On a distant planetary colony ravaged by war and infested with pirates, murderous warlords and diabolical criminals, a few towns comprised of honest and law abiding civilians discover that they are still alive because they never gave up their guns. And now, they intend to take their homeworld back from the hands of the outlaw bandits that had turned it into hell.
This is a book review for an author and a fellow gunnie who should have received far more praise and recognition than he actually got during his lifetime. Many people here probably heard of H. Beam Piper (March 23, 1904 - November 6, 1964) or read his works at one point or another. Like his contemporary Robert A. Heinlein, Piper was the author of the spectacular Federation series of space operas, as well as almost a hundred other science fiction short stories. He also wrote several non-fiction essays and books concerning firearm histories, antique gun collecting and market values, reloading, reloading components/propellants/projectiles, hunting and target shooting.
Having grown up in the woodsy outlying villages of western Pennsylvania he was surrounded by a culture of deer hunting and the preparation of venison. At a young age he had worked as a laborer on the Pennsylvania Railroad and later became a watchman and security officer for the company. As a science fiction writer who portrayed ultra-realism and highly accurate scientific theories in his works, he was remarkable because his education was almost exclusively self-taught. He was also a very avid gun-writer and shooter who amassed a considerable collection of fine firearms. As a matter of fact, his first short story, Time and Time Again, written in 1947, was inspired by a war trophy German Luger P-08 pistol given to him as a present by his father. This story would later be expanded into the award-winning Paratime series of novels.
In the creation of The Cosmic Computer, Piper had inadvertently formed yet another subgenre within military sci-fi: The space-western. instead of dealing with the dazzle of exploration or the hellish life of a front-line soldier in the heat of combat, the space-western concerns the plight of citizens stranded on distant planetary colonies ravaged by war, or formerly thriving outposts that had become so alienated from the main human race due to the immense distances of space and had lapsed back into barbarism and piracy. Firefly and Cowboy Bebop are prime examples of this genre, but their origins all can be traced back to The Cosmic Computer.
The story begins with a young man named Conn Maxwell who had just returned to his hometown of Litchfield on the planet Poictesme after spending several years studying at a university on Earth, the capital world of the Terran Federation. As he stands on the observation deck of the great strato-shuttle that would take him down from the interstellar passenger liner to the spaceport near the town, he could not help but notice how far down the drain the inhabitants of his world had gone. What was once a world famed throughout both the Federation and the System-States Alliance for it's lush agricultural output thanks to it's location in the inner-habitable zone of it's parent star was now mostly a desert wasteland. Only Litchfield and a handful of other small settlements are still inhabited by regular citizens only seeking to live a life of meager satisfaction. During the fateful war years ago, Poictesme had initially taken side with the System-States, a decision that would bring it to ruin. Federation forces had captured Poictesme early on, and used it as a base to liquidate all of the other Alliance outposts. Most of it's agricultural land was cleared and razed to build weapons facilities and shipyards where the Federation Navy's most feared battle cruisers would be assembled and launched. As punishment for it's early alliance with the rebels, Federation troops were quartered on Poictesme and a large portion of their agricultural yield was taxed and confiscated for the war effort.
When the remnants of the Alliance fleet was destroyed and the leaders of the rebel Alliance sought peace, Poictesme's economic superiority had been reduced to a mere ghost of it's former proud self. When the period of government occupation was over and the Federation military forces finally departed from Poictesme, they left a dust and concrete wasteland behind. When the stratoship finally touched down on solid ground, Conn Maxwell can see how decrepit the town has grown. Abandoned buildings littered the streets and even large public facilities had fallen into neglect and disrepair. The first people to greet him at the spaceport's landing pad were his father and uncle. After them, his mother, sister and the sweetheart he had left behind when he had embarked on his studies all rushed forward to embrace him and inquire how he had been. His father, however, had different reasons for inquiring. He had sent his son to Terra specifically because he wanted to know if the rumors are true. After the war ended, the Federation had left immense quantities of military supplies, weapons, ammunition, spacecraft propulsion units, fuel cells, and heavy machinery behind. Employing the antigravity systems needed to load them into the ships and haul them back to Earth would require terawatts upon terawatts of energy. It was simply too costly to dismantle them. So they did the only logical thing. They left them there. Weapons technology had already progressed to the point that most of the munitions left on Poictesme were already outdated.
Conn Maxwell, just like his father, hated to see resources being squandered and people living in resignation on their dirty hellhole of a home planet. His first suggestion was to tally an inventory of all the Federation knickknacks that had been deposited on their world, and to his surprise, a considerable number of Litchfield's armed and ready men were eager to start working. There were cases of pistols and M504 assault rifles, armored combat suits and vehicles and power cells which could fetch a lot of money on the interplanetary market of the former System States outposts. In order to wrench their only home back from the throes of the Dark Ages, they will have to take on the pirates and brigands which had turned most of their eastern hemisphere into an operations base. They were going to need an army. A lot of men, and a lot of equipment. As the work went on and the dormant machinery in the shipyards were once again reactivated to produce space-worthy combat corvettes and armed freighters, only the inner circle of Conn Maxwell's followers knew what they were really going after. It had already passed into legend now, that during the war, the Federation 10th Army, 3rd Fleet Command had built a supercomputer of unparalleled power and capacity for use in making tactical decisions. The machine could literally forecast an opponent's next move on the battlefield and plot the locations of entire fleets in the depths of space. It's code name was Merlin and whichever outpost got their hands on it would become a planetary superpower. If Merlin was located on Poictesme and still in operating condition, it would have the capacity to lay out a map of the entire world's natural resource deposits and offer solutions to how to put them to use. It would place Poictesme back on the center of the interstellar map again.
The story that Piper had laid out in The Cosmic Computer is literally an exact parallel of the American West after the end of the Civil War. The Terran Federation were the Union states, who were interested in preserving their empire at all costs. The System-States Alliance, much like their Confederate counterparts, were angered over the tariffs and trade limitations placed on them by the Federation and challenged this by declaring their departure from the Federation to create their own government. When most of the Union forces withdrew from the territories of New Mexico, Nevada and Arkansas after the Civil War ended, they had also left behind many defensive installations and munitions. Mostly outdated rifled muskets and muzzleloading cannons which the local governments put into immediate use in securing their border towns from Indian raids. You can say that Piper had created a "quintessential western" with this novel by following the parallel of the post-Civil War American west in a very close fashion.
What is single-handedly the most remarkable aspect about this novel was the political portrayal and defense of the Second Amendment. Even though books like Starship Troopers also made good use of political commentaries throughout the story, told through the characters themselves, in The Cosmic Computer, the discussion of the tyrannical nature of gun control is constantly present and always brought up even in the most trivial discussions. One of the things that make this novel stand out from the beginning is that everyone is armed on Poictesme. Every man who is capable of using a gun in the defense of the town carries at least a handgun, and usually a submachine gun or assault rifle is kept at their home, or in the case of permanent warehouse/excavation workers, carried on them all the time. As soon as Conn Maxwell leaves the stratoship, the men that step forward to greet him are all wearing holstered sidearms. When Conn was noticed as the only one in the group who did not carry a gun, he was promptly advised to go obtain a pistol. Throughout the story, characters would often point to governments in the history of Old Terra and discuss how they took away the rights of their citizenry to own weapons for self defense, claiming that these disarmament campaigns may have brought down crime and may even work on Poictesme to curb the actions of the outlaw gangs. In which case another character would immediately rebuff them, stating how the fact that Litchfield's citizens all freely owned firearms prevented Litchfield from getting attacked by bandit gangs or subjugated by the more draconian elements of Poictesme's planetary government. The character would go on to deliver the final blow by stating out the horrendous crimes against humanity that many Old Terran regimes had committed against their people after they had been disarmed. (The Third Reich, USSR, etc...) In the end when the most vicious of the bandit armies had been defeated, it was obvious that Poictesme's citizens were planning to create a libertarian paradise out of this war torn world where the citizenry themselves have the final say in the running of their homeworld's financial and societal affairs. If political power do indeed grow out of the barrel of a gun, then the citizens of Poictesme made that happen in their favor.
Out of all of the works of H. Beam Piper, it can be said that The Cosmic Computer is the shining beacon of his career. Not only a political genius when it came to gun ownership but a visionary of the future as well. He had also written a truly believable science fiction epic where the characters used their intelligence to think up creative solutions to difficult problems. For example, in one scene, Maxwell's men had to dislodge a particularly hardened group of bandits from an elevated position on a cliff where they could pour a murderous volley of fire down on the advancing militiamen. Rather than order a head-on charge into the gunfire, a couple of engineers decided to wire up several remote controlled drone vehicles with high explosives and launch them up into the bandit's gun nest. The resulting detonation obliterated the bandits and blew a hole large enough in the rock wall to allow the rest of the fighters to advance unscathed. Now we all remember a couple of years ago in 2016 when a disgruntled Army veteran ambushed and killed 5 Dallas police officers? The killer, equipped with a semiautomatic rifle took up a position inside a parking garage and held the area under siege until SWAT team demolition crews employed a similar strategy, wiring a bomb disposal robot with explosives and using it to blast the killer out of his hiding place. Coincidence? Perhaps. It is anyone's guess, but one thing is certain: Piper is well aware of what kinds of technological progress the future would bring and immediately recognizes their potential in many unconventional situations, including warfare.
NOTES:
*For an audiobook version of The Cosmic Computer, here is a version from Libravox, narrated by Mark Nelson in it's entirety:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eK4w...FZx1dy94AaABAg
*While The Cosmic Computer is certainly one of the best of H. Beam Piper's works, it was not his last and most profound. In 1963, Piper, already suffering from depression due to a stressful divorce, penned the haunting short story The Answer. A simple, innocent photograph of a smiling young woman holding a pet dog in her arms on a bright summer day would drive a scientist into tears every time he dares to take a glance at it. Find out why here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96oL0owM8hg (First story of this Libravox series, narrated by Mark Nelson)
*One year after the completion of The Answer, Piper would die from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He was 60 years old.
*H. Beam Piper was also the author of the award winning Paratime series of novels. Based on theoretical research into "multiverses" and "diversionary probability lines", the stories follow Verkan Vall, a Police Officer tasked with the most tedious job of safeguarding the secret behind the Paratemporal Timeshift unit, which allows the First Level civilization that invented it to explore and occupy different planes of other realities. Just like his other military science fiction works, the Paratime stories are filled with guns and gunplay. From bows and traditional kinetic energy firearms to beam weapons such as the "neutron-disruption blaster" and "ultrasonic paralyzers" used to stun and incapacitate criminal suspects, Verkan Vall and his team of elite operatives travel across thousands of parallel realities to track down and bring to justice those bandits, gangsters and warlords from his own civilization who uses the Paratemporal plane to build their own underworld empires of slavery and debauchery. One of the Paratime stories, Police Operation, takes place on the Fourth Level Europo-American sector (1950's Kentucky, USA) involving a dangerous escaped extraterrestrial predator and the Paratime Police must hunt down and kill the creature before hunters from this region shoot it, and thus lead to the secret of the dimensional travelers being leaked out. This is yet another one of H. Beam Piper's stories where the discussion of the technical aspects of guns, particularly bolt action hunting rifles, big-bore Smith & Wesson revolvers, their ammunition and the hunting of large animals are paramount throughout it's progression.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96oL0owM8hg (Stories 2, 4, 5. Libravox recording. Narrated by Mark Nelson)
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