A Hole in Space

Not so much stories as intellectual conjectures wrapped around paper thin plots. Entertaining at times but mostly dry and tedious...definitely not his best work.

This is another collection of Niven short stories. Many of these stories delve into the social consequences of teleportation, and these are what you would expect from Niven - good technical stories.
There is two stories here that are worth the entire book in my opinion. The first is "The Fourth Profession".
This story starts off as a mystery: an alien that sells skills in pill form has given four pills to a bartender. The first three skills are easily figured out, but the fourth one is a more difficult, and raises ethical dilemmas. (One of which is that the overweight waitress that the bartender likes is now programmed to lose weight and become the perfect woman for him). None of these problems are given short-shrift - they are all well show more thought out, and weighed ethically.
The other story is "The Hole Man". This story is also not set in Niven's standard "Known Space" Universe. It starts out as a murder story, and ends up as something unsettling enough to be written by Stephen King.

As a signpost of changes within myself I use "The Fourth Profession" - how I respond to the dilemmas changes with time, and reveals how I handle dilemmas associated with free will and survival. show less

This is a reasonably entertaining collection of Niven short stories primarily from the early 1970s (plus a Louis Wu story from 1968). The stories all deal with unintended consequences, with several of them focusing on the impact of the teleportation technology that inhabits Niven's known space universe. These are stories driven by ideas and the clever working out of consequences of these ideas.

My favorite story in the collection was the last one, "The Fourth Profession," in which a member of an intersteller trading mission trades knowledge with a bartender. This was a nice combination of mystery, first contact, and even a touch of a love story (handled here better than you might expect from Niven). "The Alibi Machine," "A Kind of show more Murder," and "The Last Days of the Permanent Floating Riot Club" were three similar takes on the subject of how technology creates new opportunities for criminals, too. "$16,940.00" is a very short little crime story with nary a hint of scifi or fantasy, again on the theme of unintended consequences. show less

A very nice collection of short stories (and an article) by the creator of the Ringworld. In fact, some of them seem to be set in the same reality stream as that vaunted construct. Perhaps all of them.

The majority of these stories were previously published in a variety of magazines, but that doesn't make them any less entertaining. They may have also been published elsewhere, as a couple of them seemed familiar, but I had not read this volume prior to now, and I have not read any of the magazine issues they were previously published in.

This 10-story collection is unbalanced inasmuch as eight of the stories are readable and half of thole are musts. But Niven inclujded two "Stories," one of which is no story, but an explanation of interstellar travel and sustanence abilities using severing forms of energy, and it seemed to be an essay developing his RINGWORLD concept and series. I thing Niven is a heluva imaginationist, but a bit weak of the craft of writing.

This is quite a decent collection, all the stories are just about rereadable, although my fondness for them varies. My favourite by a long way is “The Fourth Profession”, which I’d already read somehow before buying this book in 1976.

After buying it and reading it, as with all collections of short stories, I didn’t normally reread the book as a whole, but dipped into it and reread the odd story from time to time.

The “Rammer” story is OK as a bit of a curiosity. It’s also available as the first chapter of the novel A World Out of Time; perhaps the best part? I seem to have read the novel twice but have almost no memory of it now.

The next three stories are about the social consequences of displacement booths: instantaneous show more matter-transmission technology. Mildly interesting.

Then “All the Bridges Rusting” is about the effect of matter transmission on space travel.

I’m quite fond of “There Is a Tide”, in which a man looking casually for Slaver stasis boxes finds something else that just happens to look like a stasis box. Slaver stasis boxes hark back to Niven’s first novel, The World of Ptavvs, which I’m also fond of.

“Bigger Than Worlds” is a non-fiction essay about Dyson spheres, Ringworlds, and the like.

The next two stories are fairly forgettable, and then the book ends with “The Fourth Profession”, which I’m very fond of—although it’s a hard science-fiction story with a mischievous touch of added fantasy, which I don’t approve of in principle but can’t help liking in this case. show less

Indeholder "Rammer", "The Alibi Machine", "The Last Days of the Permanent Floating Riot Club", "A Kind of Murder", "All the Bridges Rusting", "There Is a Tide", "Bigger Than Worlds", "$16,940.00", "The Hole Man", "The Fourth Profession".

"Rammer" handler om en optøet der tilbydes valget mellem rumpilot og sletning.
"The Alibi Machine" handler om tilvænning til instant transport selv som flugtmetode.
"The Last Days of the Permanent Floating Riot Club" handler om lommetyve og andre der udnytter flash crowds.
"A Kind of Murder" handler om hvordan man begår et mord og bruger en dislocation box.
"All the Bridges Rusting" handler om kolonisering af fremmede planeter med dislocation boxe fra JumpShift Inc til hjælp.
"There is a Tide" handler om show more Louis Gridley Wu på jagt efter en stasis box. I stedet finder han og en alien en klump neutronium med en farligt stor tyngdekraft.
"Bigger Than Worlds" handler om spekulationer over dyson spheres og endnu større konstruktioner.
"$16,940.00" handler om pengeafpresning.
"The Hole Man" handler om et meget lille sort hul på Mars.
"The Fourth Profession" handler om en bartender og en Monk der sælger viden på pilleform fx viden om at stjerneskibskaptajner kan udløse en nova med vilje.

Novellerne er godt håndværk og godt fortalt show less