Henry Beam Piper was born on March 23, 1904, in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, USA. Some sources report his name as Horace, a confusion he generated himself. It seems that Piper didn’t like his first name so he wrote under the name H. Beam Piper and said the H. stood for Horace.

H. Beam Piper was basically self-taught and studied science and history on his own. After doing various jobs, he started working as a writer in 1947 with the publication of his short story “Time and Time Again” in the magazine “Astounding Science Fiction”. For several years, Piper wrote mostly short fiction and only in the ’60s started writing novels regularly. He wrote novels “Crisis in 2140” (1957) and “Lone Star Planet”, also known as “A Planet for Texans”, (1958) with John J. McGuire.

In his Terro-Human cycle, H. Beam Piper tells the story of 6,000 years of future human history. Many stories of this cycle belong to the space opera subgenre but in particular, the Fuzzy series, “Little Fuzzy” (1962) and “Fuzzy Sapiens”, also known as “The Other Human Race”, (1964) are more sophisticated, addressing issues such as politics and economy in addition to the military theme.

The second cycle by H. Beam Piper is the Paratime, an alternate history series in which a specialized police force travels among parallel universes. The most important novel of the cycle is “Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen” (1965). Various stories belonging to this cycle were later collected in the anthology “Paratime” in 1981.

Unfortunately, in November 1964, H. Beam Piper committed suicide. The exact date isn’t known because he wrote the last entry in his diary on November 5 and his body was found according to some sources on November 9 and according to others on November 11. The reasons for his act aren’t entirely clear gesture but he thought his career as a writer was failing and he was divorcing his wife.

At the end of the ’70s, there was a rediscovery of H. Beam Piper’s works and over the years various authors have written novels that continue both the Terro-Human and the Paratime cycles. Other authors have been inspired by his works and you can’t help but wonder how many works he could still have written if he hadn’t taken his own life.