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H. Beam Piper Mailing List and Discussion Forum
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Welcome to the Zarthani.net H. Beam Piper mailing list and discussion forum. Initiated in October 2008 (after the demise of the original PIPER-L mailing list), this tool for shared communication among Piper fans provides an e-mail list and a discussion forum with on-line archives.
 
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^     All messages    << 2100-2115  2098-2099 of 2246  2082-2097 >>
2099
David "PiperFan" JohnsonPerson was signed in when posted
06-01-2020
15:03 UT
 ~
Mike writes:

> From a story telling viewpoint, maybe it would have
> made more sense for Chalmers to be buried away in a
> civilian contractor office in a basement somewhere,
> serving as a flesh-and-blood Merlin to the founders of
> the 1st Federation.

This, of course, is the most interesting question we're left with in "Edge": did Chalmers survive and, if so, was early Terran civilization able to take advantage of his "future memories."

My sense is that, at least the second part, never happened. The way the future history unfolded: U.S.-led Terran Federation, a subsequent Fourth World War, a ~second~ Federation formed--after the Northern Hemisphere is destroyed, is all within a reasonable time frame of any Chalmers-informed planners and yet events happened in a way that was disastrous for everyone in the Northern Hemisphere.

Unless Chalmers survived the Thirty Days' War and then somehow managed to make his way to Australia, South Africa or Uruguay (or, perhaps, U.S.-held Antarctica), I'm guessing he never left Northern State Mental Hospital.

Cheers,

David
--
"I was trying to show the results of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War, and the partition of the Middle East into a loose collection of Arab states, and the passing of British and other European spheres of influence following the Second." - Edward Chalmers (H. Beam Piper), "The Edge of the Knife"
~
2098
David "PiperFan" JohnsonPerson was signed in when posted
06-01-2020
14:48 UT
 ~
Dave Eden wrote:

> Thanks to the recipe John Carr shares in his book, I
> have a tradition of having a katinka on Saturday in
> honour of Beam.

Sounds like a tradition Beam would have approved of. ;)

Cheers,

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
~
^     All messages    << 2100-2115  2098-2099 of 2246  2082-2097 >>

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