Show notes
A historian joins a late-night conversation about worlds where one altered event sends nations down roads no one remembers. Then a stranger leaves behind something impossible to explain, suggesting one of those other histories may be much closer than anyone imagined. Crossroads of Destiny by H. Beam Piper. That’s next on The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast.
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Author H. Beam Piper makes his debut on the podcast today. Henry Beam Piper was born in 1904 in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and was largely self-educated. He developed a fascination with history as a boy—several of his ancestors had fought in the Civil War—and by his teens he had decided he wanted to become a writer. Around that time he discovered speculative fiction through H. G. Wells, Bram Stoker, Edgar Rice Burroughs and A. Merritt.
At 18, Piper went to work for the Pennsylvania Railroad in Altoona, where he worked as a laborer and later a night watchman while writing and submitting stories in his spare time. Remarkably, he spent about 26 years trying to make his first sale before John W. Campbell bought “Time and Time Again,” which appeared in Astounding Science Fiction in 1947. His deep knowledge of history became one of the signatures of his fiction, particularly in his Paratime stories and alternate-history tales like “Crossroads of Destiny.”
Piper went on to write more than two dozen short stories and roughly a dozen novels and book-length works, depending on how collaborations and posthumously published books are counted. His best-known books include Little Fuzzy, Space Viking, Four-Day Planet and The Cosmic Computer. Little Fuzzy was nominated for the 1963 Hugo Award for Best Novel.
Writer Jerry Pournelle recalled that Piper once told him, apparently with a straight face, that he believed he had been born in another timeline.
From Fantastic Universe in July 1959 we will find our story on page 4, Crossroads of Destiny by H. Beam Piper…
Next on The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast, A government believes it has created the perfect biological weapon: a virus that kills only the people it considers dangerous. But Dr. Joseph Euge knows the plague is making a very different judgment, and soon an entire world may learn what truly makes someone vulnerable. Righteous Plague by Robert Abernathy.
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