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David Sooby
04-26-2016
20:32 UT
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"Did Piper's Foxx Travis inspire Norton's Travis Fox?"
Coincidences
do happen. I think that unless Andre Norton and Piper were fairly close
friends, then the chances that Norton would have read Piper's story
before publication is extremely unlikely. Just because they were both SF
writers of the era doesn't mean they directly communicated.
Occam's Razor says that we should assume this is a coincidence, unless there is some evidence to the contrary.
* * *
"Mr
Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: 'Once is happenstance. Twice is
coincidence. The third time it's enemy action'." -- Auric Goldfinger,
GOLDFINGER by Ian Fleming
~~~~~~~~~~~
David Sooby
aka Lensman
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David "PiperFan" Johnson  04-26-2016
20:04 UT
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~
Did Piper's Foxx Travis inspire Norton's Travis Fox?
Foxx
Travis, the Terran Federation military commander during the System
States War, first appears in Piper's "Graveyard of Dreams," the short
story which was subsequently expanded into the novel ~Junkyard Planet~.
"Graveyard" was first published in ~Galaxy~ in early 1958 (Piper made
the sale in 1957).
Piper's ~Lone Star Planet~, co-authored with
McGuire, first appeared in ~Fantastic Universe~ in early 1957 (Piper and
McGuire made the sale at the end of 1956). ~Lone Star Planet~ was
subsequently reissued in 1958 (as ~A Planet for Texans~) as half of an
"Ace double" with Andre Norton's ~Star Born~.
In 1958 Norton also
published the second novel in her "Time Traders" series, ~Galactic
Derelict~. The protagonist of this novel is named Travis Fox. Fox
subsequently appears in the third "Time Traders" novel, ~The Defiant
Agents~.
Is it possible that Norton's character, Travis Fox, was
inspired by Beam's Foxx Travis? The timing seems almost too close.
Norton must have been writing ~Derelict~ before ~Star Born~ was joined
with ~A Planet for Texans~ so she likely would have had to have read
"Graveyard" sometime before the "Ace double" appeared.
Perhaps
the two names are simply a coincidence. Or perhaps both were inspired
by some other source (fictional or non-fictional). Perhaps either Piper
or Norton had seen an early draft of the other's yarn before either
were published. I have no idea but it's difficult to take the
"coincidence" explanation too seriously.
What do you think?
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
~
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Jack Russell
04-19-2016
15:30 UT
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Level
Sector
Sub-sector
Belt
Thread
Maybe?
Jack
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David "PiperFan" Johnson 04-19-2016
14:51 UT
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Re: /m1309
Thanks, John.
I
agree that "belt-group" is clunky. I was trying to follow the "basic
sector-group" language that Beam uses a couple of times (in "Temple
Trouble" and in "Time Crime") but any of your suggestions work for me.
It
might even be that more than one "extra category" is needed: there's a
lot of history to "diverge" from between the time when Columbus led a
Spanish expedition to the Americas and when Pennsylvania trooper Calvin
Morrison gets shanghaied by a paratemporal conveyor! Does it really
make sense for a timeline where the War of the Spanish Succession didn't
occur and another where the Confederacy didn't lose the American Civil
War to simply be lumped together as parts of the Hispano-Columbian
Subsector?
Down Styphon!
David
--
"As to Heisenberg
compensators . . . I'd rather rely on reversing the polarity of the
neutron flow." - Tom Rogers, H. Beam Piper Mailing List and Discussion
Forum, July 15, 2015
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Otherwhen@aol.com
04-18-2016
19:58 UT
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Hi David,
Interesting post....
In my writing
about Paratime, I've resorted to using belt a lot, since there is no
Piper structural division between subsector and belt....
And you're
right: there should be.The best ones I could come up with are zone,
region, area and section. Right now I'm leaning toward zone.
Belt-group is a little to clunky, to me.
Anyone else?
John Carr
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David "PiperFan" Johnson 04-12-2016
03:39 UT
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~
The Concept of a Paratime Belt-Group?
There seems to be a
discrepancy in the chronography of Paratime. A Paratime sub-sector, like
the Hispano-Columbian Subsector of the Fourth Level Europo-American
Sector, has a divarication point that can be several centuries in the
past, as was the discovery of the Minor Land Mass (America) by
Christopher Columbus, a Fourth Level nautical explorer-conqueror
commissioned by Spain, a nation on the North-West Continent (Europe) of
the Major Land Mass (Afro-Eurasia). On the other hand, a Paratime belt
typically has a divarication point in the recent past, usually measured
in years rather than in centuries.
What's missing is some level of structural identification somewhere in between.
Perhaps
the "belt-group." Not a Paratime belt of recent divarication, but a
collection of earlier divarications--belts perhaps originally, but ones
closely-enough related to be considered a cohesive group--that
nevertheless don't rise to a sufficient degree of divarication to
constitute a new sub-sector.
Down Styphon!
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"
~
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David "PiperFan" Johnson 04-01-2016
02:56 UT
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~
Tim T wrote:
> I thought I had missed a Piper book!
I
noticed that too. Probably just a simply goof. At least he knew which
Future History work was the first one--and that ~Uprising~ was first
published in Pratt's ~The Petrified Planet~.
Znidd Suddabit!
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~
~
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David "PiperFan" Johnson 04-01-2016
02:51 UT
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~
Jonathan Crocker wrote:
> I don't know what the reviewer meant about it being hard to keep track of the
> supporting characters in Cosmic Computer, though. It's not like it was a cast
> of thousands!
Not
thousands but there were plenty. All the townies that Conn went to
Litchfield Academy with. All the townsmen in Fawn's gang. The business
people in Storisende. Conn's fellow hypership-hunters of Koschei.
> I still remember the first time I opened the box for MegaTraveller, and I opened
> up the map, and heeyyyyy, that's the Sword Worlds down there!
:)
For
me it was the original ~Supplement 3: The Spinward Marches~. And then
of course there were those ~Broadsword~ class mercenary
cruisers--smaller versions of ~Nemesis~ and ~Corisande II~--in ~Journal
of the Travellers' Aid Society~ No. 8.
Great stuff!
David
--
"Good things in the long run are often tough while they're happening." - Otto Harkaman (H. Beam Piper), ~Space Viking~
~
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