The Publisher Says: Four-Day Planet . . . where the killing heat of a thousand-hour "day" drives men underground, and the glorious hundred-hour sunset is followed by a thousand-hour night so cold that only an Extreme Environment Suit can preserve the life of anyone caught outside.

Fenris isn't a hell planet, but it's nobody's bargain. With 2,000-hour days and an 8,000-hour year, it alternates blazing heat with killing cold. A planet like that tends to breed a special kind of person: tough enough to stay alive and smart enough to make the best of it. When that kind of person discovers he's being cheated of wealth he's risked his life for, that kind of planet is ripe for revolution.

My Review: Fenris might not be the Garden Spot of the Galaxy, sort of like the future's equivalent of a "shithole country" in fact, but the men there are a hardy, self-sufficient lot. Yes, I said "men" and made no attempt to be inclusive. H. Beam Piper, the author, was born in 1903 and died of self-inflicted starvation due to absurd, overweening pride in 1964. He was a gun nut. He married once, and was divorced or separated from his wife in short order because he was convinced that she married him for money.

Not a likely feminist icon's profile. His writing and his attitudes show that. Strangely enough, though, there's an admixture of Powerful Woman hints that make me think his was a late-life learned misogyny.

So anyway, this 1961 tale from the Terro-Human Future History of Piper's creation never called to me. I assumed it would be all about the great-man theory of history that libertarians tend to like. It is, in a way; Steve Ravick, the successfully ensconced ruler of the economy on Fenris, is a master manipulator and born gangster, an exceptional man in all the wrong right ways. He lied successfully to the economic engines of Fenris, the workers, telling them how things were terrible and he'd have to fight Those Others just to give them half of what their labor got them before. He did this by cutting them off from any source of information he didn't like and insulting and belittling the one outlet he allows to remain in business. He reminds me of the Koch brothers and their stooge 45. Like, a lot.

What I didn't expect was to feel so nostalgic for the narrator of the story being a journalist. A young lad very eager to seek out The Truth and to be the one who, in [[H.L. Mencken]]'s memorable definition of a journalist's job, "afflicts the comfortable and comforts the afflicted." As a result he breaks the story of a lifetime. At seventeen! Of course, his dad owns the paper, but he's the one who found, followed, and shaped the story, which is the central trait of a born reporter.

Ultimately, the reason I enjoyed the read was the ending, wherein Right(s) and Reason prevail over caddish, greedy oligarchy. I was amused by the sixty-year-old vision of future technology, but charmed by the sixty-year-old faith in the ability of The People to rebel against unjust, unprincipled rulers. Piper's writing was serviceable, failing to ignite my passion in this book's telling. I was ignited by what was told. In a different political and economic climate I would've been pretty much uninterested in the tale.

Piper tends to lard his story with way too many names...characters we'll never meet have first and last names like one Oscar Fujisawa, the tall, blond Viking action hero of part of the story. Piper wants to make the point that, away from Earth and far into the future, names are just handy labels. Ethnicity is a relic, a distant and fading social construct. Like the idea, at least insofar as it makes plain the social system doesn't discriminate based on superficial qualities, but to give *every* minor character a first and last name with such a heavy significance makes this reader tired.

Still and all, despite low expectations, reading this elderly writer's surprisingly sanguine take on Humanity's future was a tonic. I'm glad I did it, and since the book is a whopping 99¢ on Kindle, I think you would be as well. ( )

I went through the gateway, towing my equipment in a contragravity hamper over my head. As usual, I was wondering what it would take, short of a revolution, to get the city of Port Sandor as clean and tidy and well lighted as the spaceport area. I knew Dad's editorials and my sarcastic news stories wouldn't do it. We'd been trying long enough.
The two girls in bikinis in front of me pushed on, still gabbling about the fight one of them had had with her boy friend [sic], and I closed up behind the half dozen monster-hunters in long trousers, ankle boots and short boat-jackets, with big knives on their belts. They must have all been from the same crew, because they weren't arguing about whose ship was fastest, had the toughest skipper, and made the most money. They were talking about the price of tallow-wax, and they seemed to have picked up a rumor that it was going to be cut another ten centisols a pound. I eavesdropped shamelessly, but it was the same rumor I'd picked up, myself, a little earlier.”

In “Four-Day Planet” by H. Beam Piper

I used to read/watch SF and was also always careful to be scandalized at how little regard the genre got until I realized that ... well ... an awful lot of it does suck. Or at least, an awful lot of it is an awful lot like an awful lot else. The same five characters, the same one plot. There's good stuff out there, but the signal to noise ratio is lower than almost any other genre of entertainment or literature. Vast, vast, vast swathes of the stuff is bug-eyed monsters, buzz-cuts with guns, female eye-candy, and explosions: the power fantasies of 15 year old boys, in other words. Okay okay, okay, there's some good stuff -- someone will always point out the celestial Octavia Butler or Ursula Le Guin -- but the fact remains, you need to swim through an ocean of silicone and lasers to get to the good stuff. And oftentimes, the target SF demographic (who are all too often a lot more like Comic Book Guy than they want to admit) who rushes to lay claim to writers like Butler and Le Guin to legitimize themselves in the eyes of the oppressive lit-critic are the same ones who sneer at the stuff when asked to turn away from their tits-and-explosions for three seconds to read something that doesn't posit a 1950s Ward-and-June sensibility transplanted into The Future. (I'd always heard how "revolutionary" and "incredible" Asimov's books were, as an example, and I was incredibly disappointed to open the things and find out that his stuff was just one whiter businessman with a briefcase coming home to a pearl-necklace-wearing housewife who said hi-honey-how-was-your-day. Revolutionary? More stodgy and unimaginative to me, it reeked of the dust of the past even at the time it was written.) Even the supposedly "mind-blowing" 2001 movie could posit such "incredible" and "imaginative" things as enormous space babies and colonies on the moon but couldn't do any better than false-eyelash-wearing Space Stewardesses when it came to social imagination. Even at the time that stuff was dusty and stale. And SF is still no better. Again, sure, you can always flap Butler and Tiptree in people's faces, but they are plainly not in the mainstream and are often only mentioned by the core demographic as a means of telling people who call them out on their dull social imaginations to STFU. The ONLY time your typical white-guy SF geek even acknowledged the existence of a novel like "Kindred" is to shut up someone who asks why all the women in modern SF are housewives, harpies, or underwear models. And I can bet you a steak dinner that that same geek hasn't even read it.

In all honesty though, I don't feel any more generous toward fiction of any kind. It's all the same five characters and the same one plot after a while. That's what nonfiction is for -- for when a reader gets sick of the smoothed-out predictability of fiction and wants to see what happens when stuff's actually not within any given "protagonist's" control. For me the problem is not the bad science. It's the bad fiction. But the best SF is, in its very different way, as good as the best literary fiction: that is, it enriches our culture and our lives just as deeply, though sometimes by rather different routes...

And that’s why I love reading vintage SF, the good and the bad. The appeal for me for has always been so I can learn more about what influenced the books that were written today and not for their own sake. Everything comes from somewhere, every author was influenced by some other author, and I enjoy these connections. Reading Vintage SF is like having a conversation with my grandmother, and watching her make the same hand motions as my Mom makes. Today’s SF is the descendants of what came before. Reading currently every Science Fiction anthology I own, just before I will chuck them all out (but the Stanislaw Lem/Robert Sheckley/ Ray Bradbury/ William Gibson/ Robert Silverberg and a few others stay!) Some of them, specifically from the 50-60, are truly awful (remember E.E. “Doc” Smith? Ah, EE Smith's coruscating beams of force ... he introduced these early on in every one of his novels, and then every couple of chapters would want to up the ante, so would have to try and outdo his earlier description, and they would become ravening beams of unimaginable pure power…), but you can still find some hidden gems like this one from H. Beam Piper. Piper has always been one of my favourite vintage SF authors. With Piper it is interesting how a specific subject of science (which is still Fiction) changes. But "science-fiction" is just a catch-all phrase for speculative fiction (SF), not an enforceable limitation. I read a lot of SF, all the way from junk/pulp through to the serious hard-science stuff and the only complaint I ever have about any individual book is if it's badly written. Some of the more glaring errors and redundant theories raise an eye-brow (I love H. P. Lovecraft despite plate tectonics being fifty years in his future and all his mentions of luminiferous aether...) but what the hell, if it's a good book it's a good book. H. Beam Piper wrote a good with SF book no fillers or infodumps at a time when it was very difficult to produce stuff above average.

I also read vintage SF for nostalgia, and that’s awesome as well.

SF = Speculative Fiction. ( )

I find these 'visions of the future' written back in the 50s quite interesting really. Whilst this story was a little slower at the beginning than some of HB Piper's other works it got up and moving about 1/4 of the way through and was a good read overall. ( )

Kid reporter! Mixed up in an uprising against a despot! Oh past future, you and your science-y vision of the newspaper world, with easily portable film cameras that relay back to the paper offices, and laser and UV plate engraving, to be cut out and hand pasted up. Mind you, two years after I worked hand paste up for the yearbook, I was using computers to lay out the school paper—while simultaneously taking an advanced graphics course that taught hand paste up. Sidebar: the word in the industry is that the current generation of journalism majors graduating are going to have to be re-taught, because they're learning what isn't used any more and the industry doesn't know what it needs yet. Awkward. But the story. Allusions to Moby Dick, which I've now so read. The introduction to how Piper sees ethnicity in the future, incredibly mixed in unpredictable ways (there's a guy with a very Japanese name who is very Scottish looking, as a small example). Generally impressed by how well Piper can handle non-Terra kind of worlds in believable ways. Said planet goes through four day and night rotations in about one Terran year. Crazy weather stuff. ( )