Five Sci-Fi Short Stories

by H. Beam Piper

Read by Mark Nelson.

The Answer
Temple Trouble
Flight from Tomorrow
Police Operation
Graveyard Dreams

Genres: Science Fiction, Audiobook

Audiobook

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Henry Beam Piper was an American science fiction author. He wrote many short stories and several novels. He is best known for his extensive Terro-Human Future History series of stories and a shorter series of "Paratime" alternate history tales.

Reviews

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very well narrated by Mark Nelson & they were good stories, too. I found a lot of Piper's other books on Librivox & I'm looking forward to listening to it.

The stories were:

The Answer
Temple Trouble

Flight from Tomorrow - was in a short story collection I'd listened to before, but it was good enough to listen to again.

Police Operation
Graveyard Dreams

[Michael Pitaniello · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm torn on this one. Good read for checking out some good old sci-fi, but I'm probably not going to push on.

On the one hand, I very much like the setting. I generally don't care for parallel universe work, but Piper's setting got me invested.

The science in this fiction is showing it's age, but it pads it with conscious thought and a certain amount of reflection about the material. I don't care if it's the 1950s and people still think there's aliens on Venus, but I do care that they're thinking about invasive alien species and irresponsible uses of technology.

But man this feels stale. A lot of the characters are idealized cardboard cutouts. Some of these stories feel like Sean Connery era James Bond fanfiction. It's enough to take me out of it, and hence 3/5 stars for something I otherwise thought was fine.

[Buck · Rating 3 out of 5]

The stories are:
The Answer
Temple Trouble
Flight from Tomorrow
Police Operation
Graveyard of Dreams

I found the middle three the most interesting, They are all in the same setting, i.e. time travel adventures by more or less the same set of characters.

Graveyard of Dreams seemed familiar. Turns out it was essentially the same story as the novel The Cosmic Computer.

I noticed that in these stories, everybody is armed with a pistol or similar type of hand weapon. Also, most characters smoke.

The Answer is perhaps a little closer to home: ruminations on the aftermath of an atomic war. Maybe because of that, I think I enjoyed it the least, though none of these were great.

[Vivaine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really old school time travel science fiction that has not exactly aged well. One character from the future makes a comment about "We've used so much nuclear-related technology that we've just absorbed it all and now it can't hurt us". The entire center portion of one of the stories is a bafflingly detailed description of just how the multiple time streams work, which mostly made very little sense in the context of the story. The action/adventure parts are much better.

Definitely not on par with Piper's best known work "Little Fuzzy", but IMO Piper's "Little Fuzzy" is much better than Scalzy's reboot of the same name.

[Scott Whitney · Rating 3 out of 5]

These five stories are very good. They are well narrated and made me think. Graveyard Dreams resonated with me due to the multi-generational nature of dreams. The other story which really got me thinking was flight from tomorrow. This was a story which got me thinking about my own writing.

[GoldenGerbera · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the best reading voices so far for aby Audio book I heared. Contents...varys mostly from sufferable to bad, but the last story almost made me cry. In a good way :) Ignoring the fact that in the future thousands of years ahead women go prepare food while men talk the real stuff :D

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

I always enjoy short sci-fi stories and these were also good, not ground breaking, but nice to read.

[Brandon Mehl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Everything from filming a world-destroying movie, to an inter-dimensional intelligent rutebaga, these stories are just great.

[Han · Rating 3 out of 5]

of these I found graveyard dreams to be most interesting. Police operation reminded me of a Louis Lamour short story. Texas ranger in space.

[Maureen · Rating 2 out of 5]

My capacity to appreciate classic science fiction is apparently limited.