Larry Niven

Science-Fiction and Fantasy stories are often problematic when depicting other species - in that the "aliens" usually don't feel nearly alien enough. Generally, the best you can hope for is a "planet of hats" situation, or at worst the zero-effort "human in an alien suit." Rarely does a reader encounter aliens such as those in "The Mote in God's Eye" - aliens that are truly *alien.* If you can, avoid all spoilers before reading this book, because discovering who the aliens are, what they show more believe, what they are hiding, and how they work is all part of the fun. show less

I'm giving Ringworld a 3, but this is a conditional rating. I think Ringworld is both a book with a terrific story and convincing world-building, but it is unfortunately told through the eyes of flat, uninteresting characters utilizing dated, often chauvinistic dialogue. A lot of "golden age" sci-fi falls into this trap, having been written by middle-aged white men in an era when this sort of behaviour and attitude was left unchecked. I understand that, and can usually appreciate the work as show more a piece from its place and time. It feels jarring though when the only female character behaves ignorantly, acts clumsy, and is hyper sexualized by the writer - and the male characters around her treat her critically because of these things. However, if you can look past this (and there were a few moments where I really struggled) the concept of the Ringworld itself is good fun, especially when Niven manages to blow your mind with the scale of it. I do feel like I'm kind of done with the saga though and as interesting as the Ringworld is, I don't feel compelled enough to read the other four books in the series. show less

We make foolish decisions all the time, probably even several times a day. Mostly, they cause no harm, perhaps a little mild embarrassment, often no one witnesses the embarrassment but we know about it ourselves all the same. I have no idea why I decided to complete my exploration of Larry Niven’s oeuvre. I last read his books back in the early 1980s, and while I had fond, if incomplete, memories of some of the books, I also knew they weren’t very good. But, for some reason, I decided to show more read the rest of his books. I don’t know; perhaps I saw a couple of his books, with their pretty damn cool Peter Andrew Jones cover art, in my local secondhand sf bookshop, and thought, yeah, let’s give them a go, I liked them back when I was, er, fourteen or fifteen, what could possibly go wrong?

Everything, of course.

I’d remembered the ideas in Niven’s books over the decades, and I knew he was a proponent of "transparent prose”, which is what writers say when their prose is so bad it’s almost an anti-style, and yes, I’d remembered Niven’s politics were considerably to the right of mine (and not just because I’m British but because he’s a conservative loon)... but what I’d forgotten was how effortlessly offensive his fiction was. My sensibilities were still in flux back in my mid-teens, so perhaps I just skated over the worst bits and only took the good, if rare, bits on board.

The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton was not a Niven book I’d read back in the day. It’s a collection of three novellas set in Niven’s Known Space universe and featuring a single protagonist, Gil Hamilton. Who is an officer in the UN police, which is called ARM, Amalgamated Regional Militias (an unconvincing backronym, which Niven himself admits). Hamilton lost an arm in an accident in the Asteroid Belt, and developed a telekinetic arm as replacement - he has ESP, it operates like an arm, only not as strong, but it can reach through solid objects. See, the “long arm” in the title, it’s a pun: Hamilton works for ARM and he has a psionic arm too. Hoho.

Hamilton chiefly investigates organleggers… and this is where I have to wonder how I didn’t immediately recoil at Niven’s politics back in the day. Earth in the Known Space series has a population of eighteen billion, which means it’s massively overpopulated and covered almost entirely by cities. (Earth currently has a population of over 8 billion but there are still vast swathes of unpopulated wilderness. I can bore you with population density by country, but you can look at Wikipedia yourself.) For some reason, these 18 billion people have an insatiable demand for new organs. So insatiable, in fact, that pretty much breaking any law results in a death sentence so the criminal’s organs can be harvested. Having one more kid than licensed, for example. Or drunk driving. Which first supposes the death penalty is normal - it’s not, the US is an aberration (one of around 15% of nations). And second, that all medical conditions are solved by transplanting a new organ. It’s complete nonsense, complete right-wing nonsense.

The plots of the three novellas are almost incidental. Hamilton is, to be fair, a mostly engaging narrator. In the first story, Hamilton is confronted with the seeming suicide of a Belter friend by direct simulation of the pleasure centres of the brain. Except it goes everything Hamilton knows about his friend. It’s murder, of course. And Hamilton tracks down the killer. In the second, an attempt on Hamilton’s life leads him to suspect an organlegger who retired when the world government made it legal to use cryogenically frozen bodies for organs. The third story is one Niven freely admits he had the most trouble completing - it’s a locked-room murder mystery, of a sort, but also a sf story, which, according to the essay which ends the collection, took Niven several goes to get right… and even then it’s confusing, muddled and neither a good murder-mystery or a good sf story.

Everything in The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton, although it mentions other nations, is Americocentric. Everything operates according to US laws and sensibilities. This is hardly surprising - it’s a US sf collection written by a US sf author for the US sf market. And that was not only common, it was the actual state of the genre for much of the twentieth century. So it seems churlish to point this out, except to say it makes these books - not just Niven’s, but other sf authors of his generation - irrelevant to a twenty-first century sf audience. show less

A long time ago, in a land far, far away, I was a member of the Science Fiction Book Club.

Remember that? If you read Ace Doubles (remember (THOSE?) or just about any Ace book or most sci-fi mags, you found blowi-ns for the SFBC. "Choose any four books! FREE!" Well, that was my kind of price. Mind you, I was 13 years old at the time. I think that first lot was volume one and two of "The Hugo Winners" (still have it, minus the dust jacket), Asimov's "The Gods Themselves", "The Fall of show more Colossus", and "A Treasury of Great Science Fiction". Wow! And all I had to pay was shipping!

And send those cards in every month to keep them from sending me more books. Which I would have to pay for.

Show of hands…how many of you often forgot to send those cards in? Yeah, me too.

Now, one of those books I got "unwanted" was Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's "The Mote in God's Eye", which was pretty highly regarded when it came out. In fact, a blurb from no less than Robert Heinlein say it was the finest science fiction novel he'd ever read. Really. And it ended up being nominated for a lot of awards…Hugo, Nebula, etc. With all this going for it, you'd think I would find time to read the damned thing, especially when I paid full price for it.

Well. In my defense, I was 13 at the time. No, I never read it. Kept it for years, kept it on my list of to-reads, but somehow it never got read. Years passed, that copy disappeared, I bought another. Still never read it. I DID read Niven & Pournelle's other works, namely "Lucifer's Hammer" and "Inferno". Great stuff. But somehow I still never got around to reading "Mote".

Fast forward now to 2016. Shell and I are at a semi-annual book sale in Fairview, Tennessee. And look; what's that on that Sci-Fi table? Why, it's a battered copy of "Mote"! I was torn…if I bought it, would I actually READ it this time? Well, it was only fifty cents. It went home in my sack. And yes, I did finally read it.

Take my advice. DON'T WAIT FORTY YEARS. This really IS an excellent book. It amazes me it's never been made into a movie, but then I could say the same about "Lucifer's Hammer" (but do we really need another "Armageddon"?) or "Inferno". It's not just about the first contact with aliens, but in the personal and political results of just such a meeting. From both points of view. It's hugely fascinating, exciting, and occasionally funny. Better yet, it kept me guessing to the very end just what would happen to whom. No, I won't spoil it for you.

Oh. There is a sequel too, titled "The Gripping Hand". You bastards, now I have to go get THAT. And I will get it, and I will read it, I won't wait forty years. And that's my advice to you, dear friends: go out and get yourself a copy of this one, and READ THE DAMNED THING. You'll love it. show less