The Short Fiction of H. Beam Piper

This gathering brings together the shorter work of a writer who built entire future histories one story at a time. Across these tales Piper moves from the Paratime patrol policing parallel worlds to the far reaches of his Terro-Human Future History, where humanity spreads across the stars and keeps repeating the patterns of its past. Standouts include ‘Omnilingual,’ about the first attempt to translate a dead Martian language, and ‘He Walked Around the Horses,’ a sly puzzle spun from a real historical disappearance. Piper wrote with a soldier’s eye for tactics and a historian’s sense of cause and effect, and the range on display here shows why his ideas outlasted him. Free PDF and EPUB editions are available here.