Tag: larry niven

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book reading reviews

The World of Ptavvs – Larry Niven

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.

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book Read Every Day reading reviews

RED book 5: Protector – Larry Niven

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.)




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Read Every Day reading reviews

RED book 1: Ringworld – Larry Niven

Yay! First book of 2012’s Read Every Day (hereafter referred to as RED). In fact I finished this earlier in the week and am a little disappointed that I haven’t written it up yet but still at least it hasn’t been weeks as has been the case in the past.

I can’t remember exactly what made me choose Ringworld as my first book of the year, except that towards the end of 2011 I was already thinking about it and shuffling the list of five or six possibles into an order. I think it was looking at my bookshelf and realising I had bought Ringworld Throne (Ringworld 3 if you like) and never read it and perhaps I’d read the series. In any case I knew I’ve liked it whenever I read it in the past.

I have a lot of the same feelings about it as I do about A World Out of Time so I won’t repeat the High Fidelity reference (see here if you don’t know what I mean).

So, Ringworld is set about 600-700 years in the future. The earth is over-populated compared to now but stable thanks to a world government and its Fertility Board regulations. Space travel is possible and a number of worlds have been colonised and a number of alien races encountered, and warred or traded with. Technology has moved on of course and teleportation has replaced air and surface travel. Thus Louis Wu, the protagonist of this novel, is celebrating his 200th birthday by travelling around the globe moving on just before midnight in each timezone, thereby extending the day, and his traveling birthday party, to nearly 48 hours.

He does this by hopping around using the ‘transfer booths’ and after one particular hop he finds himself not where he intended but in the presence of a Pierson’s Puppeteer – one of a particular race of aliens who apparently abandoned the galaxy on masse a couple of centuries earlier. The alien has a proposition for him. They have discovered the Ringworld – an artificial world made by constructing a ring around a star – and they want to put together a team to investigate it and they want Wu on that team.

The thing about Ringworld, in fact Niven’s writing in general, is that the stories serve as delivery mechanisms for big scientific, speculative ideas. So you don’t get character nuances and investigation of the human condition, but what you do get is an examination of what it would take to build a ringworld, why you would want to and what that implies about you and your technology and what it would be like to live on one. And Niven does provide a plot which gives us a good old romp through such a world. In the first third to half of the book he sets up the scene introducing the members of the team (Wu, another human, the puppeteer and another alien, a Kzin – an eight-foot tall tiger-like creature) and gives us time to absorb the level of sophistication, technology and species differences in so-called Known Space before launching us to the Ringworld itself. That Ringworld seems awesome and vast and an intimidatingly impressive achievement to these people, themselves much more advanced than us, is a clever way to get across just how remarkable this thing would be. (a sort of SciFi version of “When scary things get scared, not good” – a line Xander Harris once uttered in Buffy)

I have a minor irritation with one of the invented elements. It’s not the strange ability of the other human, Teela Brown, which the novel itself flags up as implausible thereby at least recognising the fact. It’s the idea that you could hook up a communications device to a computer and simply by listening to enough spoken language begin to translate it. How exactly would that work. That implies that there’s some inherent meaning in the sounds themselves or the structure and frequency with which they’re used. OK so there would be some, maybe enough to realise when a word was a verb, but ultimately you need context and you need to be able to do the equivalent of pointing at an object and saying the name for it.

Still, if I really knew enough about physics there are probably any number of things that are equally impossible and it doesn’t really hurt the enjoyment of the book for me, which is based on the scope of the story and the ideas it contains. It’s also quite well constructed in the way that a lot of back-story (and more scifi ideas) are included in such a way as to directly affect where the plot is going.

I’d remembered the ending before I got to it even though it’s probably at least 15 years since I last read it but it was still satisfying. There were a few things that I was looking forward to that weren’t in the book and must therefore have been in the sequel and I confused the two.

7/10 – a fun book of big ideas and a bigger world.




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6000 pages reading reviews

6000 Pages, A World Out of Time – Larry Niven (pages 2296-2551)

A World Out of Time by Larry Niven

It’s going to be hard to separate a real review from a personal, autobiographical account of this book. I’ll probably not try.

This is, uniquely since I started 25 books much less 6000 pages, a re-read. I felt I needed something familiar, something I knew I’d enjoy.

There’s a section in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity where he talks about listening to the Beatles because it’s music that he first heard as a child and it isn’t (for him) associated with love, loss and chasing girls, it’s associated with a more innocent, less complicated time and as such it’s comforting.

A World Out of Time is a little like that for me. I didn’t first read it when I was a child. In fact I was 22. Although…

OK. Let’s go back to when I was a child – 11 or 12 – and first discovered book shops. I knew I loved to read but faced with a choice, my own choice, of what to read I was a little stumped. So I went with what I knew. I knew I liked Dr Who so I figured that meant I liked SciFi so I went to the SciFi section. I’d already devoured HG Wells and some other classics so I wanted something a bit more up to date. What I eventually chose was a book of short stories by Larry Niven. I must have enjoyed them because over the next several years I read most of his “Known Space” books including the Ringworld ones.

Anyway one of the stories was called “Rammer” and was the story of a man awakened from frozen sleep to discover he’s being trained to be a spaceship pilot. A World Out of Time’s first chapter is a slightly modified version of this story.

What I like about this book is its ideas. A lot of science (which may well have been superceded since it was written). It has a huge scope – the main character travels to the centre of the galaxy and back and his story spans 3,000,000 years (though his personal timeline doesn’t due to relativistic time effects). There’s discussion of how in this future the solar system was adapted by moving planets around. Red Dwarf played this for laughs but here it’s done seriously with what looks like a plausible stab at the science needed.

It’s also a rolicking good story. The earlier part of the book is about Corbell’s exploration of the galactic hub and his return to what he believes is earth. The later part is almost one long chase scene. Certainly I found (then and now) that the pace keeps you interested.

The characterisation isn’t much to write home about. Emotionally it’s a little cold I guess. Corbell and the other few characters act mostly in ways dictated by logic. And the logic is applied to these huge events such as what will happen if/when the earth is moved again. But I can forgive it that. I’m not looking for insight into the human condition here. What I get is a good story, interesting scenery and big ideas.

Also – maybe this is not entirely irrelevant – the plot of the later part of the book concerns the hunt for immortality. The scientific secret of which has been found but lost.

I can’t necessarily recommend this unless you have the same set of idiosyncratic tastes as me, but it is a guilty pleasure.

7/10 – good old fashioned ‘hard’ scifi. Full of ideas.