Larry Niven – MarzAat
Posts about Larry Niven written by marzaat
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MarzAat
Review: Flatlander, Larry Niven, 1995.

This is an expanded version of Niven’s early collection The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton and adds the novel The Patchwork Girl and “The Woman in Del Rey Crater”.

Hamilton is a policeman, an agent for the United Nations Amalgamated Regional Militia (ARM), and the crime he investigates is mainly organlegging. I probably don’t have to explain to you what that is. We often call it “organ theft”. You know the deal: the urban legends with a man waking up in a hotel room with a scar and a note saying he’s now missing a kidney. Under the color of law, it’s “organ harvesting” as when executed criminals in China are farmed out for spare parts or, even more darkly, people disappearing to supply the medical needs of some ailing CCP member. Indeed, the death van featured in what’s very likely the world’s creepiest PSA, “You Will Be Confirmed Dead in 130 Seconds”, seems there to make sure those parts are fresh.

In the collection’s “Afterword”, Niven says organlegging goes back to 1964 with organs taken from people executed in India. I haven’t been able to substantiate that, but you can certainly find plenty of news stories about the “organ trade” in India and Nepal these days. Even when this book was published, the Chinese government was doing it with executed prisoners, and the practice is more common now. Niven says people constantly send him stories about it and, indeed, the one time I met him, he mentioned he was involved with international organizations trying to stop the illegal trade.

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More stuff from the archive regarding Vernor Vinge though, in this case, he’s just a small part of a big anthology.

Raw Feed (2002): Explorers: SF Adventures to Far Horizons, ed. Gardner Dozois, 2000.

“Preface”, Gardner Dozois — Brief look at the theme of exploration stories in world literature and exploration stories in sf. Dozois notes that the theme wanes and blooms in interest amongst writers. Ironically, when real space exploration, at least of the manned variety, was winding down, space exploration stories in sf were picking up. They used the new scientific findings for romantic and adventure stories set in space like the old planetary romances used uncontradicted speculations.

“The Sentinel”, Arthur C. Clarke — This is at least the second time I’ve read this story which I did not remembered being set in 1996.

“Moonwalk”, H. B. Fyfe — A man against nature tale that reminded me strongly of Jack London, particularly his “Building a Fire”, and the true story of mountain man John Colter. This 1952 story has the sole survivor of a lunar tractor accident walking away from it, trying to find help from his fellow explorers far away before his oxygen gives out. (His wife is one of the members of the lunar base.) Fyfe even throws in some grandiose descriptions of the lunar landscape.

“Grandpa”, James H. Schmitz — The only other time I’ve read this story is about 25 years ago, but I remembered most of it. It’s still a clever story of the unraveling-a-deadly-secret-of-an-alien-ecosystem variety. It does, however, make me want to read more of Schmitz. He strikes me as just as clever at working out alien ecosystems.

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Review: Tsunami, Crawford Kilian, 1983.

Kilian’s Icequake turned out to be a surprising success. The author’s note on Kilian says it sold 300,000 copies worldwide. This isn’t really a sequel but a parallel story telling us what happened on the Pacific Coast of North America during the events of the previous novel.

Even more so than that book, I have the impression this book would not be published as is today. It’s a mere 218 pages long. It would probably be three times that length today or maybe even a series. Kilian, in that brief span, takes us from the events just before the tsunamis, triggered worldwide by large portions of the Antarctic ice shelf catastrophically sliding into the ocean, through the disintegration of the old order and a tentative rebuilding of civilization.

This book has a little more detail on the troubles of the the pre-tsunami world than Icequake did. We hear about the devastation the new solar flares are wrecking on electronics and communications. (Oddly, Kilian only has disruption and not the actual destruction of electronic devices. That may be because there were a lot less transistors and microchips about in 1983.) Agricultural has been greatly affected by the increased UV from the sun. Crops are withering. Cattle wander about blinded if not equipped with sunglasses. Activity has largely become nocturnal for people. There is an interesting racial component here in that blacks can move about easier in the daylight hours though even they need to wear sunglasses.

And things aren’t going to get better. Einar, a grad student in solar physics, says the recent solar flares have revealed new information about the sun. Its fusion has stopped, and it may be from 5,000 to 50,000 years before it starts again. An ice age is on the way.

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In keeping with looking at what my archives have to say on Frederik Pohl works, here’s a review of an anthology he appeared in.

Raw Feed (2000) Armageddons, eds Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, 1999.

“Preface”, Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois — Brief introduction to the anthology which talks about the beginnings of apocalyptic sf and how apocalyptic notions once relegated to mostly sf are now common thoughts in the public at large.

“Fermi and Frost”, Frederik Pohl — I’d heard of this story before. It’s relatively famous. Published originally in 1985, I suspect this is one of the sf stories to specifically evoke the idea of “nuclear winter” (though the term is not used). I don’t know how closely Pohl followed the scenario of Carl Sagan and other inventors of the idea of nuclear winter. For instance, I’d never heard of the destructive, soil destroying (via erosion) rains though they logically follow. Pohl chillingly lays out the details of his apocalyptic scenario, adds an interesting beginning where he lays out alternative fates for nine-year-old Timothy Clary – “But that is in fact what did happen!” he says after detailing an alternative where Clary survives (in Iceland which, given its volcanism, actually turns out to be one of the better places to survive nuclear war). Pohl adds a wry, cautionary note at story’s end where he details a plot development where man lives, survives, saves “the science and beauty of life” and greets aliens. But the story ends, “At least, one would like to think so.” Fermi is evoked in the title because the death of humanity is a possible answer to the Fermi Paradox. This isn’t a new idea. Carl Sagan proposed self-destruction as a reason why an alien civilization wouldn’t be around to communicate with us. This is a well-told story, but there’s nothing in here to really distinguish it from many another nuclear war story.

“A Desperate Calculus”, Gregory Benford — Gregory Benford had an article in Reason a few years ago very similar to this story (originally published under the name Sterling Blake, a Benford pseudonym I was unaware of). The premise behind both is that a group of environmentalists might decide to cure environmental degradation in the overpopulated, poor Southern hemisphere by introducing plagues. In the article, Benford postulated revived, lethal smallpox. Here, the environmentalists introduce (under cover as medical doctors, amongst other things) a disease that mostly renders women infertile. Mostly, but they’re willing to accept some collateral damage in deaths of the elderly. In both article and story, Benford postulates that the wealthy North won’t exactly rush aid to the South. At story’s end, the North has developed a vaccine against the plague but isn’t going to rush it to the South. In the article, Benford makes it clear he regards this scenario as plausible and probable and disapproves of such nasty tactics. (He, however, is worried about environmental degradation and lessening biodiversity. I’m sure he supports the idea, depicted in this story, of simply sweeping huge amounts of organisms in the threatened areas of the South and freezing them for possible DNA resurrection.) The morality of the story is much less clear (possibly because the plague is not intended to be lethal). The tone is more matter of fact and not moralizing, and much of the tale seems to be an exchange of letters between lovers Todd (working in the Bio-Salvage Program) and Amy (an epidemiologist) about their work against the backdrop of a spreading superflu. It is only at the end of the tale that we find out they are carriers of the superflu and that their correspondence is part of the coded communication of a conspiracy of about a 100. In the unlikely event that future bioterrorists are lacking in imagination, modern sf has provided a lot of plausible ideas – including this one – to try.

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Michael Flynn died on September 30th. He made quite an impression on me with one of his earlier tales, “Eifelheim” — a tale of alien contact in medieval Europe during the Black Plague. It was turned into a fine novel as well.

I always meant to read more of his novels, but those are his only two solo works I’ve read so far.

While Jerry Pournelle was alive, Flynn was a frequent commenter on his website and exhibited not only a professional’s knowledge of statistics but a deep knowledge of obscure medieval natural philosophy, some which prefigured twentieth century discoveries. And, of course, Flynn collaborated with Pournelle and Larry Niven on Fallen Angels.

Raw Feed (1991): In the Country of the Blind, Michael Flynn, 1990.

This book features implausible hypnoconditioning turning unsuspecting individuals into disposable pawns (I suspect this is as much a stock feature of modern espionage tales as double agents which this book also features a plethora of); an annoying, little explained rescue of Red Malone and Sarah Beaumont by Janie Hatch at, of course, the opportune cliffhanging moment; an obvious plot twist (Alan Selkirk being a double agent), a somewhat inconclusive ending (How is cliology going to impact society? Will its secret be released so the general public can do it? Will a confederation, a secret cabal, of cliologists be formed?), and aa plot rife with coincidence (Namely an individual with Sarah Beaumont’s talents making much of Brady Quinn’s scrap of notes after finding it. I suppose, though, the Secret Innocently Discovered plot must be granted the initial presumption of coincidence to work), characters alternately brilliant (like Sarah) and somewhat slow (in her objections to cliology which Red Malone has obvious answers for. Also, Jim Doang seems alternately brilliant and slow when he discovers the mathematical truth of cliology but doesn’t, as Vane does, see the analogy to physical laws.

All that said, I liked this book and thought it was well done.

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Review: The Cosmic Computer, H. Beam Piper, 1963.

Published in 1963 under the far better title Junkyard Planet, this was an expansion of Piper’s “Graveyard of Dreams”. Like Four-Day Planet, it’s a juvenile novel though with a protagonist older than the usual works in that genre. While Piper did not find the writing of it quite as easy as Four-Day Planet, it was a relatively easy process for him and, to his surprise, it sold well as that other novel.

Besides the System States War with the Federation, which John F. Carr in Typewriter Killer sees as an American Civil War analog, the main historical analogy here is the Melanesian cargo cults which sprang up after Allied armed forces left various Pacific islands after the completion of World War Two. (I wonder, before Steven Barnes’ and Larry Niven’s Dream Park, if this is the first use of cargo cults in science fiction.)

The story is set on the planet Poictesme. The planet’s name is an allusion to one of Piper’s favorite authors, James Branch Cabell. (In the story, we’re told that the Surromanticist Movement, which was rediscovering the “romantic writers of the pre-Atomic Era”, named a bunch of planets after literary works.)

The hero is Conn Maxwell, returning to Poictesme after a six-month voyage from Terra where he was at university studying computer science for six years.

Things have changed on Poictesme in his absence. On the penultimate stop at the world’s capital of Storisende, Conn learns there is mass unemployment on the planet, ten men for every job. Gangs armed with shotguns and tommy guns raid merchants coming to pick things up at the spaceport. Some have also taken to piracy like Blackie Perales’ gang which even stole the spaceship Harriet Barne six months ago, and it hasn’t been seen since. The town of Storisende has offered a reward, dead or alive, for pirates in their city limits, and hasn’t been troubled since.

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Raw Feed (2006): The Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham, 1951.

Brian Aldiss referred to the work of John Wyndham as “cosy catastrophe”. I don’t think, in retrospect, he meant that the disasters of Wyndham’s works are improbably nice and clean. I think he was referring to the narrative strategy Wyndham used in this and The Kraken Awakes: first person narratives centering around one or two individuals who have limited knowledge and explanation of the disaster they face. For instance, the narrator here has no definite proof that the blindness which strikes most of humanity is the result of satellite weapons — an interesting idea for the beginning of the satellite age — or that the lethal plague which breaks out after the blindness is an engineered disease — and limited means of dealing with it. This stands in direct contrast to the best-seller idiom of later American works like Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s Lucifer’s Hammer. (I don’t know enough about styles of the time to know if something similar to Niven and Pournelle existed in disaster fiction prior to this book.)

John Christopher, another English writer from the time, fits into this style, and a prior American work, George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides, does too. In fact, as the story progresses and we hear about how the houses and roads and bridges of England were being eroded away by nature, I was very much reminded of Stewart’s novel. Tonally and thematically, though, there is nothing cozy or comfortable about this novel. There is something very visceral about the blinding of most of humanity, an unclean disaster that requires, for disaster fiction, an unusual amount of lifeboat ethics in that the narrator and some of his fellow survivors realize they are not doing the blind any good by temporarily saving them from death.

Wyndham’s genius, of course, is combining the blindness with the “invasion” of genetically engineered, ambulatory, poisonous triffids. As with Wyndham’s Re-Birth and The Midwich Cuckoos, we are constantly reminded of the Darwinian struggle for life, of competing species and supplanters in our midst. As the narrator memorably remarks in a book of many memorable, philosophical lines, custom and tradition have been long mistaken for natural law.

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The Charles Sheffield series continues.

Raw Feed (1997): Georgia on My Mind and Other Places, ed. Charles Sheffield, 1995.

”Introduction” — Short, no nonsense, no-frill introduction for a collection of stories ranging from “silly to personal and serious.”

”The Feynman Solution” — This is a fantasy. The mechanism of time travel is never rationalized beyond the point of artist Colin Trantham saying he’s a sort of positron which physicist Richard Feynman described as an electron traveling back in time. The story involves Colin, suffering from a brain tumor (the major scientific interest of the story is the descriptions of cancer therapies, their successes, methods of operation, and failings) and seeing visions of increasingly ancient and mostly extinct life which he draws with his usual precision. The relationship between Colin and his paleontologist sister Julia and his oncologist James Wollaston (eventually Julia’s lover) was well handled. The Tranthams, like Bey Wolf in Sheffield’s Proteus novels, love to quote all kinds of things from Samuel Johnson to movies. I suspect Sheffield does this too.

”The Bee’s Kiss” — Like Sheffield’s “C-Change”, this story involves aliens who are concealing things. A very skilled voyeur is forced by a tyrant (after the voyeur is caught spying on him) to spy on some enigmatic aliens, the Sigil. It turns out the aliens have become alarmed after learning humans use sexual reproduction. The Sigil are asexual and use a parasitic means to reproduce like Earth’s sphinx wasp. This story has good psychological insight into a voyeur. Continue reading →

The Michael Moorcock series continues not with sword-and-sorcery but science fiction.

Raw Feed (1999): The Roads Between the Worlds, Michael Moorcock, 1964, 1971.

“Introduction” — An interesting introduction in which Moorcock not only talks about the three novels in this omnibus but his relation to sf. Moorcock cites Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination and The Demolished Man as an influence which made me eager to read the novels in this omnibus. Moorcock has said he doesn’t have a lot of interest in “modern sf” but liked the works of Fritz Leiber, Philip K. Dick, and the Frederick Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth collaborations. This explains his dislike of Larry Niven and Robert Heinlein. He doesn’t like conservative sf with its preeminence of rationalizing with hard science its fantasy elements. For him, sf (he’s hardly alone in this nor is it an illegitimate stance) is a way to understand our world. The fantasy element in his sf is both a symbol as well as a device to move the story. He says these three novels trace the evolution of the “rationalist apparatus” of sf from “stage machinery” to symbolic writings. Moorcock also, as I didn’t know, worked as a writer for the British Liberal Party for awhile. These novels were written in one draft and very slightly revised for this edition. Evidently, they were written in a hurry to provide more traditional far for the experimental magazines Science Fiction Adventures and New Worlds.

The Wrecks of Time — I liked this novel a lot more than I thought I would. Its plot of Earths being built and destroyed and altered (and the inhabitants amnesiac about the alteration of their planet’s geography) reminded me of Philip K. Dick’s themes of what is reality and simulating it. The scheming groups of D-Squads and aliens obsessed with recreating the society that birthed them reminded me of A. E. van Vogt (also an influence on Dick). Continue reading →

The Jerry Pournelle series concludes with one of my favorite Niven and Pournelle collaborations, and, I think a book of some political prescience.

The desire to retreat from crime and social chaos is still with us: gated communities and billionaires buying bolt holes in New Zealand, and survivalist compounds in South Dakota.

And Alphabet’s plans for its workers sounds like a return to feudalism which, of course, is what this book is about.

This is the only work of Niven’s or Pournelle’s to appear in David Pringle’s Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels (1985).

Pringle exhibits a bit of snark in his capsule review of the novel when he says

. . . memories of J. G. Ballard’s High-Rise intrude; but that is a novel which Niven and Pournelle are unlikely to have read.

I suspect that’s true of Pournelle, but Niven’s essay, “The Words in Science Fiction“, hints at fairly broad tastes in the genre.

This was the next novel Niven and Pournelle started after The Mote in God’s Eye, but it was put aside for other novels.

For the 2008 edition, they wrote an introduction, but I have not read it.

If you go to Pournelle’s website and patiently read the search results for “Oath of Fealty”, you’ll find many references to people still thinking about an urban arcology as a shelter in turbulent times.

Raw Feed (1998): Oath of Fealty, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, 1981.

This book was certainly shorter and better than the last Niven and Pournelle collaboration I read, Footfall.

It also stands as the most explicit endorsement of feudalism, a theme which appears in much of Pournelle’s solo work, particularly the John Christian Falkenberg series and a type of corporate feudalism of this novel also shows up in Pournelle’s High Justice (another title seemingly derived from medieval law) and, in a milder, more implicit way in Pournelle’s collaboration with Charles Sheffield, Higher Education.

The title derives from the medieval feudal oath between vassal and lord, and the novel’s plot of Todos Santos fighting for legal and economic independence from LA broadly reflects similar struggles between towns and medieval lords. [Yes, I’m aware that some medievalists argue that feudalism never existed. I just don’t accept the argument.]

That independence is never truly achieved. Indeed, Los Angeles’ reliance on Todos Santos (an emerging economic and social unit like the medieval towns) economically is used as leverage against the city. Continue reading →