A Hole in Space
Larry Niven Dean Ellis
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    for readers. The Perfect The invention of displacement booths produced one hell of a crime wave. If a ma…
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August 15, 2017

A Hole in Space was one of Niven's best early collections, with stories from several of his best-known and most popular universes. It can be argued that Niven was more effective in those days as a short fiction writer than he was as a novelist, because he could throw his ideas out to challenge and engage the reader without bothering overmuch with complex plot or character motivation. He was always one of the best thinking-persons writers.

April 1, 2020

This is an early collection of short stories from 1968 - 1974 by Larry Niven. Most of them deal with human teleportation via displacement booths. There are nine stories and one essay, including: Rammer, The Alibi Machine, The Last Days of the Permanent Floating Riot Club, A Kind of Murder, All the Bridges Rusting, There Is a Tide, Bigger Than Worlds (essay), $16,940.00, The Hole Man (winner, 1975 Hugo Award; 1975 Locus Poll Award, Best Short Story (Place: 2)), The Fourth Profession (nominated, 1972 Hugo Award). Well worth the read for fans of Larry Niven.

July 25, 2016

A collection of short (and not so short) stories by Niven. Quite a few recurring themes, but all are exceptionally well written, fun, and mildly educational (although I reserve my doubts about some of his math.

Also, to quote one of my friends, "heh, heh, A-hole in space".

August 11, 2012

Pretty great Larry Niven short story collection, mostly focusing on the problems created by the invention and popularization of "displacement Booths" AKA teleportation as mass transit. For all you nerds out there...this collection only kinda fits into Niven's KNOWN SPACE series.

Stories of note in this collection:

RAMMER: a man who had himself cryogenically frozen wakes up to find himself in a very different future then he could ever imagine.

THE LAST DAYS OF THE PERMANENT FLOATING RIOT CLUB: In a world with teleportation, in was only a matter of time before petty criminals found a way to profit from it...at least for a time.

$16,940.00: Like Hemingway's the killers this one scene crime story gives you just enough to leave you intrigued, but gives you any answers...

June 27, 2013

Yet another freebie from the "Y". I love their book table. This copy was the 1974 paperback, not even sure if the book is still in print. No ISBN barcode, the books listed in the back were only $1.25. It was a simpler time.

There are 10 stories in this collection. Two of them are basically essays about the economics of space travel, one from the standpoint of what to do when you have to rescue a lost expedition and one about how star ships can scale up in size (including Dyson spheres and Niven's own Ringworld). The others are fictions surrounding the basic theme of teleportation and the issue that arise. Well worth checking out.

Finished : 6/26/2013

February 17, 2019

[Corrupt] Online text, https://www.scribd.com/document/10096...

First pub 1973, Vertex. Reprints: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cg...

I must have read this, but the first para or 2 aren’t familiar….

Maybe not: “There had been displacement booths in 2004: the network of passenger teleportation had already replaced other forms of transportation over most of the world.… ” Heh. We’re running late, here in 2019!

Puzzle story, and not a particularly good one. Stalled, probably headed for DNF. Not horrible, but way off his best! 2-stars at 1/3 in. OK: Officially DNF. For diehard fans only/

August 5, 2013

A fantastic collection of short stories - I too like the idea of displacement booths, but for the vision of wide, empty streets with no cars whizzing along them. Probably my favourite two stories were the last two - "The Hole Man" is quite a scary thought of how just a small black hole could swallow a planet, a solar system. And "The Fourth Profession" was actually quite funny.

September 23, 2017

I first read this as a kid. I know I started reading Niven with a short story collection but I'm not sure if it was this or The Flight of the Horse. I think it was this.

When I started reading it this time around it was because a) my reading had stalled and I wanted to kick-start it with something familiar, and b)I had a hankering for a particular story (The Fourth Profession).

Which might be ways of excusing the fact that this book isn't that great but I read it anyway. I'm not sure if you were completely new to his work this would be a good place to start. Unless you were into that era of SciFi as a retro thing.

As with a lot of old scifi it's amusing what is still futuristic and what's old fashioned. A world where teleportation is real but people still type up notes on paper. A world where interstellar space travel is possible but computers take up a floor of a building.

That rating is a bit misleading because it's a bit of an average, so let's do a breakdown:

Rammer - a 20th century man who had his body frozen is awakened in the 22nd century in another body and trained as a spaceship pilot. Probably my favourite of the collection. It was later expanded to become A World Out of Time which is also a favourite of mine. 8/10

The Alibi Machine - The first of four teleportation stories in this book. It deals with the idea that in a world where you can "flick" long distances alibis almost become useless, in the time you take to pop to the loo you could travel somewhere and kill someone. Like a lot of Niven's stories this is about exploring what that would mean and how we might adapt, but the story itself lacks bite. 5/10

The Last Days of the Permanent Floating Riot Club - Great title, so-so story. This deals with the idea that teleportation would lead to "flash mobs" whenever something interesting happened (cos if you can just 'flick' there why not?) which would lead to pick-pocketing and looting. The "last days" of the title is about how the authorities figure out a way to deal with this. 6/10

A Kind of Murder - Covers a lot of the same ground as The Alibi Machine, probably because they were originally published separately I guess, but the twist here is - is there a kind or type of murder that would become more common if teleportation was available. Also, the way the murderer attempted to cover his tracks is another feature of the tech. 6/10

All The Bridges Rusting - the effects of teleportation on space travel. But also what happens when you're dealing with years- or decades-long missions and the tech improves during that time. You can start later and arrive first. You can probably do that anyway depending on the mechanics of the flights. That in part is what this is about and I didn't follow the physics closely enough, didn't really try to be honest, to really enjoy it. Another good title though. 4/10

There is a Tide - A man on a long solo space trip finds what he takes to be a valuable artefact, a stasis box left by a former civilisation. However he discovers he's not the only one to find it. I think of this story a lot because it contains the phrase, "though he had never realized it until now, his system for saving fuel was based on the assumption that he would never find a Slaver box". The idea of doing something to optimize a process that only works as an optimization if the goal is never achieved feels like something I do a lot. 6/10

Bigger Than Worlds - Not a story but an essay about a series of alternatives to living on a planet, generation ships, Dyson spheres and or course Ringworld. Interesting.

6/10

$16,940.00 - story of being blackmailed for an oddly specific sum. Nothing SciFi about this at all. Very slight idea really. 5/10

The Hole Man - an expedition to Mars to explore a long-abandoned alien base there goes awry when one man finds something very unusual. 6/10

The Fourth Profession - a bar man spends an evening serving an alien drinks and gets a very strange bargain. This was the story I wanted to read. I like it because it's not just based on a SciFi premise but it's told in an interesting way - it's starts the morning after and we find out what happened slowly. I would say it pushes its premise over from science speculation into almost magic but that's OK the story earns it. It's a little sexist but mostly because of its time, its heart is basically in the right place. 8/10

I think reading this reminds me of some of Niven's strengths and weaknesses. He's big on concept and weaker on character. He can do plot but sometimes gets distracted with the world-building. But he never just writes a story with time machines or space ships as backdrop, they're always about the implications of the technology.

So overall a couple of strong stories that I enjoyed reading and the rest were ok or even poor. But the good ones also add up to nearly half the book and the book is short, so it was worth reading the whole thing so I can mark it as another book read.

October 14, 2019

This is a collection of several of Larry Niven’s early short stories. These suffer a lot from the time they were written in the way they portray women. Some of the speculation about tech is just wrong to the point of seeming dumb because it turns out tech does not work that way. It turns out to actually be hard to teleport something / someone and there is no way it could not be done without being able to track a person or package. It is also interesting that I remember reading several of these short stories but they were different edits of the story. Overall this was still an interesting read of classic science fiction. A quick note on each story is below.

Rammer: Interesting idea but not sure if protagonist is real corpsicle or false implanted personality. The evil "State" sure spends a lot of resources in a short time to create and train a Rammer - it makes no sense. One of the stories I have read with a different edit.

The Alibi Machine: I hate to tell Mr Niven but he is really bad at writing "Mystery" type stories. The case is not really solved at the end, they just caught a suspect. I have read a better edit of this story at some time.

The Last Days of the Permanent Floating Riot Club: Interesting use of instant teleportation. But if the government can redirect and block booths then the claim that teleporter booths makes smuggling unstoppable. All the police have to do is block booths in an area or block the sending booths number. The story also claims that it is impossible to track people via teleportation booth, but each booth has a number so there will be easy to track numbers. No government would approve a tech that amazing without a way to tell who went where. Also, it is not going to cost a coin to travel, coins can be counterfeited, the booths are going to use user ID or unique keys to ensure payment.

A Kind of Murder: Another "Murder" mystery and again Mr Niven uses that word but not sure he knows what it means. Teleporter booths don't give you a way to carry out the perfect crime, though it is cute that older booths do not compensate for elevation changes properly. I have read this story several times all slightly different.

All the Bridges Rusting: I lie the descriptions of the deteriorating infrastructure because people no longer drive due to the invention of cheap teleportation booths. But in the end more current science particles do not act as described in the story. Teleportation is not going to work over light years the signal will dissipate over distance and not be recoverable.

There is a Tide: An actual Louis Wu Know Space story! The story is interesting but the idea that first contact of an alien species we never hear from again is weird. The alien is actually smarter than the human would have won if Louis was no so lucky. I call BS on the alien being in danger without his space suit. Louis has an autodock and an airlock. I’m sure that is not actually an issue as they are not that far from a space station / colony. I have read a shorter edit of this story if my memory can be trusted.

Bigger than Worlds: Cute article for Analog Magazine. Many of the ideas and concepts Mr Niven later calls out as bad or impractical in his writing.

$16,940.00: I guess this is meant to be a mystery the story is not that good. We get a setup but no resolution. We never learn what was being used for blackmail.

The Hole Man: Another of Mr Niven’s weird murder mysteries. The speculative fiction about Mars is kind of interesting – but the crew selection process is so bad and un-realistic.

The Fourth Profession: Another Mystery. But seriously no deep space traders that can sell you any skill or profession in pill form. There is no way someone who makes a living as a space merchant is going to accidentally give some local yokel a pill that gives the subject god like powers. Seriously. The rest of the build up to discovering the bartender’s new skills is interesting.

February 5, 2024

Ironically, my favorite story in Larry Niven’s A Hole in Space anthology is “The Fourth Profession.” It is ironic because portions of that story feature “hard” science fiction concepts. Anyone who has read Ringworld and Ringworld Engineers knows that this is but one of Niven’s strengths, yet I’m not the most avaricious read of “hard” science-fiction. I usually like socio-politico-economic science-fiction with a hugely speculative aspect better. The irony is that “The Fourth Profession” has more “hard” science-fiction conceptualization than “The Last Days of the Floating Riot Club” and “The Alibi Machine” (although this one is very like a story in The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton anthology) but I like it the best. Indeed, there are significant calculations to get one’s head around in “The Hole Man,” but it would have to be my second favorite in the collection.

Most of these stories are to speculative science what Tom Clancy’s books were to military hardware—almost an excuse to lecture on a concept or platform. The “lectures” wrapped inside the fiction weren’t quite as obvious as those in the Clancy novels, but they did force me to spend longer in reading this thin volume than they usually would. Indeed, one selection is nothing but scientific speculation with no pretense of story.

Of course, I haven’t told the reader too much about the stories themselves for fear of spoiling. Still, here are some of the ideas I found interesting. Stories involved: RNA for education/training purposes, crime and displacement, physical resources versus human lives, solving problems related to cryogenics, conceptual possibilities in developing fusion power, and avoiding an intelligence service take over one’s life, along with others. To be honest, I probably didn’t enjoy this anthology as much as some others from Niven but I definitely stretched my mind more.

January 25, 2024

This is quite a decent collection, all the stories are just about rereadable, although my fondness for them varies. My favourite by a long way is “The Fourth Profession”, which I’d already read somehow before buying this book in 1976.

After buying it and reading it, as with all collections of short stories, I didn’t normally reread the book as a whole, but dipped into it and reread the odd story from time to time.

The “Rammer” story is OK as a bit of a curiosity. It’s also available as the first chapter of the novel A World Out of Time; perhaps the best part? I seem to have read the novel twice but have almost no memory of it now.

The next three stories are about the social consequences of displacement booths: instantaneous matter-transmission technology. Mildly interesting.

Then “All the Bridges Rusting” is about the effect of matter transmission on space travel.

I’m quite fond of “There Is a Tide”, in which a man looking casually for Slaver stasis boxes finds something else that just happens to look like a stasis box. Slaver stasis boxes hark back to Niven’s first novel, The World of Ptavvs, which I’m also fond of.

“Bigger Than Worlds” is a non-fiction essay about Dyson spheres, Ringworlds, and the like.

The next two stories are fairly forgettable, and then the book ends with “The Fourth Profession”, which I’m very fond of—although it’s a hard science-fiction story with a mischievous touch of added fantasy, which I don’t approve of in principle but can’t help liking in this case.

September 10, 2021

This is a nice collection of some of Larry Niven's (mostly) lesser-known stories. Only "Rammer" and "The Hole Man" get talked about much, any more, as far as I can tell. The first of those two was later expanded into a novel: "A World Out Of Time," which is not one of my favorite novels of his, although I do enjoy "Rammer". The best-developed story, IMHO, is "All the Bridges Rusting." It's a thought-problem: how does a civilization rescue the crew of a ship which has had a malfunction, and is heading in the wrong direction at a significant percentage of the speed of light, *and* is accelerating?

The real value of this collection is to show the breadth of Niven's imagination, as there are two very-different murder mysteries, both of which involve his teleportation device, as well as a discussion of potential options when/if we actually begin to colonize the solar system and beyond. Fun stuff!

I suspect that this edition is no longer in print, likely because everything in it has been included in various other, "newer" collections. It probably can be found in many libraries, as well as used bookstores.

April 24, 2020

A Hole in Space (which is a terrible pun BTW) is a story collection by Larry Niven. First published in 1974 the stories still retain relevance today, and they're very exciting. Hidden away in the middle of the book is a hard science essay on the various vehicles we (humanity) might successfully construct to get to the stars. I would have been nine years old in 74 but I'm sure I would have greeted this essay with enthusiasm. I'm not nine anymore, however-so I have to admit my reaction was entirely different: horror. I've totally lost my love of space travel. Humanity is not worthy of this gift, I think-please let's not spread the madness of our species any further. I have lost hope. But them my wife reminds me that the times we are living in are maybe the ones that lead to that better future I have always believed lies glittering just over the horizon. Thanks honey.

July 24, 2019

This is some tremendously good sci-fi that's still a treat to read some 40 years later. I had never read Niven's work before, although I was familiar with him as an author, so this was a great introduction to his writing. His stories keep a balance between technical detail and human intrigue. There's murder and mystery and spaceships and aliens, and the fate of humanity is always on the line. There are points where I thought it was maybe a tad too murderous...several of the stories seem to be Niven's fantasizing about how to use futuristic science to get away with murder. As someone who has never fantasized about murder, I found that a little off-putting. Otherwise however it's a highly enjoyable collection of page-turning stories that still hold up for the modern reader.

September 16, 2023

Niven is pretty solid, but no real epiphanies in this collection of short stories.

The tales built around the JumpShift boxes weren't that interesting to me, but I had respect for the "rational fantasy" specificity of the cost benefit analysis in All the Bridges Rusting (there is literally a budget [with dollar signs and a TOTAL line and everything (!!!)] in the the middle of the story, and the spreadsheet jockey in me rejoiced).

There is a Tide, the gambling story featuring Louis Wu, pulled me in, but I feel like I've read it before, so it was probably in another Niven book I read.

March 9, 2017

From that classic genre of the sci-fi short story collection. 3 or 4 of the stories explore developing possibilities of a kind of transporter technology, the basis of which is that instantaneous transportation makes the concept of alibis all but meaningless in crime fighting. The final story, "The Fourth Profession," starts with the idea of aliens visiting Earth and transferring knowledge via pills, but ends in an interesting exploration of what it means to be a prophet, in very much the biblical sense.

September 19, 2019

This collection of Larry Niven short fiction is heavy on stories from the early age of teleportation, which are not among my favorites. Two excellent pieces stand out: "There Is a Tide," a Known Space story featuring Louis Wu (of Ringworld fame) on vacation, and "The Fourth Profession," wherein a bartender becomes an expert on several unusual skills when an extraterrestrial offers him learning pills.

November 17, 2021

4.5. A great collection of stories, I enjoyed most of them quite a bit. Most of the stories revolved around the invention of teleportation booths, and I think for the most part those were my favorites. They were all about how criminals would be able to utilize such devices and how law enforcement would adapt to solve those issues. I particularly liked the riot control concept. The other stories were a bit random with no relation, but all pretty interesting. This definitely has inspired me to dig a bit deeper into Niven’s work.

October 6, 2023

Been a long time since I read some of Niven's short stories. They hold up surprisingly well, although some do feel dated, stuck in 1970's ways of thinking. Still, they're fun, well-constructed stories for the most part. I skipped one because it was more about the hard science than the characters, but otherwise he strikes a good balance, and has some clever twists. Old-school s-f, for sure, but well done if you can forgive a few bits of rich white American male '70s myopia here and there.

May 13, 2019

This is a great selection of short stories from the early '70s. Every single one of them are well written and the patina wears well, even today. I strongly recommend this book for any reader of any age.

Read

June 8, 2021

I read a lot of Larry Niven during my youthful years and I remember the books fondly.

Read

January 3, 2022

Read the first 4 stories. 3 of which revolved around the displacement booths and were basically Earth based crime stories.

Abandoning the read for now. Just not the kind of stories I want right now.

This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.

April 16, 2024

pretty good collection of stories and essays. If you like Nivens style and subjects, you'll like this

November 27, 2022

Not a book about an astronaut who’s a jerk, as the title would suggest.

November 1, 2017

Read these stories as a teen back in the 70's and wondered how they held up. For the most part they did well. Still a believable, whole universe that holds together well. Some of the attitudes, especially towards women, feel a little dated. Still, if you are looking for good "hard" sci-fi I recommend.

April 14, 2024

Fun and thought-provoking stories, though mostly centered around technologies that might have seemed plausible in the early '70s but which don't seem very plausible now.