H. Beam Piper (1904-1964) is probably best known for the ‘Fuzzies’ stories, helped along by some brilliantly illustrated book covers showing them off. He was also quite prolific, with a string of novels and short stories. ‘Omnilingual’ is an anthology of seven short stories. This book has little, if anything, in its indicia to show how old the stories are, so a little research was needed.
The short story ‘Omnilingual’, written in 1957, also provides the title of the book. Archaeologists on Mars are exploring an underground city. They know something catastrophic happened millennia ago and they are piecing it all together. For Martha Dane to translate their books, she needs to find a Rosetta stone. She’s not the only one on the team and there’s a lot of vying for leadership. Bearing in mind the era the story was written in, practically all of them are smokers. Considering that they were bringing oxygen into various buildings so they didn’t have to rely on oxygen masks, you would have thought the oxygen purity might have been ignited by their lighter flames. One thing this story did make me wonder is whether humans have prepared a similar Rosetta stone for our own world if we face extinction. Yes, we have books written for children that would probably key in on things like nouns, but a starter for aliens might actually be a book that we really ought to produce specifically for them, to leave as a legacy. We could even provide photographs.
‘Genesis’ is about the survivors of a crew whose spacecraft became damaged on its way to Tareesh because its meteor protection hadn’t been kept up to date. The women outnumbered the men seven to two as this was supposed to be a breeding colony. With only a limited amount of ammunition and only a week’s supplies, they had to find food and avoid the hairy local inhabitants, living as nomads. In many respects, this is a typical survival story but, having looked up its date of publication, 1951, it was advanced for its time.
‘Day Of The Moron’ centres on an atomic plant whose manager wants his new recruits tested for competency. He is more afraid of idle hands turning knobs when they shouldn’t than he is of sabotage. Although the union agrees to this, it still leads to a dispute involving two dismissed employees. The story is set in 1968, although it was written in 1951. In many respects, this story still has a bearing today.
‘Time And Time Again’ (1947) starts off in 1973, with the multi-talented Allan Hartley being given an injection after World War Three. I’m not sure if that was the cause, but he wakes up in his 13-year-old body in 1945, before the nuclear bombing of Japan, with his widower father, Blake Hartley. He initially thinks he might be dreaming, but his behaviour is certainly different. He convinces his father of who, or rather when, he originally was, and the rest turns into spoiler. From a modern-day writer’s point of view, some elements are rather naïve. However, if his father is half as smart as his son, then his acceptance of the unusual shouldn’t be too surprising.
The next story, ‘He Walked Around The Horses’ (1948), is the tale of the diplomat Benjamin Bathurst, who vanished in November 1809. I looked him up. He was a real person who did actually vanish. What Piper suggests in his story, as told by witnesses, is that Bathurst was moved to an alternative reality. This builds up over the transcripts and the differences between there and here. There is a lot of spoiler here and, if you are aware of British history, there is a fabulous twist at the end. If you don’t recognise it, look up the name at the end.
There are some short-form authors where you should only read one story a day to allow the ideas to soak in, which is what I’d been doing here until today, when I immediately followed with ‘The Answer’ (1959), a story dealing with the build-up to a nuclear war seen from a civilian perspective, and it didn’t have the same impact. Piper is like a fine wine: you need to savour one story at a time to appreciate how good a writer of ideas he actually was.
Lastly, ‘Graveyard Of Dreams’ (1958) is the only one I have a vague memory of reading a long while back. After five years away from his home planet, the colony world of Poictesme, getting a computer degree on Earth, Conn Maxwell returns home to his family. Poictesme was a staging ground for a war and, once it was over, much of the equipment was left behind. On this impoverished world, there was a rumour that an advanced intelligent computer, ‘the Brain’, had been left behind too. Part of his time on Earth was spent finding out the truth of this. The rest is spoiler. Something that has relevance today is America leaving its equipment in Afghanistan when it pulled out, largely because it was too expensive to take home. In that respect, Piper was using something that is now commonplace.
‘Omnilingual’ is a magnificent read and is available in other editions besides this one. Science Fiction is a genre of ideas. H. Beam Piper shows that in these stories, is oddly prophetic in several of them and is a fine writer. If you’re planning or writing Science Fiction, seeing a master at work is an education in seeing where an idea can go. The fact that several of these stories are 70 or more years old makes it even more remarkable that they are still valid today.
GF Willmetts
November 2026
(pub: Bibliotech Press, 2023. 149-page enlarged paperback. Price: varies. ISBN: 978-8-88830-286-6)
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