EVERYONE ON POICTESME BELIEVES IN MERLIN

This is a problem.

The planet Poictesme used to matter.

During the great interstellar wars it was covered in military bases, depots, factories, command centres and enough expensive machinery to make accountants wake sweating several centuries later.

Then the war ended.

The soldiers left.

The money left.

The industries collapsed.

What remained was a planet-sized scrapyard full of abandoned military technology and people desperately remembering when things were better.

There is, however, one hope.

Somewhere on Poictesme, supposedly buried beneath the ruins of the old war, lies Merlin: the Fleet-Army Force Brain, a strategic supercomputer powerful enough to transform the planet's fortunes.

Everyone knows Merlin exists.

Everyone knows finding it will make Poictesme rich again.

Everyone has been waiting for somebody to discover where it is.

So the people of Poictesme scrape together enough money to send Conn Maxwell off-world to study on Terra and find the secret location of Merlin.

Years later, Conn comes home.

He has indeed discovered the truth.

Unfortunately, the truth is the one thing his entire planet cannot afford to hear.

Graveyard of Dreams is a classic H. Beam Piper science-fiction novelette about collapsed economies, technological mythology, nostalgia, political expediency and the dangerous things people will believe when hope becomes more useful than evidence.

This unabridged audiobook edition, read by Felbrigg Napoleon Herriot, runs for 49 minutes and 41 seconds.

THE JUNKYARD PLANET

Poictesme is one of the great settings of mid-century science fiction.

Not because it is gleaming.

Because it isn't.

The planet has already had its golden age.

Everywhere are remnants of the war economy: abandoned installations, warehouses, machinery, weapons, vehicles and the industrial carcass of a civilisation built to serve a conflict which ended long ago.

There is still enormous wealth lying around.

The problem is that everybody wants the wealth they imagine is buried underneath it.

Merlin.

The mythical computer.

The machine which supposedly directed vast fleets and armies during the System States War.

A machine so sophisticated that people have spent generations convincing themselves it can solve virtually anything.

Economic decline?

Merlin will fix it.

Industrial stagnation?

Merlin.

Poverty?

Merlin.

The future?

Merlin knows.

It has become less a piece of military hardware than a secular messiah made out of electronics.

Which would be awkward enough if Conn Maxwell had not gone away and discovered that the whole story is almost certainly bollocks.

COMING HOME WITH BAD NEWS

Conn is returning from Terra after years away.

Everybody expects answers.

His family expects answers.

Businessmen expect answers.

Politicians expect answers.

Ordinary people have effectively invested in him as the man who will come home and tell them where salvation is buried.

He cannot simply walk down the ramp and announce:

“Sorry. No giant computer.”

For one thing, people will not believe him.

More importantly, Poictesme's hope in Merlin has become economically and socially useful in its own right.

The dream is doing work.

People invest because of it.

They organise because of it.

They tolerate hardship because one day, surely, somebody will find the machine and everything will become easy again.

Conn's problem is therefore much nastier than merely correcting a mistaken fact.

He has to decide what to do when an entire society depends upon something that probably isn't true.

That gives Graveyard of Dreams considerably more weight than the straightforward treasure-hunt science fiction its premise initially suggests.

THE SUPERCOMPUTER AS RELIGION

Merlin is fascinating precisely because it spends much of the story functioning as an idea rather than a machine.

Nobody has seen it.

Nobody knows exactly where it is.

Reliable records are absent.

The people who supposedly knew the truth are gone.

Nevertheless, belief in Merlin is practically universal.

That belief has grown because it solves an emotional problem.

Poictesme is poor because history moved on without it.

That is painful.

Merlin offers another explanation.

Poictesme is merely temporarily poor.

Its true wealth is waiting underground.

The planet is not a failed former military economy.

It is a treasure chest whose key has been misplaced.

That is a much nicer story.

People often prefer nice stories.

Especially when they have had a generation or two to become institutions.

H. BEAM PIPER AND THE FUTURE AS HISTORY

Piper's science fiction often feels unusually historical.

Empires rise.

Empires decay.

Trade routes change.

Governments collapse.

Technology survives the societies which built it.

People living among the ruins rarely understand the past as well as they think they do.

He treats the future less like a succession of shiny inventions and more like another stretch of human history.

That gives Poictesme its texture.

The planet is not merely “post-apocalyptic” in the usual sense.

Nothing especially apocalyptic happened there.

The economy simply stopped being important.

The war ended elsewhere.

Demand disappeared.

Military expenditure dried up.

People who had built their lives around a huge temporary economic boom discovered that temporary meant temporary.

That is considerably more mundane than a nuclear holocaust.

It is also, in some ways, more believable.

THERE IS STILL WEALTH EVERYWHERE

One of the central ironies is that Poictesme really is sitting on a fortune.

Just not the one people want.

The abandoned military infrastructure is full of machines, industrial equipment, vehicles, weapons, electronics and salvage.

There is a vast amount of real, useful capital lying around.

But it is ordinary.

It requires work.

Someone has to identify it, recover it, repair it, transport it, sell it and build industries around it.

Merlin offers something much more attractive.

A miracle.

Why build an economy when you can find the box which tells you how to become rich?

Why spend years creating businesses when the great machine can provide the answer?

The difference between those two ideas sits right at the centre of the story.

One requires effort.

The other requires faith.

Human beings have historically shown a certain enthusiasm for the latter.

CONN MAXWELL HAS A PROBLEM

Conn therefore returns to a society whose defining belief he no longer shares.

That makes him an awkward kind of protagonist.

He knows more than the people around him, but knowing more does not give him an easy answer.

Telling the truth may destroy hope without providing anything to replace it.

Lying may keep people moving.

Encouraging the search for Merlin might even produce useful consequences regardless of whether Merlin exists.

Suddenly the central question becomes uncomfortable.

If a false belief causes people to act in ways which improve their lives, what exactly is the responsible thing to do?

Tell them the truth?

Protect the useful lie?

Use the myth?

Replace it gradually?

Piper does not need alien monsters or laser duels to create the dilemma.

He gives Conn a planet full of people who desperately need him to tell them something untrue.

That will do.

FROM SHORT STORY TO THE COSMIC COMPUTER

Graveyard of Dreams first appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction in February 1958.

Piper later returned to the material and expanded it substantially into the novel The Cosmic Computer, published in 1963 and originally titled Junkyard Planet.

The longer novel develops Poictesme, Merlin, Conn Maxwell and the economic revival of the planet much further.

That makes Graveyard of Dreams interesting in two different ways.

It works perfectly well as a compact science-fiction story in its own right.

It is also the earlier form of one of Piper's better-known novels.

You can hear the central idea before it accumulated the extra machinery of a full-length book.

For readers already familiar with The Cosmic Computer, that makes this something of a literary fossil.

A very functional fossil.

One which still has arguments about economics inside it.

SCIENCE FICTION ABOUT ECONOMICS

There are spaceships.

There is lost military technology.

There is an alleged supercomputer.

But this is also science fiction about economic psychology.

Poictesme has resources but lacks confidence.

It has infrastructure but lacks markets.

It has technical knowledge but has fallen into stagnation.

Most importantly, its population has transferred its hopes for recovery onto a single mythical object.

The story asks what happens when the belief in a solution becomes almost as important as the solution itself.

That theme has aged remarkably well.

Humanity remains extremely fond of announcing that one new technology, one economic policy, one discovery or one sufficiently clever machine will remove the tedious necessity of solving complicated problems one at a time.

Merlin is simply a particularly large version.

AND YES, IT IS A COMPUTER

A “Fleet-Army Force Brain” sounds delightfully 1958.

Which it is.

Piper was writing during a period when electronic computers were transitioning from enormous specialised machines into something the public could begin imagining as transformative.

That imagination ran faster than the hardware.

Science fiction filled the gap.

The result was the supercomputer: vast, centralised, hidden inside fortified installations and capable of calculations far beyond ordinary human understanding.

Merlin belongs to that tradition.

It is not the pocket-sized artificial intelligence modern fiction might invent.

It is infrastructure.

A strategic machine built for war.

Something requiring an installation rather than an app.

That gives the story a pleasingly industrial quality.

Future technology still weighs several tons.

FELBRIGG NAPOLEON HERRIOT

This edition is read by Felbrigg Napoleon Herriot, whose FNH Audio catalogue includes a substantial amount of classic science fiction, pulp adventure and weird fiction.

His recording of Graveyard of Dreams also appears as part of the Sci Fi Shorts V8 collection alongside work by Harry Harrison, J. F. Bone, S. P. Meek, Anthony Gilmore and Murray Leinster.

Here, however, you get Piper's story on its own.

No anthology navigation.

No six-story commitment.

Just Conn Maxwell coming home to Poictesme carrying exactly the information nobody wants.

The reading is unabridged.

Nothing has been condensed into a dramatisation or modernised summary.

Piper's prose and ideas are allowed to do the work.

FORTY-NINE MINUTES AND FORTY-ONE SECONDS

There is something very pleasant about a science-fiction audiobook you can finish before forgetting why you started it.

49 minutes, 41 seconds.

That is enough time for Piper to establish Poictesme, Merlin and Conn's predicament without turning the story into a major scheduling commitment.

Put it on during a walk.

A commute.

Painting miniatures.

Cooking.

An evening with the lights down.

Or listen immediately before starting The Cosmic Computer and hear the original version of the idea first.

The story itself is compact.

The implications are not.

A PLANET WAITING FOR SOMEBODY ELSE TO SAVE IT

The sad thing about Poictesme is that its people are not fools.

Their belief in Merlin makes sense.

They remember prosperity.

They live among physical evidence of a greater age.

They know enormous military secrets were once buried across their world.

Somewhere along the way, a rumour about one strategic computer hardened into certainty.

That certainty became inheritance.

Parents taught it to children.

Children grew old waiting.

Hope became tradition.

By the time Conn returns, disproving Merlin is no longer like disproving a rumour.

It is like taking away somebody's future.

That is why the story works.

The problem is not finding a computer.

The problem is what human beings do when they have built their lives around finding one.

WHAT YOU GET

This digital audiobook edition contains:

• Graveyard of Dreams by H. Beam Piper

• Read by Felbrigg Napoleon Herriot

• Complete and unabridged

• 1 MP3 file

• 45.4 MB

• Runtime: 49 minutes 41 seconds

• English-language narration

• Digital download

The original story was published in Galaxy Science Fiction in February 1958 and later became the foundation for Piper's expanded 1963 novel The Cosmic Computer.

THE DREAM IS WORTH MORE THAN THE MACHINE

Conn Maxwell left Poictesme with a mission.

Find Merlin.

Come home.

Save the planet.

He comes back having discovered that reality has failed to cooperate with the plan.

Unfortunately, reality does not get a vote.

Everyone is waiting for him.

Everyone believes.

Everyone needs Merlin to be real.

And Conn may be the only man on Poictesme who knows better.

Graveyard of Dreams is classic H. Beam Piper: hard-headed science fiction about history, technology, economics and the lies people tell themselves when the alternative is admitting that the future will require work.

There may be no Merlin.

There is still a planet to save.