Jon Crocker  03-21-2020
22:10 UT
|
That is an interesting comparison - I'd just thought that the ruins on
the Whelan picture were suggested by the title, a Space Viking raid
wouldn't seem to leave nicely landscaped gardens in their wake.
If the central figure in the Whelan picture is Lucas Trask, he's been working out, catching rays.
I think I'll be pulling my copy off the shelf for a read this week!
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jimmyjoejangles 03-21-2020
04:08 UT
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https://www.ebay.com/itm/1964-fanzine-SCIE...:g:rTEAAOSwXwJaniH3
Just
saw this copy of Science Fiction Times go up on ebay. It says it has
an obit for Piper in it. Not sure if its overpriced or not.
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David "PiperFan" Johnson 03-21-2020
03:48 UT
|
~
Whelan's Space Viking
Michael Whelan's cover for Space Viking has always been one of my favorite images inspired by Beam's work. But I have just
this evening realized how much Whelan's illustration seems to have been
inspired by John Schoenherr's illustration for the cover of Analog
when the novel was originally serialized in 1962 and by Ed Valigursky's
illustration for the cover of the first Ace paperback edition in 1963.
Whelan
switches Valigursky's green-and-purple color scheme but Whelan's Viking
in the foreground and ruins in the background reflect similar elements
in Valigursky's illustration.
And Whelan's illustration of the spherical Nemesis is of the same size and position as Schoenherr's Viking ship (just mirrored across the centerline). The Nemesis blazonry is a wonderful addition by Whelan.
It's fascinating and I'm astounding I've only now realized the similarities!
Smash the traitors first!
David
--
"They
were turning into the main hallway, between the rows of portraits of
past emperors, Paul and Rodrik, Paul and Rodrik, alternating over and
over on both walls." - "Ministry of Disturbance"
~
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 03-21-2020
03:38 UT
|
Space Viking by John Schoenherr (1962)
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David "PiperFan" Johnson 03-21-2020
03:37 UT
|
Space Viking by Ed Valigursky (1963)
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David "PiperFan" Johnson 03-21-2020
03:36 UT
|
Space Viking by Michael Whelan (1977)
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David "PiperFan" Johnson 03-12-2020
04:40 UT
|
~
Blake Hartley's Path to the White House
"About 1950, we start building a political organization, here in Pennsylvania. In 1960, I think we can elect you President." - Allan Hartley, "Time and Time Again"
That's
Allan Hartley speaking to his father, Blake Hartley, in August 1945.
So what did Blake Hartley's path to the presidency look like?
The
easiest assumption, based upon Allan Hartley's off-the-cuff plan, is to
assume that Hartley was elected President in 1960. But the younger
Hartley's plan is not the only information we get from Beam.
In
1965, when "The Mercenaries" takes place, Blake Hartley's time as
president of Associated Enterprises is recent enough that the MacLeod
Team can still expect to call-in a favor from Allan Hartley for their
prior service for the Hartleys' firm. It seems unlikely that this favor
could be called in five or more years after it was "earned." Based on
this bit from Beam, perhaps Hartley was not elected President until
1964. So maybe Allan Hartley's plan didn't quite unfold as he had
initially anticipated.
One path possible path from a Pennsylvania
"political organization" to the Presidency might have run through one
of Pennsylvania's Senate seats. "Time and Time Again" was submitted for
publication in June 1946. By that point, Pennsylvania Attorney General
Jim Duff was on his way to being elected Governor later that year.
Duff went on to be elected to the Senate in 1950 but lost a close
election in 1956 and retired from politics. So one possibility is that
Blake Hartley ran (as a Democrat) against Duff in 1956. (The actual
candidate was Philadelphia Mayor Joseph Clark.) Hartley might then have
ran for President in 1960 as a freshman Senator. Perhaps he was
unsuccessful in doing so.
At the time "Time and Time Again" was
written Pennsylvania's other Senate seat was held by Duff's predecessor
as Governor, Ed Martin, who was elected to the Senate in 1946. He was
re-elected in 1952 and it seems unlikely new-to-politics Blake Hartley
would have been successful in trying to unseat him in that election.
Martin did not run for re-election in 1958 but it seems unlikely Hartley
could have run for his Senate seat then and then been successful
running for President just two years later. So, if Hartley were elected
to take Martin's place in the Senate, he might then have ran for
President in 1964. But as Senator from 1958 to 1964 Blake Hartley
likely could not have been president of Associated Enterprises when it
employed the MacLeod Team.
Duff's successor as Governor, John
Fine, was elected in 1950, but did not run for re-election in 1954. The
1954 race for Governor was between the Republican Lieutenant Governor
and a Democratic State Senator. This seems like the earliest likely
opportunity for Hartley to have been elected to statewide office in
Pennsylvania. If he were elected Governor of Pennsylvania in 1954 he
would have been well placed to run for President in 1960, assuming he
was re-elected as Governor in 1958.
(Allan Hartley would have
been expected to know some of this history from his boyhood, but perhaps
not the details, especially about the Senators.)
So who might Hartley have ran against for President?
Harry
Truman had been President for a year by the time Beam submitted "Time
and Time Again." It was not at all clear at that point that Truman
would be elected President in 1948 so Beam may have made a variety of
assumptions about who might have been running for President in 1960. It
would not have been obvious that Eisenhower would have been President
from 1953 to 1961 and therefore not obvious that Richard Nixon would
have been the Republican nominee for President in 1960. Likewise, it
seems unlikely that Beam would have been able to anticipate the
candidacy of Jack Kennedy when he was writing his yarn in 1946.
When
Beam was writing "Time and Time Again" in 1946 he may have assumed that
Truman would not be elected in 1948. Perhaps he assumed Truman would
be defeated by his Republican challenger--Dewey actually did defeat
Truman in this then-future-now-alternate history--who would have then
served the newly-mandated two terms. (The 22nd Amendment limiting
Presidents to two terms was not ratified until 1951 but it seems likely
that a "President Dewey" would nevertheless have served only two terms
even if he'd been "grandfathered out" of the 22nd Amendment because it
had been a key Republican initiative.)
Blake Hartley likely would
not yet have been ready to run for the Presidency in 1956 so that would
mean someone else to follow "President Dewey." That new President
would have been an incumbent in the 1960 election. A tough challenge
for freshman Senator Hartley but less so for seasoned Governor Hartley.
But if Hartley had been Governor of Pennsylvania from 1954 he likely
wouldn't have also been president of Associated Enterprise.
So
perhaps Governor Hartley ran in the primary in 1960 but was
unsuccessful. When his second term as Governor--or first term as
Senator--came to an end in 1962 perhaps Hartley became (or returned to
being) president of Associated Enterprises, running again for President
in 1964 in an election with no incumbent President. That would leave
him well-placed as President in 1965 to have "owed" a favor to the
MacLeod Team.
So, Hartley as Pennslyvania Governor in 1954 (or
Senator in 1956), an unsuccessful run for President in 1960, leaves
office in 1962 to become president of Associated Enterprises, and
elected President in 1964.
Cheers,
David
--
"It
started when I began contributing to some of the professional journals.
There's still a little of what used to be called male sex-chauvinism
among my colleagues, and some who would be favorably impressed with an
article signed D. Warren Rives might snort in contempt at the same
article signed Doris Rives." - Doris Rivas (H. Beam Piper), "Day of the
Moron"
~
|
Gordon Johansen 03-06-2020
05:34 UT
|
Thanks for the recent posts. A very interesting take on slide rules. I'm
old enough to have had to learn how to use them in university though
I'm sure I couldn't remember how to do it now.
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 03-06-2020
03:09 UT
|
~
Annual Muster of Piper Irregulars
Hi folks,
This
year's Muster will take place on Saturday, May 16th. All Piper fans are
welcome; I will be attending as well as Dennis Frank and several others.
Again,
we will meet at the Waffle Shop on North Atherton Street at 10:00 a.m.
We plan to visit the Kalvan Transposition site (which is slowly
disappearing!) and other Piper sites of interest.
We hope to see you there.
John Carr
~
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Tim Tow 03-05-2020
14:24 UT
|
Just finished watching the Mandalorian. Thinking of the Piper
connections, they have made the Jawas a space-faring species as they are
now on 2 planets other than Tatooine, though always tooling around in
their ubiquitous sandcrawlers. It doesn't seem practical to transport
that monstrosity from planet to planet. It's unclear though if the Jawas
are cargo or pilots either.
Their high pitched language could be
similar to fuzzy-speak. Maybe they are devolved ewoks (fuzzies) or a
nocturnal breed under those robes.
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Tim Tow 03-04-2020
13:04 UT
|
Nice work here. The save icon is still a floppy disk, which is pretty much already in dis-use.
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 03-04-2020
03:32 UT
|
"Slide Rule" in Pournelle's "The Last Shot"
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David "PiperFan" Johnson 03-04-2020
03:31 UT
|
 "Slide Rules" in "Space Viking's Daughter" Edited 03-04-2020 03:33
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David "PiperFan" Johnson 03-04-2020
03:30 UT
|
~
Conn Maxwell's Slide Rule
As some of you will recall, back
in 2004 I ran an online role-playing game set in Beam's Future History,
specifically about 40 years after the events of ~Space Viking~. At one
point I had a question from one of the players, the late Frank Gasperik,
asking whether the characters had hand-held "personal data assistants"
(PDAs). My response was:
"Those of you who are familiar with
Piper's Space Vikings know this is an awkward question. Writing in the
late '50s and early '60s Beam Piper's star travellers still used things
like slide rules to do calculations! (Indeed, much of Piper's
"futuristic" technology seems backwards and quaint to our
half-century-in-his-future sensibilities.)
"Here's how we will
play this. Characters can indeed have what we today would call 'personal
data assistants' . . . but they call these hand-held computers 'slide
rules' (just as we here in the U.S. still 'dial' a number on our mobile
telephones--even if we're not old enough to have ever even seen a rotary
telephone). I will handle other archaic Piper technologies in a similar
manner as we come across them."
You'll note that back in 2004 it
was not yet obvious to me that our "PDAs" and our "mobile phones" were
themselves about the merge into a single device!
[Screenshot from the online game to follow.]
This week I finished reading's John Carr's excellent new collection ~The Best of Jerry Pournelle~:
https://www.baen.com/the-best-of-jerry-pournelle.html
The
collection includes a previously-unpublished Pournelle story titled
"The Last Shot" written sometime in the 1970s. In it is this remarkable
scene:
"Bill took his slide rule from his pocket. He still
called it a slide rule although he'd long since given up his circular
slipstick for the tiny Hewlett-Packard computer. It hummed, a tiny
warbling note indicating that it was in microwave communication with a
larger computer somewhere. Of course . . . [there was] an antenna hooked
into the company's primary data banks right here in this room. . . ."
That's Pournelle imagining a wireless "PDA"--which is called a "slide rule"--in the 1970s!
[Photo of that excerpt from "The Last Shot" also to follow.]
A
"slide rule" appears several times in Beam's Future History yarns. Abe
Clifford, the ~Javelin's~ navigator, uses one to try to calculate the
position of the castaways on Hermann Reuch's Land on Fenris. Gerd Van
Riebeek imagined Fuzzies using them on Zarthustra. Conn Maxwell
contrasted Merlin's capabilities with those of a slide-rule-using human.
Even the leader of Aditya in the Empire era "Ministry of Disturbance"
is expected to carry a slide rule!
It seems likely Pournelle
would have grappled with Beam's "slide rules" and other archaic
technology in a similar manner. When we finally see ~Return of Space
Viking~ I expect the Space Viking will be calculating--and perhaps even
communicating--with their "slide rules"!
Cheers,
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~
~
|
David "PiperFan" Johnson 03-01-2020
15:55 UT
|
~
The Terro-human History Project at Zarthani.net
I've
finally posted the first "monograph" in a little effort I've been
working on for quite some time, the Imperial Conservatory of Terro-human
Civilization's "Terro-human History Project":
http://www.zarthani.net/future_history_development.htm#background
This
is the first piece from an imagined Galactic Empire era research effort
at the Imperial University at Asgard on Odin which is studying
Terro-human history. This monograph, "Terra: From Many Nations to One
Planet," examines the early origins of the Terran Federation:
http://www.zarthani.net/conservatory-terra_one_planet.htm
Additional monographs looking at other aspects of Terro-human history are planned for the same space.
Cheers,
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 (narrator point-of-view), ~Uller Uprising~
~
|
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