Tag: Larry Niven

Tales of Known Space

I’ve been making a lot of progress on the “launch” story for the new fictional universe over the past two weeks, but started to notice that the text was a bit academic. I figured this was due to not reading any fiction for a while, so I set aside The Master and His Emissary (yet again – it’s slow going), and picked up my old, old copy of Larry Niven’s anthology, Tales of Known Space.

Niven was one of the first science fiction authors that I ever read*, and along with Heinlein (who I didn’t discover until I was 17) was long my favorite author in the genre. But after a while, and for very different reasons, both lost their luster – Niven because of his Eternal 1968 Southern California fixation**, Heinlein because I couldn’t un-read his biography.

While there was a bit of that fixation evident in ToKS, I was surprised at how very different some of his early stories were in tone and style to those which came only a few years later. “Becalmed in Hell” and the three Mars stories, “Eye of an Octopus”, “How the Heroes Die”, and “At the Bottom of a Hole” (all published 1965-66) had the feel of Arthur C. Clarke stories. Contrast this with “Cloak of Anarchy” (1972), which displays pretty much all of Niven’s characteristic themes and elements (“A Relic of the Empire” from 1968, which is not in this anthology, shows his distinct style even earlier).

I think Niven was a good choice of an example for tightening up my own fiction, given how much detail he seems to pack into few words. “Eye of an Octopus”, for example, is quite short as short stories go, yet covers a lot of ground: introducing his (ultimately doomed) Martians, partially explaining why Mars is bypassed in the Known Space future history, laying the groundwork for the two sequel stories, etc., mixed in with some plausible xenoarchaeology and a bit of unexpectedly exciting biochemistry.

Writing technique aside, the story that stood out for me the most was “How the Heroes Die”. I don’t remember reading it before, so much so that it felt like an instance of the Mandela Effect. I’ve been immersed in Current Year for so long that I got to the reveal of why John Carter (no, not that one) murdered Lew Harness, and bust up laughing. Not only could I not remember having read that before, I couldn’t believe that I had never once encountered any outrage about it, nor calls for Niven’s cancellation. Sure, it was published in 1966, but when has the passage of time ever stopped presentists from denouncing someone for expressing then-ordinary-now-problematic notions?

* – The first science fiction book I recall reading was Lucifer’s Hammer. In fifth grade. Imagine a Current Year govskool teacher’s scandalized reaction to finding one of her precocious inmates reading a post-apocalypse novel where Black Power militants join forces with Army deserters to pillage the ruins of civilization while eating the survivors – and aren’t the protagonists.

** – “Shall we indulge in yet another tedious narrative dump about overpopulation, strange hair/beard styles, and sexual freedom?“

Ringworld on Amazon

This is interesting news – Amazon is adapting Ringworld:

“Ringworld,” a co-production with MGM, is based on Larry Niven’s sci-fi book series from the 70’s. It tells the story of Louis Gridley Wu, a bored man celebrating his 200th birthday in a technologically-advanced, future Earth. Upon being offered one of the open positions on a voyage, Louis joins a young woman and two aliens to explore Ringworld, the remote artificial ring beyond “Known Space.”

It’s nice to see SF adaptations being made from books I’ve actually read for a change. It’s anyone’s guess whether it will actually turn out well (I think it will be challenging, both to make the story work on the screen and to represent the setting both accurately and compellingly), or whether Amazon will look at the projected budget necessary to pull it off and back off instead. But given how good a job they’ve done with The Man in the High Castle, I’m willing to get my hopes up for this one.

What’s interesting, though, is that Ringworld is not a very long story. I could see it filling out ten episodes…but then what? Do they do all this work developing the backstory of Known Space and a couple of its recurring characters just for a single season, or do they continue on with the other Ringworld books, and perhaps branch out into the other stories and novels set in the Known Space universe?

That has some interesting potential, and is akin to my thoughts after re-reading The Mote in God’s Eye this summer. It struck me then that the Co-Dominium universe (and particularly the period in which the Mote novels and King David’s Spaceship are set) is ripe for adaptation as a series in the High Castle format. Only, instead of telling the Mote stories right away, build up through a combination of existing and new material over the first 10-12 episode season. These episodes could include KDS, along with the revolt and suppression of New Chicago, leading up to a cliffhanger involving the appearance of the Crazy Eddie Probe and setting the stage for a second season based entirely on TMIGE. The early episodes gradually introduce the technology, future history, and sociopolitical setting along the way, so that narrative dumps don’t bog down the main story later on.

We’ll have to wait a year and see how it turns out, if it makes it to the screen in the end.

Everything Old is Even Older Again

Contra Naomi Klein… dystopian fiction was popular in the 1970s, too:

…Naomi Klein apparently has no idea whatsoever that the 1970s was probably the Golden Age of Dystopian fiction, Eco-collapse edition.  Including, I might add, a lot of overconfident predictions about global warming that never actually happened.  In fact, pretty much none of the things that were worried about then – overpopulation, choking pollution, the loss of every species less hardy than the cockroach, nuclear war, mass famine, running out of oil, running out of water, running out of air, and of course the obligatory dictatorships made up of the authors’ least favorite American social groups – didn’t actually happen, either.

Funny, I noticed this zeitgeist while re-reading some 1970s Larry Niven recently. Overpopulation in particular seems to have been a major theme of 1970s science fiction, much as mainstream SF today obsesses over “global warming”. The only thing new in what Klein notes as a new thing is that the popular dystopias of today involve young adults.

I disagree with Lane, though, in his assessment of The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s not that Atwood’s predictions were spectacularly wrong, it’s that she cast as the implementers of her dystopian future the religion she personally dislikes rather than the religion which actually implements the horrors she predicts in contemporary reality.

“Destiny’s Road”

So much potential, and it’s actually pretty decent, but having done some writing of my own since I last read it (July 1997), it suffers in the re-reading.

Don’t get me wrong, the prose is nice, the worldbuilding is interesting (there’s less of the everywhere-is-California feel to this than many of Niven’s other books…I suspect parts of it are even based on Icelandic terrain), and in bits and pieces and then a big data-dump, he gives a bunch of tantalizing detail linking together and fleshing out the Rammer/Heorot/Smoke Ring universe.

It’s just that it had no soul.

I don’t know how else to put it. Jemmy the protagonist goes from place to place, gets up to crazy adventures, but nothing seems to affect him very deeply. For example (spoiler): his wife of twenty seven years dies as a result of a freak accident, and he just shrugs and moves on…as he has with everything else in his life. The character comes across at times as emotionally shallow verging on sociopathic, which is kinda hard to relate to in a protagonist.

And beyond that, from the moment Jemmy makes his escape from the caravan about 40% of the way into the book, the plot goes off the rails. The entire sequence in the Windfarm is baffling, and all through it I was asking myself What is this? Where did this come from? Who gives a crap about this stuff and these people? Am I still reading the same novel? Then they all escape, and Jemmy escapes from the escapees, and then…it’s twenty-seven years later. What? What was the point of that baffling and Brian-in-the-alien-spaceship-like digression? It suffered from the same problem as Prometheus: there was good material, but it seemed like portions of the story necessary for it to make sense had been cut out. Editing may be to blame here – there were a number of glaring editing mistakes (e.g.: stating that Destiny has no polar caps, then a page and a half later referring to Destiny’s polar caps), so perhaps something essential actually did get cut out.

Not Niven’s best work, unfortunately. But I would happily read more stories set in this universe – we’ve already had two novels and a short story concerning the Avalon colony, and the third colony whose information Jemmy is unable to access presumably becomes the Smoke Ring colony, which has figured in two novels. The “hydraulic empire” that has emerged in Earth’s system by the time of Destiny’s Road is seen in “Rammer” (the short story that became A World Out of Time), but is not a positive future. It seems to me that a second Destiny novel would be in order, perhaps one explaining what happened to the Argo and what becomes of the settlements on the Crab after Jemmy does what he does at the end of the first novel. Or possibly a prequel, covering the events of the arrival of the original settlers, the mutiny, the collapse of Base One, etc. Or maybe something far into the future, when Destiny has fully matured, Earth technology has been fully recovered, the Otterfolk are somehow made ‘portable’…or another ship from Earth arrives, bearing a detachment of Checkers…