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arthurbdd's review
3.0
Influential in its time but has not aged well. Full coverage of stories: https://fakegeekboy.wordpress.com/2021/12/14/a-chronological-exploration-of-known-space-part-1-20th-24th-centuries/ and https://fakegeekboy.wordpress.com/2022/01/24/a-chronological-exploration-of-known-space-part-2-25th-32nd-centuries/
frakalot's review
adventurous
funny
lighthearted
mysterious
reflective
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
When I start making notes for collections, it's always "I'll just make a few brief notes about each entry" but before long it has ballooned out of proportion and I'm... sorry about the length of this review.
0. A collection of stories set in Niven's 'Known Space' universe. I have read and enjoyed 'Ringworld', the first book of the series, but not for a few years and I didn't recall very many details before starting this collection. There's a meaty introduction by Niven himself, although I decided to skip it. My experience would seem to indicate that the stories here can be read and enjoyed without much knowledge of the 'Known Space' universe and in fact did a fine job of introducing it to me.
I'm a sucker for good world building and this series appears to provide an enormous amount of that. These stories were mostly great, with just one being a major let down and an unfortunate lack of interesting female characters throughout.
1. 'The Coldest Place' opens the collection and introduces us to Howie and his intelligent spaceship, Eric. The relationship between ship and captain is described as functionally symbiotic which I thought was just great!
After the story there is a note from the author which calls this his first story, I'm not sure if that's in regard to the collection or to all of his work. He acknowledges that by the time the story was published his information about Mercury had been superseded by the latest available NASA results.
2. 'Becalmed in Hell' is a sequel to the first short story, in that we get to spend more time with Howie and Eric. In this tale they're having trouble with the rams and are unable to operate the craft's wings. We learn that Eric is somehow the surviving conscious remains of an accident victim implanted as the ship's brain. The pair end up arguing over the cause of the problem and even after it is repaired they must defer to an engineer's diagnosis to settle the disagreement.
3. 'Wait it Out' featured a different crew out on an expedition to Pluto.
"And so we came, Jerome and Sammy and I, in an inflated plastic bubble poised on an ion jet. We'd spent a year and a half in that bubble."
Things don't go exactly as planned...
"Jerome stands out there with his helmet clutched in his hands: a statue to himself, the first man on Pluto."
I really enjoyed the writing in this one, the following quote demonstrates an ability to reference something that scifi readers should easily pick up without being explicitly told:
"Even the hopeful dead of Earth are only stored at liquid nitrogen temperatures."
4. In 'Eye of an Octopus' Henry Bedrosian and Christopher Luden have discovered a well on Mars.
"The translucent hewn stone of the well-mouth stood like a blasphemy in the poisonous wilderness that was Mars."
The story we get involves our two explorers puzzling out what they've found; a well, built with stones of diamond, that draws up bucket loads of nitric acid and with an alien corpse located conveniently nearby. Unlike some of the ideas that our duo consider, the following quote does not apply to this quirky short story:
"That plot's as old as Lowell."
5. 'How the Heroes Die' is another story on Mars, although with a different cast. There is a timeline of events from the Known Space series provided at the start of this collection for reference, but the narrative does eventually place this one at some time after the events of the previous entry.
In this tale we meet Carter who is fleeing from an angry mob in a Marsbuggy. Unfortunately, he is essentially trapped and riding circuits around the interior of the bubble-habitat.
This was a tense, nail-biter of a story and takes a few very surprising turns. It's the first one from this collection, apart from the character continuity of the first two, that really instils a sense of the wider universe that these stories sit in.
The following quote shows another fun little factoid that would later be shown to be incorrect:
"All the air anyone could use--tons of nitrogen and oxygen--was right outside; but it was in the form of nitrogen dioxide gas. The airmaker could convert it three times as fast as men could use it."
This was pushing to be my favourite of the collection until the dialogue took an unfortunate turn.
"Hes not worth it, Alf. He was nothing but a queer."
Homosexuality is considered to be an illness which is a problem that needs to be fixed. Oof. Alright, at the time of writing it was probably the most commonly held opinion and alriiiight, at least one of the characters argues that homosexuality is not a reason to kill a person, but it's just a shame that this otherwise compelling short story went that way. The main positive to come out of this set up is that the aggressor is forced to contemplate the stupidity of his actions.
And to end on a more positive thought, here's a quote about losing control, or having no real choice, with a phrasing that I would definitely steal if I was an author:
"It didn't matter. Carter was beyond free will."
6. 'The Jigsaw Man' features a Lew again, in a more lively role this time. Warren Lewis Knowles (Lew) is on trial for his life and finds out that one of his cell mates is in for organlegging - dealing in stolen organs.
"Transplant technology, through two hundred years of development, had come into its own... and raised its own problems. The Belt escaped the most drastic social effects. Earth did not."
This story considers the death penalty at some length and in an interesting way. Psychology gets that classic slight of being referred to as a science/art and it seems the argument for abolition of the death penalty was considered a novel but impractical experiment. To buck the trend of states giving up on the death penalty, Vermont introduces organ bank laws so that "it was no longer true that an execution served no good purpose."
"The cause of it all was the organ banks. With good doctors and a sufficient flow of material in the organ banks, any taxpayer could hope to live indefinitely. What voter would vote against eternal life? The death penalty was his immortality, and he would vote the death penalty for any crime at all."
Being the first of these tales actually set on Earth we get a better look at some technologies and a lovely grim picture of the automation and mechanisation of the 'Known Space' future.
"The doctor was a line of machines with a conveyor belt running through them."
At least in this future licensed nudism is apparently a thing. Tell me more, Larry.
7. 'At the Bottom of a Hole' reveals a whole lot about the 'Known Space' setting in just the opening paragraphs. Scientific exploration of our home solar system has largely given way to industrial endeavours and:
"By 2100 AD, five nearby solar systems held budding colonies: the worlds were Jinx, Wunder land, We Made It, Plateau, and Down."
Here I was picturing the social setting of Corey's 'Expanse' series. Niven appears to have been there first, creating a 21st century in which a society of Belters has emerged in support of belt mining operations. Earthers are also called Flatlanders, and both groups, the Belters and the Flatlanders are generally phobic of the other's environment.
"Yah. He had a valuable cargo, twenty kilos of pure north magnetic poles. The temptation was too much for him. He tried to get past us, and we picked him up on radar."
This tale tells of a smuggler who got too close to a hole, while trying to pull off a gravity assisted manoeuvre. Through the eyes of our wayward smuggler we get to take a look back at the aftermath of the earlier tale, 'How the Heroes Die.'
Also interesting, the following quote gives a little unexpected insight into Belter existence:
"Confinement is where they take women when they get pregnant: a bubble of rock ten miles long and five miles across, spinning on its axis to produce one gee of outward pull. The children have to stay there for the first year, and the law says they have to spend a month out of each year there until they're fifteen."
The story is a compelling account of a loneliness-induced madness. This is the last time we visit Mars in this collection so it feels apt to quote the following line:
"Goodbye, Mars, lovely paradise for the manic-depressive."
8. My copy of this collection calls this next short story 'Intent to Deceive,' while the blurb on GR calls it 'The Deceivers.'
We're back on Mars, sort of, not really. Actually we're in a restaurant called the Red Planet with a couple of diners being served by a waiter bot. This story has a paraplegic main character.
"Waiters weren't invented. They evolved, like computers."
This story gives us a bit of history about the evolution of robots, by telling a story over dinner about an earlier dinner. It's quite a bit funny by the end.
"We put him away for telling television audiences that his brand of dishwashing liquid was good for the hands. We tested it, and it wasn't."
Sign me up for a future that has "Intent to Deceive" laws, please! But perhaps without the organ bank laws. I'm impressed at how gradually and naturally these stories are adding to what we know of 'Known Space" and keener than ever to get back into the series.
9. 'Cloak of Anarchy' takes place on a "hot, blue summer afternoon in King's Free Park." Free parks are places where only a single rule prevails: "No violence.--No hand to be raised against another--and no other laws whatever." The rule is maintained under surveillance by "copseyes"; basketball sized, gold coloured, floating television eyes (cctv) which are equipped with sonic stunners and linked directly to police HQ.
"Within King's Free Park was an orderly approximation of anarchy."
Actually this tale is a strange little walk through the park, that has an alluring but untouchable beautiful woman and a bunch of kids throwing rocks at the copseyes. And then we meet an art-inventor and a few more dazzling ladies. Followed by the following procession:
"We passed seven little men, each three to four feet high, traveling with a single tall, pretty brunette. They wore medieval garb. We both stared; but I was the one who noticed the makeup and the use of UnTan. African pigmies, probably part of a UN-sponsored tourist group; and the girl must be their guide."
So "UnTan," or "white face." Why in this future the short gentlemen would be painting their faces white, on a UN sponsored tour, is beyond me. Why couldn't they just be disney cosplayers?! Anyway, I don't want to make any guesses.
This story does a particularly good job of expanding the 'Known Space' universe, in terms of both its social and technological history PLUS the scenic stroll through the park was a splendid literary device BUT overall it's one of the more bland and disappointing narratives in the collection.
My favourite part of this was a passing reference to "The Society for Creative Anachronism."
And one more quote, which is clearly a reference to Star Trek:
"I did something I'd seen often enough on television: linked my fingers and brought both hands down on the back of his neck."
10. 'The Warriors' starts with an introductory note from the author which tells us that "The organ bank problem is basic to an understanding of this era, and of later eras on the colony worlds." and then links the idea to other published stories in the series before giving a brief history.
"In particular, breakthroughs in alloplasty and regeneration ended the organ bank problem."
This tale takes place on a ship in the Kzinti system? It gradually becomes clear that the this story is told from the Kzin perspective. Wait. No, the story goes one better. We get a first contact scenario told in parts from the POV of both species. It's a fun one.
My main disappointment was that the aliens weren't alien enough! But I think the intro mentioned they were humanoid with some ancient kinship to us, so it's not a very relevant criticism.
11. 'The Borderland of Sol' begins with an even longer note from Larry, which after providing some necessary background introduces us to Beowulf Schaeffer. This is apparently the fifth Beowulf tale and it takes place on Jinx, one of the colony worlds.
Beowulf's nickname is "Bey" which is kind of like "bae" which is kind of cute. So bae bumps into an old friend who had also been returning to Earth but wound up on Jinx instead. The pair discuss how it happened and how they might overcome the obstacle and finally make it home.
In this one "futz" is used as a replacement swear word which is also a bit cute.
12. 'There is a Tide' features a space rogue who finds an Earthish planet to vacation on but gets distracted when he spots an abandoned stasis box. Unfortunately an alien craft approaches and challenges his claim to salvage the precious booty. The two work out an amicable arrangement so that the competition won't end with a battle.
The story seems to go on just a little longer than necessary but I suspect it sets up an interspecies relationship that is important to the wider 'Known Space' universe.
13. 'Safe at Any Speed' starts with a note from the author explaining some changes that occurred over the time between the previous two stories. Then the story starts with a brief list of ways that a being with indefinite life span might still meet an unexpected death.
Short, sharp and punchy.
14.... The collection ends with a few pages of Larry's 'Afterthoughts' which was probably interesting, but I chose to skip it.
0. A collection of stories set in Niven's 'Known Space' universe. I have read and enjoyed 'Ringworld', the first book of the series, but not for a few years and I didn't recall very many details before starting this collection. There's a meaty introduction by Niven himself, although I decided to skip it. My experience would seem to indicate that the stories here can be read and enjoyed without much knowledge of the 'Known Space' universe and in fact did a fine job of introducing it to me.
I'm a sucker for good world building and this series appears to provide an enormous amount of that. These stories were mostly great, with just one being a major let down and an unfortunate lack of interesting female characters throughout.
1. 'The Coldest Place' opens the collection and introduces us to Howie and his intelligent spaceship, Eric. The relationship between ship and captain is described as functionally symbiotic which I thought was just great!
After the story there is a note from the author which calls this his first story, I'm not sure if that's in regard to the collection or to all of his work. He acknowledges that by the time the story was published his information about Mercury had been superseded by the latest available NASA results.
2. 'Becalmed in Hell' is a sequel to the first short story, in that we get to spend more time with Howie and Eric. In this tale they're having trouble with the rams and are unable to operate the craft's wings. We learn that Eric is somehow the surviving conscious remains of an accident victim implanted as the ship's brain. The pair end up arguing over the cause of the problem and even after it is repaired they must defer to an engineer's diagnosis to settle the disagreement.
3. 'Wait it Out' featured a different crew out on an expedition to Pluto.
"And so we came, Jerome and Sammy and I, in an inflated plastic bubble poised on an ion jet. We'd spent a year and a half in that bubble."
Things don't go exactly as planned...
"Jerome stands out there with his helmet clutched in his hands: a statue to himself, the first man on Pluto."
I really enjoyed the writing in this one, the following quote demonstrates an ability to reference something that scifi readers should easily pick up without being explicitly told:
"Even the hopeful dead of Earth are only stored at liquid nitrogen temperatures."
4. In 'Eye of an Octopus' Henry Bedrosian and Christopher Luden have discovered a well on Mars.
"The translucent hewn stone of the well-mouth stood like a blasphemy in the poisonous wilderness that was Mars."
The story we get involves our two explorers puzzling out what they've found; a well, built with stones of diamond, that draws up bucket loads of nitric acid and with an alien corpse located conveniently nearby. Unlike some of the ideas that our duo consider, the following quote does not apply to this quirky short story:
"That plot's as old as Lowell."
5. 'How the Heroes Die' is another story on Mars, although with a different cast. There is a timeline of events from the Known Space series provided at the start of this collection for reference, but the narrative does eventually place this one at some time after the events of the previous entry.
In this tale we meet Carter who is fleeing from an angry mob in a Marsbuggy. Unfortunately, he is essentially trapped and riding circuits around the interior of the bubble-habitat.
This was a tense, nail-biter of a story and takes a few very surprising turns. It's the first one from this collection, apart from the character continuity of the first two, that really instils a sense of the wider universe that these stories sit in.
The following quote shows another fun little factoid that would later be shown to be incorrect:
"All the air anyone could use--tons of nitrogen and oxygen--was right outside; but it was in the form of nitrogen dioxide gas. The airmaker could convert it three times as fast as men could use it."
This was pushing to be my favourite of the collection until the dialogue took an unfortunate turn.
"Hes not worth it, Alf. He was nothing but a queer."
Homosexuality is considered to be an illness which is a problem that needs to be fixed. Oof. Alright, at the time of writing it was probably the most commonly held opinion and alriiiight, at least one of the characters argues that homosexuality is not a reason to kill a person, but it's just a shame that this otherwise compelling short story went that way. The main positive to come out of this set up is that the aggressor is forced to contemplate the stupidity of his actions.
And to end on a more positive thought, here's a quote about losing control, or having no real choice, with a phrasing that I would definitely steal if I was an author:
"It didn't matter. Carter was beyond free will."
6. 'The Jigsaw Man' features a Lew again, in a more lively role this time. Warren Lewis Knowles (Lew) is on trial for his life and finds out that one of his cell mates is in for organlegging - dealing in stolen organs.
"Transplant technology, through two hundred years of development, had come into its own... and raised its own problems. The Belt escaped the most drastic social effects. Earth did not."
This story considers the death penalty at some length and in an interesting way. Psychology gets that classic slight of being referred to as a science/art and it seems the argument for abolition of the death penalty was considered a novel but impractical experiment. To buck the trend of states giving up on the death penalty, Vermont introduces organ bank laws so that "it was no longer true that an execution served no good purpose."
"The cause of it all was the organ banks. With good doctors and a sufficient flow of material in the organ banks, any taxpayer could hope to live indefinitely. What voter would vote against eternal life? The death penalty was his immortality, and he would vote the death penalty for any crime at all."
Being the first of these tales actually set on Earth we get a better look at some technologies and a lovely grim picture of the automation and mechanisation of the 'Known Space' future.
"The doctor was a line of machines with a conveyor belt running through them."
At least in this future licensed nudism is apparently a thing. Tell me more, Larry.
7. 'At the Bottom of a Hole' reveals a whole lot about the 'Known Space' setting in just the opening paragraphs. Scientific exploration of our home solar system has largely given way to industrial endeavours and:
"By 2100 AD, five nearby solar systems held budding colonies: the worlds were Jinx, Wunder land, We Made It, Plateau, and Down."
Here I was picturing the social setting of Corey's 'Expanse' series. Niven appears to have been there first, creating a 21st century in which a society of Belters has emerged in support of belt mining operations. Earthers are also called Flatlanders, and both groups, the Belters and the Flatlanders are generally phobic of the other's environment.
"Yah. He had a valuable cargo, twenty kilos of pure north magnetic poles. The temptation was too much for him. He tried to get past us, and we picked him up on radar."
This tale tells of a smuggler who got too close to a hole, while trying to pull off a gravity assisted manoeuvre. Through the eyes of our wayward smuggler we get to take a look back at the aftermath of the earlier tale, 'How the Heroes Die.'
Also interesting, the following quote gives a little unexpected insight into Belter existence:
"Confinement is where they take women when they get pregnant: a bubble of rock ten miles long and five miles across, spinning on its axis to produce one gee of outward pull. The children have to stay there for the first year, and the law says they have to spend a month out of each year there until they're fifteen."
The story is a compelling account of a loneliness-induced madness. This is the last time we visit Mars in this collection so it feels apt to quote the following line:
"Goodbye, Mars, lovely paradise for the manic-depressive."
8. My copy of this collection calls this next short story 'Intent to Deceive,' while the blurb on GR calls it 'The Deceivers.'
We're back on Mars, sort of, not really. Actually we're in a restaurant called the Red Planet with a couple of diners being served by a waiter bot. This story has a paraplegic main character.
"Waiters weren't invented. They evolved, like computers."
This story gives us a bit of history about the evolution of robots, by telling a story over dinner about an earlier dinner. It's quite a bit funny by the end.
"We put him away for telling television audiences that his brand of dishwashing liquid was good for the hands. We tested it, and it wasn't."
Sign me up for a future that has "Intent to Deceive" laws, please! But perhaps without the organ bank laws. I'm impressed at how gradually and naturally these stories are adding to what we know of 'Known Space" and keener than ever to get back into the series.
9. 'Cloak of Anarchy' takes place on a "hot, blue summer afternoon in King's Free Park." Free parks are places where only a single rule prevails: "No violence.--No hand to be raised against another--and no other laws whatever." The rule is maintained under surveillance by "copseyes"; basketball sized, gold coloured, floating television eyes (cctv) which are equipped with sonic stunners and linked directly to police HQ.
"Within King's Free Park was an orderly approximation of anarchy."
Actually this tale is a strange little walk through the park, that has an alluring but untouchable beautiful woman and a bunch of kids throwing rocks at the copseyes. And then we meet an art-inventor and a few more dazzling ladies. Followed by the following procession:
"We passed seven little men, each three to four feet high, traveling with a single tall, pretty brunette. They wore medieval garb. We both stared; but I was the one who noticed the makeup and the use of UnTan. African pigmies, probably part of a UN-sponsored tourist group; and the girl must be their guide."
So "UnTan," or "white face." Why in this future the short gentlemen would be painting their faces white, on a UN sponsored tour, is beyond me. Why couldn't they just be disney cosplayers?! Anyway, I don't want to make any guesses.
This story does a particularly good job of expanding the 'Known Space' universe, in terms of both its social and technological history PLUS the scenic stroll through the park was a splendid literary device BUT overall it's one of the more bland and disappointing narratives in the collection.
My favourite part of this was a passing reference to "The Society for Creative Anachronism."
And one more quote, which is clearly a reference to Star Trek:
"I did something I'd seen often enough on television: linked my fingers and brought both hands down on the back of his neck."
10. 'The Warriors' starts with an introductory note from the author which tells us that "The organ bank problem is basic to an understanding of this era, and of later eras on the colony worlds." and then links the idea to other published stories in the series before giving a brief history.
"In particular, breakthroughs in alloplasty and regeneration ended the organ bank problem."
This tale takes place on a ship in the Kzinti system? It gradually becomes clear that the this story is told from the Kzin perspective. Wait. No, the story goes one better. We get a first contact scenario told in parts from the POV of both species. It's a fun one.
My main disappointment was that the aliens weren't alien enough! But I think the intro mentioned they were humanoid with some ancient kinship to us, so it's not a very relevant criticism.
11. 'The Borderland of Sol' begins with an even longer note from Larry, which after providing some necessary background introduces us to Beowulf Schaeffer. This is apparently the fifth Beowulf tale and it takes place on Jinx, one of the colony worlds.
Beowulf's nickname is "Bey" which is kind of like "bae" which is kind of cute. So bae bumps into an old friend who had also been returning to Earth but wound up on Jinx instead. The pair discuss how it happened and how they might overcome the obstacle and finally make it home.
In this one "futz" is used as a replacement swear word which is also a bit cute.
12. 'There is a Tide' features a space rogue who finds an Earthish planet to vacation on but gets distracted when he spots an abandoned stasis box. Unfortunately an alien craft approaches and challenges his claim to salvage the precious booty. The two work out an amicable arrangement so that the competition won't end with a battle.
The story seems to go on just a little longer than necessary but I suspect it sets up an interspecies relationship that is important to the wider 'Known Space' universe.
13. 'Safe at Any Speed' starts with a note from the author explaining some changes that occurred over the time between the previous two stories. Then the story starts with a brief list of ways that a being with indefinite life span might still meet an unexpected death.
Short, sharp and punchy.
14.... The collection ends with a few pages of Larry's 'Afterthoughts' which was probably interesting, but I chose to skip it.
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