Customer Reviews

Flight from Tomorrow: Science Fiction Stories

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Great stories, too bad they are all in the Ace versions released 1981-83 (Paratime, Federation, Empire & The Worlds of H. Beam Piper)edited by John F. Carr. If you haven't got those, or can't find them used, get this and enjoy.

Many thanks to Wildside Press for reissuing these long out of print stories by Piper, who died in the early 1960s. The book is all the more attractive because those stories probably first appeared in scattered throughout science fiction magazines. So it's not so simple as merely reprinting an earlier book.

Piper's writing skill shows through. Perhaps many readers of this book will find the stories still fresh and appealing. Plus, in some ways, the unabashed confidence in a spacefaring humanity is a refreshing contrast to much of the current introspective science fiction. Let alone to the sad state of the US manned space program.

The only drawback about the book, if I may phrase it as such, is that we should lament Piper's early and unnecessary death. He could well have lived decades longer, and we will never know [in this timeline anyway] what was never written.

With the transition of much of H. Beam Piper's work into the public domain publishers like Wildside Press have finally begun to bring Piper's work back into print and for that fans of Piper owe them a debt of gratitude. But this first collection is an odd choice. The title story is one of Piper's least imaginative and includes an outdated and mistaken understanding of radiation poisoning as a central plot element. Two other stories, "The Answer" and "Operation R.S.V.P.," are cautionary tales from the Cold War era of Mutually-Assured Destruction (MAD) that will also seem outdated to contemporary readers. It does include "Graveyard of Dreams," an intriguing novela that was later expanded by Piper into the novel The Cosmic Computer (originally published as Junkyard Planet) but this story only introduces the plot that is finished in the novel. Finally, the story "Genesis" is perhaps the most interesting one in the collection. This story of ancient Martian explorers crash-landed on Earth is seem by most Piper fans as the "genesis" of his Paratime yarns.

Skip this one and pick-up Wildside's Graveyard of Dreams: Science Fiction Stories which includes all the yarns here except "Flight from Tomorrow," replacing it with the much more interesting Paratime yarn "Last Enemy."