Impact
| This section may contain original research. |
Piper did not live to see how influential he was to other science fiction writers.
Michael McCollum's first novel, A Greater Infinity, was inspired by Piper's notion of the Paratime Police (and to a lesser extent by Isaac Asimov's The End of Eternity). The Paradox Patrol, in a series of stories by F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, are a parody of Piper's Paratime Police, although they also pay homage to Alfred Bester in their enforcement of "Bester's Law".
Robert Adams' Castaways in Time is similar in many ways to Piper's Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen. Adams' book has a group of late-1970s Americans transported to an alternate medieval England where the Roman Catholic Church controls the supply of gunpowder. Jerry Pournelle's Janissaries series is an obvious tribute to Lord Kalvan, with several early scenes being very close echoes of scenes in Piper's work. Charles Stross's Merchant Princes series explicitly acknowledges H. Beam Piper's Paratime as an influence.
Piper's story Omnilingual has been much reprinted and has been referred to in many subsequent stories dealing with the translation of alien languages.
Elizabeth Bear has stated that her novel Undertow was inspired by Little Fuzzy.
Read more about this topic: H. Beam Piper
Famous quotes containing the word impact:
“If the federal government had been around when the Creator was putting His hand to this state, Indiana wouldn’t be here. It’d still be waiting for an environmental impact statement.”
—Ronald Reagan (b. 1911)
“As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice—there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community. To discover how scientific revolutions are effected, we shall therefore have to examine not only the impact of nature and of logic, but also the techniques of persuasive argumentation effective within the quite special groups that constitute the community of scientists.”
—Thomas S. Kuhn (b. 1922)
“Television does not dominate or insist, as movies do. It is not sensational, but taken for granted. Insistence would destroy it, for its message is so dire that it relies on being the background drone that counters silence. For most of us, it is something turned on and off as we would the light. It is a service, not a luxury or a thing of choice.”
—David Thomson, U.S. film historian. America in the Dark: The Impact of Hollywood Films on American Culture, ch. 8, William Morrow (1977)