known space – Only Mostly Dead

This book is part of a new mini project I’m doing over the next month or so which concerns re-reading. I’ll cover this in more detail in another post shortly but for now all you need to know is that I chose this book at random from a shortlist.

The World of Ptavvs is one of Larry Niven’s early books in the ‘Known Space’ universe. It opens with an alien, Kzanol, escaping from his ship which is about to crash by getting into a stasis suit which will keep him safe, with no time passing, until he can be rescued. Unfortunately that takes a rather long time, 2 billion years in fact. He is eventually dug up on Earth and is named the “sea statue” and becomes a cultural artifact. However when he is accidentally let out of the suit he wreaks havoc trying to find his other stasis suit in which he left a valuable tool. Kzanol is part of a race that enslaved other races using mind control and he uses that talent to try to recover the other suit.

I enjoyed this book. It’s short and a quick read and although, like all early Niven it’s not great on character, it has a lot of ideas. I’ve left out quite a lot in the description above. There’s a chase through the solar system, inter-system politics and possible war, a man who becomes convinced he is Kzanol and Pluto being set on fire. It’s also very interesting how primitive some of the future tech is. They have spaceships with fusion drives but the on-board entertainment is a video game which involves connecting lines between grids of dots on a screen.

In a reflection perhaps of when it was written (1966) the politics surrounding who gets to have and control what’s in the second suit take on a kind of Mutually Assured Destruction aspect.

As for the re-read aspect I’m not going to comment on that now but I made various notes.

7/10 – big ideas and a fun romp through space, if a little dated.

Having re-read Ringworld I thought my next Niven re-read would be Ringworld Engineers so I could go on to read Ringworld Throne. However I was reminded of Protector – partly because it takes place in the same universe as the Ringworld stories and partly through thinking about the books I read during the same era that I read Ringworld. So I decided to go with what I felt like reading, also knowing it was relatively short.

Protector concerns an alien species known as the Pak. They have three distinct phases to their life-cycle: child, breeder and protector. The change to the later stage is triggered by age and the consumption of a yam-like root known as tree-of-life. The changes are dramatic and the protector becomes vastly more intelligent, significantly stronger and extremely protective of its offspring – hence the name. On the Pak homeworld this trait gives rise to constant war with the effect that many protectors are left with no living descendants and they soon find themselves lacking the will to live, unless they can find a purpose.

One such childless protector is Phssthpok. He does manage to find a purpose and that requires him to travel 32,000 light-years to our solar system in search of a lost expedition of Pak millions of years previously. The first part of the book concerns what happens when Phssthpok encounters humanity in the form of an asteroid belt miner. The second part of the book is set two centuries later when the effects of that meeting and Phssthpok’s original mission are still playing out.

It’s becoming a cliche of mine to say I like Niven for his big ideas so I’ll try to avoid just saying that here. Let me expand on it by saying that there’s a particular type of idea, or execution that he does well in Protector. He takes an existing set of known facts about humanity, evolution and aging, and some make-believe about a possible alien race and weaves a connection between the two that is plausible enough to tell a good story around. It’s a bit like a SciFi equivalent of what Richard Matheson does in I Am Legend. There he takes an existing fantastical monster and creates a scientific ‘explanation’ for how that might actually work. Here there’s no existing monster but there is that same sense of slotting together the known science with the speculative and made-up. It has the same pleasing sense of “this could actually be true“.

I’m still not wowed by his characterization but it’s definitely better here. Although the ease with which two characters part forever for the sake of humanity is notable by the speed with which it’s dealt with.

There’s a rather extended space battle sequence near the end which takes a look at what a ‘dogfight in space’ might look like over vast distances and at significant fractions of lightspeed – ironically the answer is: slow. Not being overly interested in astrophysics for its own sake I found that section dragged a little. However I had genuinely misremembered the ending and so had the pleasure of realising it was not what I’d thought, figuring out what it might be and having that confirmed.

7/10 – another good old-fashioned romp through space and time with Niven.

(P.S. for those keeping score, another paper read.)