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Tales of Known Space, Larry Niven

(This is another review first posted on Facebook.)

I used to own a copy of this, so I know I must have read it sometime in the 1980s, probably the first half of the decade, and no doubt prompted by having read Niven’s Protector (1973, USA) and Ringworld (1970, USA), both of which I remembered reasonably fondly until rereading them this century. Which doesn’t exactly explain why I bothered to reread Tales of Known Space (1975, USA), given I’ve known for a long time what Niven, er, and his fiction, is like.

On the other hand, I like future histories, and Niven’s is a good example. It wasn’t until he was a few years into his career that he decided to fit his stories into a single timeline, from 1975 through to 3100 (at the time of Tales of Known Space’s publication in 1975). As a result, there are inconsistencies, such as the planet Mount Lookitthat, the setting of the novel A Gift from Earth (1968, USA), being occasionally referred to as Plateau.

Tales of Known Space is a collection of stories, set during the centuries covered by Niven’s future history (and also handily shown in a timeline chart after the table of contents). And speaking of contents… I must have purged some of these stories from my memory because, well, wow… One is the most homophobic genre story it has ever been my misfortune to read: first settlement on Mars is all male, some of the men “turn queer”, one is beaten to death when he flirts with a homophobe, homophobe flees in a Mars buggy, but does not survive, leader of mission writes report explaining why all-male colonies are a Bad Thing.

It doesn’t help that Niven’s early stories get the planets of the Solar System entirely wrong – Mercury does not rotate, Mars does not have a nitrous oxide atmosphere (the secretive Martians are forgivable, but not the noxious atmosphere). Later stories are set after humanity has encountered several alien races, but even then relations between the races are implausibly easy. The Kzin, Niven’s most popular creation – giant alien warrior cats!, go figure – may have been hostile from the start, but they’re so easily defeated, despite their advanced technology, it makes them a joke.

The stories generally make a lot of their scientific credibility, throwing out terms and concepts that would not look out of place in a hard sf story, but even back in the 1960s and 1970s Niven would have got more right if he’d actually bothered to do any real research. I think he tried, I think he didn’t understand everything he researched, and I think he didn’t let his imperfect understanding of his research get in the way of drama – and today, in the 21st century, we would hold writers to a much high standard because research has become so much easier (right-wing misinformation and lies notwithstanding).

I quite like the idea of Niven’s future history, even if the individual instalments are actually pretty bad. Niven has never been a great writer – he’s a fan of “transparent prose”, he may even have originated the phrase – and the stories in this collection vary from bad to mediocre. It includes a single Beowulf Shaeffer story, and yet hints at many much more interesting ones. The whole organ bank concept is offensive, and ‘Intent to Deceive’ reads like a right-wing wank fantasy. ‘Cloak of Anarchy’ at least reads like a sensible commentary on libertarianism, but calls it anarchy…

Even as an historical document, this collection is best avoided. Reading it will add nothing to a reader’s appreciation of the history of the genre. It should certainly never be read for enjoyment in 2024. I believe Larry Niven is still in print. I have no idea why.


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The Ringworld Engineers, Larry Niven

This was a reread, although I don’t recall when I previously read the book. Some time in the 1980s, I suspect. Everyone knows Ringworld (1970, USA), it was even No. 60 in the SF Masterworks series. Niven admits he had never intended to write a sequel, but he’d received so much correspondence about the novel – a lot of it pointing out where he’d got things wrong. Earth famously rotates the wrong way in the opening chapter of the novel (updated in later editions), but the chief complaint was that the ringworld was unstable. It needed attitude jets to keep it in orbit. So Niven decided to write The Ringworld Engineers (1979, USA), which is all about the attitude jets. Mostly.

Twenty-three years after the events of Ringworld, Louis Wu is a wirehead. He and his kzinti companion on that trip, Speaker-to-Animals, now called Chmeee, are kidnapped by a Pierson’s Puppeteer. Who is actually the mate of the Pierson’s Puppeteer from Ringworld, and was the leader of the race, the Hindmost. He was ousted and now plans to win back his position by fetching a “treasure” from the ringworld, a transmutation device.

Which doesn’t exist and never existed. But that proves irrelevant because the ringworld has been knocked from its orbit and will impact the sun in a year or so. The City Builders, the most powerful race on the ringworld, had removed the attitude jets from the ringworld’s rim, the jets that kept it in orbit, in order to power their spaceships. Hence the current situation.

Wu decides there must be a Repair Centre, a sort of central control complex for the ringworld. If he can find it, then he can prevent the ringworld from being destroyed. But first he has to find it.

The humanoid races on the ringworld have created, and maintained, treaties and coalitions through “rishathra”, which is sex between people of different hominid races. Niven obviously likes writing about sex, or rather the easy availability of it to males, but this is commercial science fiction so it’s either alluded to or entirely off the page. Nevertheless, it leaves a bad taste.

The other problem is the distances – the ringworld is huge. Absolutely fucking enormous. With a surface area equivalent to three million Earths. Most of the action in The Ringworld Engineers takes place around the Great Ocean, an ocean so large it features archipelagos which are full-size maps of various planets in Known Space (including Earth, Mars and Kzin), and which are hundreds of thousands of miles apart. After a while, the distance gets wearying, it’s almost like some sort of scale fatigue sets in. It becomes meaningless, just words. Niven uses the right words, but there’s no sense of wonder attached to the vast scale of it all.

The Ringworld Engineers fixes the issue with the ringworld’s unstable orbit, and even identifies its builders – linking back to an earlier novel by Niven. He returned to the ringworld seventeen years later with The Ringworld Throne (1996, USA), and then again eight years after that with Ringworld’s Children (2004, USA). Five prequel novels, the Fleet of Worlds series, then followed.

The ringworld is a great creation, one of science fiction’s most memorable. The plot of the novel which introduced it doesn’t really matter. Same for its sequels. Dune (1965, USA) had great world-building, but its plot helped bring it to life. The plot of Ringworld is irrelevant, the Big Dumb Object exists in spite of it. And so it is for The Ringworld Engineers. Which presents a disappointing, and unconvincing, explanation as the answer to the question of who built it, and never really manages to really evoke the scale of it all.