
|
The problem with Kalvan is that it makes no mention of the second
Paratime police that Verkan was put in charge of at the end of Time
Crime. Barring that; based on the descriptions of Tortha Karf, more
than a few years pass between A Police Operation and Time Crime. I think
Kalvan happened before Time Crime so I thiought more like the sixties
or even later.
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David "PiperFan" Johnson 05-20-2018
18:35 UT
|
~
James "jimmyjoejangles" Romanski wrote:
> I don't see how that direct mention of space flight can be
> construed as them having Not discovered the THFH.
Well,
Verkan is using that Second Level occurrence of hyperdrive as a sort of
example of the "most advanced" civilization they've encountered in
Paratime at that point in linear-time. "Temple Trouble" takes place
sometime before ~Lord Kalvan~ so we're talking about the 1950s on Calvin
Morrison's original timeline (if one assume his is the same as the
Terro-human Future History--tough to call it "our timeline" at this
point).
So, the Terro-human Future History doesn't yet exist at
the time of "Temple Trouble." Ed Chalmers hasn't yet "pre-perceived"
the Thirty Days' War and there's not yet been a ~Kilroy~ nor a U.S.
Lunar Base to provoke a crisis with the Eastern Axis. Martha Dane
likely hasn't even been born yet.
(Don't get me wrong here. I
don't believe the Terro-human Future History is a Paratime timeline at
all. I'm convinced they're entirely separate settings. I was just
laying out--two decades ago, now--what needs to be considered for one to
make that case; the key point here being that everything we see in the
Terro-human Future History yarns occurs in the linear-time _future_ of
the Paratime yarns.)
Cheers,
David
--
"There had
been the time he'd mentioned the secession of Canada from the British
Commonwealth. . . ." - Edward Chalmers (H. Beam Piper), "The Edge of the
Knife"
~
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jimmyjoejangles 05-20-2018
18:15 UT
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I don't see how that direct mention of space flight can be construed as them having Not discovered the THFH.
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David "PiperFan" Johnson 05-20-2018
04:08 UT
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~
More from the Archives: The Ol' "Is the Terro-human Future History a Paratime timeline"?
Here's a message (from your truly) from the old PIPER-L mailing list back in November 1997 (just two years old at that point):
-----
Date: Wed, 12 Nov 1997 13:12:49 -0500
From: David Johnson
Subject: Paratime and TFH
This is Verkan Vall from "Temple Trouble":
"We
even know of one Second Level civilization which is approaching the
discovery of an intstellar hyperspatial drive, something we've never
even come close to."
This suggests that if the Terro-Human Future
History universe *is* a part of the Paratime universe that it's a
timeline that the First Level Paratimers have not come across.
Of
course, TFH could be the *future* of Calvin Morrison's and Ed
Chalmers's Fourth Level timeline, with Verkan's great-great-great-great-
great-great grandson(daughter?) running Paratime Police operations in
the Sword Worlds. :)
David Johnson
-----
The original message is available here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20060619003834...per-l&T=0&F=P&P=307
Here's
your chance to weigh in again. Could it be that Merlin doesn't show up
in ~Space Viking~ or any Empire era yarns because future Paratimers
have destroyed (or stolen) it?
And let's not even _start_ with what future Paratimers might have to do about those "micropositos" in "Ministry of Disturbance"!
Cheers,
David
--
"Lord Kalvan is a Martian." - Jackson Russell, H. Beam Piper Mailing List and Discussion Forum, July 6, 2015
~
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 05-14-2018
00:31 UT
|
~
From the Archives: John F. Carr - Wrong Timeline?
Here's a little taste of what was happening on the old PIPER-L mailing list back in May 2001:
-----
Subject: Hey, Are They Telling Me I'm On The Wrong Time-Line?
From: John Carr
Date: Sat, 12 May 2001 13:53:32 -0700
SOMETIMES THEY CALL ME JOHN FORD, SOMETIMES THEY CALL ME JOHN F. LAST, AND
SOMETIMES THEY EVEN CALL ME JOHN F. CARR!
Let me preface this post with a little backstory. On April 14, 1998 I had
open-heart surgery, for a 'routine' valve replacement. It wasn't
un-expected: I was born with a congenital heart defect, a damaged heart
valve. Through luck, determination not to have my chest ripped apart, and a
healthy life style, I managed to delay this operation for about 34 years
beyond my original cardiologist's prediction in 1954 of open-heart surgery
in early 60s! To make a long story short, the operation was a success and
when I came out of anesthesia and was walked (they don't coddle heart
patients these days!) into the post-op room, I was greeted by Dr. Yan, head
of my 4-surgeon surgical team. His first words were: "You very lucky. We
found aortic aneurysm: you had between 2 seconds and 2 weeks to live. If
your aneurysm would have blown out, we could not have saved you on the
table. Very lucky man."
Well, I don't need to belabor the point to tell you that I've felt VERY
lucky ever since -- my wife calls me her "Walking Miracle." The facts that
I hadn't seen a cardiologist (or any other doctor) for 16 years before going
to Dr. Ryman, that I hadn't had health insurance at any time in the previous
33 years (since I left my parent's home!), and that the job I had with Coast
Federal Bank only lasted 4 months beyond my health insurance qualification
period of 90 days (Coast was merged in March '98 with Home Saving/then
WAMA -- as Washington Mutual Bank is know unaffectionately here on the
Westcoast by anyone who's had to deal with the bastards!) gives you an idea
of just how many odds I beat. If I did this well on a roulette table in
Vegas I'd own the whole town before I left!
On top of this, I felt in wonderful shape -- no symptoms of the failing
heart I was told by my doctors I would soon have to deal with in a year or
two, leading to congestive heart failure. The fact that is I'm one stubborn
S.O.B. when it comes to not getting myself filleted, well, you get the
picture. If Dr. Ryman wasn't equally pig-headed, I'd probably not be here!
It was when she told me "get this operation now, or you'll need a transplant
in a year-and-a-half, that convinced me to 'face reality,' so to speak.
I talked, bullied my way out of the hospital in 4 days -- my wife still
calls this my 'Exorcist' period! -- and healed at home in the comfort of my
own bed. Not having taken drugs all my life -- I sometimes think I was the
only straight rock musician in the 1960s, and certainly the only one who
remembers it all! Well, I had a very bad reaction to the pain medication,
which I didn't even need thanks to a very high pain threshold -- and got a
bit snippy in the hospital, as my wife tells it. (Actually, she puts it a
little coarser, but we won't go into that!) Victoria finally convinced the
nurses I didn't need the pain pills and they gladly let me leave early!
The doctors don't like you to do much for the first 3 months after
open-heart surgery (especially driving cars, since upon impact with the
steering wheel bad things happen and chest cavities have been know to
unexpectedly and unhappily open up -- something they don't talk about! My
wife asks a lot of questions so I got in on this little bit of information,
I'd rather not have known.) so I had a LOT of time to think over my close
call with the grim reaper and life in general.
Needless to say, my overall mood was very good. However, after 25 years of
studying Beam Piper and writing several novels in Paratime, it couldn't help
but think about Beam's own death and the Piper curse, as some people call
it -- for example, my friend Bill Tuning died less than a year after the
publication of "Fuzzy Bones." My question was: how did I escape, or did I?
Are there time-lines where John F. Carr died sometime in April 1998...?
This is why, to this day, I celebrate my Re-Birthday on May 1, which is
exactly 2 weeks from my surgery and my longest possible lifespan after April
14, 1998. Don't worry, I don't really dwell on it: it's just a day for my
wife and I to appreciate the fact that I'm in actuality a walking poster
child for Miracles of the Week! (Maybe I ought to do a television
treatment -- nah, just kidding!) No presents: we just go out for a nice
dinner and enjoy our time together. My natal birthday is Christmas so it's
not much of a birthday, even if my initials are JC... Let's not even go
there.
No religious conversions, no new truth 'to bring back from the void' -- just
a better appreciation for life and how short it can be, for any of us.
Now, what brought all this on -- besides my Re-Birthday about a week and a
half ago -- is the latest issue of 'Science Fiction Chronicle' where they
review "Kalvan Kingmaker" in Don D'Ammassa's Critical Mass: Book Reviews,
P-36. The good news is KK is the lead review and it's a positive review.
The bad news is they changed my name to John Ford about halfway through the
review -- I won't even bother to dwell on the fact that they dropped the
last half of the Pequod address and included my e-mail address instead of
the website! I know Don and I suspect it was the meddling that happens to
good magazines when you try to shorten a piece so that it fits on the page
and don't always pay attention to what gets cut.
I probably wouldn't have paid the name change much mind had Ace not also
changed my name, on the Copyright page of "The Complete Paratime," from John
F. Carr to John F. Last -- see what I mean, it's like a message.
Maybe Verkan's behind all this and letting me know that Beam wasn't just
writing fiction! John Ford, the director, has been dead for years and John
F. Last -- well that's obvious.
So maybe this is the Fourth Level, Europo-American, John Carr Time-Line and
on all the other Europo-American time-lines fate and/or the Paratime Police
caught up with me and I'm moldering in a box six feet underground --
Now hear this Verkan, wherever you are, I'm onto you and I'm not taking the
hint -- I'm going to continue writing Paratime yarns. Your agents
dispatched Beam, Bill and Richard Meredith -- I just want you to know that
I'm not going quietly into the night. I know you're behind the Ace Piper
re-issue ban and all the saucer sightings in the US. I don't know about the
cattle mutilations, but we're still investigating... This is one
time-line -- maybe the root Europo-American time-line, where you're not
going to get away with it!
Don't take this too seriously, this is just good fun. I woke up this
morning and this entire post blossomed in my mind. However, sometimes late
at night, after writing all evening, like last night -- when scenes and
visions of Aryan-Transpacific and First Level drop into my mind like I'm
patched into a 'broadcast' from another world, I sometimes just wonder if
maybe Beam wasn't onto something...
John F. Carr
Paratime Chronicler
-----
The original message is available here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20080310041446...r-l&T=0&F=&S=&P=663
I'm
sure I'm not the only Piper fan who's happy that John is still with
us--steadily turning out new material despite Verkan Vall's best
efforts--twenty years after that life-altering surgery he was musing
about back in 2001.
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~
~
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 05-01-2018
14:41 UT
|
~
Piper Interview at eBay!
There is a copy of the "Double: Bill Symposium" on offer at eBay:
https://www.ebay.ca/itm/Double-Bill-Sympos...Asimov/302722914751
This item contains responses from many science-fiction authors, including Piper, to a list of questions about their work.
Good luck!
David (not the seller)
--
"I
have heard it argued that fandom tends to make a sort of cult of
science fiction, restricted to a narrow circle of the initiated. This I
seriously question." - H. Beam Piper, "Double: Bill Symposium"
interview
~
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