Henry H. Beam Piper books

Anthologies

Collections

Fuzzy Sapiens Reading Order

Lord Kalvan Reading Order

Paratime Police Reading Order

Short Stories/Novellas

Standalone Novels

Terro-Human Future History Reading Order

Henry Beam Piper (1904-1964) grew up in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and was largely self-educated. He worked on the engineering staff of the Pennsylvania Railroad and spent years as a night watchman, reading and writing on his own time. His first published story, “Time and Time Again,” appeared in Astounding Science Fiction in 1947. His only non-SF novel, Murder in the Gunroom (1953), drew on his extensive personal collection of antique firearms.

Piper built two major fictional universes. The Terro-Human Future History traces humanity’s expansion across the galaxy over thousands of years, and includes novels like Space Viking and Four-Day Planet as well as the beloved Fuzzy trilogy. The Paratime series imagines a civilization that has discovered how to travel between parallel timelines and keeps this ability secret through the Paratime Police. His novel Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen, about a Pennsylvania state trooper stranded in an alternate timeline, was assembled from stories published shortly before his death.

After Piper died, his friend and literary executor John F. Carr worked to keep his books in print and also wrote several continuation novels set in Piper’s universes. In 2011, John Scalzi published Fuzzy Nation, a full reboot of Little Fuzzy that brought Piper’s original concept to a new generation of readers.