Rainbow Mars

Gah! This is like reading Larry Niven's notes for a novel instead of a novel itself. Technological things go unexplained. Dialogue is never more than a single sentence long. Settings are so sparsely described as to be almost nonexistent. And if you haven't read any of the previous stories featuring the main character (Hanville Svetz), most of this book will probably make zero sense to you.

At about 20% of the way through the book, I gave up on it.

Supposed to be funny, and a tribute to classic Mars stories including Weinbaum's Odyssey....

Ok, had to give up. I did like the short stories. If I'd read them first, I wouldn't have struggled so with the novella. And maybe I would have liked it more. Bad choice to put them at the end of the volume... after all, they do take place earlier.

I do like the theory that rocs were invented as an explorer's thought that ostriches were chicks of a larger bird, even though it makes no sense. The short stories were funny that way. I gave the part of the novella that I tried to read not even one smile.

Come to think of it, this isn't the only Niven I've not been able to enjoy. I might just give up on him.

Delightfully geektastic. Time-travelers visit a past where the lines between fiction and reality are blurred; they go to the Mars of this past, where they meet the creations of Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.G. Wells, C.S. Lewis, Ray Bradbury and others. I loved it, but you probably have to be a big fan of classic science fiction to like it or even follow it.

Rainbow Mars is more about Svetz the time traveller…see if you can identify the sources within this tale. There are 3 of the Svetz short stories (included in other volumes) but it's Rainbow Mars that is the meat. The main tale gives us more detail and development of a decent plot line and deserves a bit more credit that "okay", but certainly a bit less than the "Draco Tavern" stories. The short stories are cute fluff, but "Rainbow Mars" is a real story with action, blood and love. Still not on the level of "Ringworld" but worth the read anyway.

Each of the stories in this book, some of which were previously published as shorts in magazines, centers on a xenophobic and somewhat reluctant time traveler being sent through time to find things to appease/entertain the ruler and/or encourage funding for the time travel agency he works for. But unbeknownst to him or his agency, he is being sent not just backwards and forwards in time but sideways to parallel universes populated with creatures from myth and fiction.
The concept is interesting and it could have made for a very whimsical series of tales. Somehow it falls short. The potential isn’t realized. Niven, a highly competent science fiction writer, was apparently trying to stretch himself to write fantasy after meeting with show more Terry Pratchett but Niven simply does not have Pratchett’s skill with words and ideas necessary to pull this off. show less

I finally got through this book on the third try. Niven's later worlds, swarming with different species in constant combat, are somehow too much invention for me. In this story he ties together time travel, alternate futures, and a whole bunch of myths about giant trees and as well as giant beanstalks, Baba Yaga, and turning things into gold.

There was a reward at the end of this story, though: all of the stories from The Flight of the Horse, which are some of his earliest and which have a lot of narrative and action packed into a short arc.

At the end of the book is a short explanation of how Niven came to write one more story about Svetz the time-traveller after 30 years.

Good Niven, but unfortunately set in the slightest of his universes.