Larry Niven - N-Space.pdf - Larry Niven - margozap

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This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious,

and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

N-SPACE

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

49 West 24th Street

New York, N.Y. 10010

Printed in the United States of America

Book design by Jaye Zirnet,

Quality Printing and Binding by:

ARCATA Graphics/Kingsport

Press and Roller Streets

Kingsport, TN 37662 U.S.A.

CONTENTS

Introduction: The Maker of Worlds by Tom Clancy

On Niven (by David Brin, Gregory Benford, Wendy All, John Hertz, Steven Barnes, and Frederik Pohl)

Dramatis Personae

Foreword: Playgrounds for the Mind

From WORLD OF PTAVVS

Bordered in Black

Convergent Series

All the Myriad Ways

From A GIFT FROM EARTH

For a Foggy Night

The Meddler

Passerby

Down in Flames

From RINGWORLD

The Fourth Profession

"Shall We Indulge in Rishathra?" (with cartoons by William Rotsler)

Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex

Inconstant Moon

What Can You Say about Chocolate Covered Manhole Covers?

Cloak of Anarchy

From PROTECTOR

The Hole Man

Night on Mispec Moor

Flare Time

The Locusts (with Steven Barnes)

From THE MOTE IN GOD'S EYE (with Jerry Pournelle)

Building The Mote in God's Eye (with Jerry Pournelle)

Brenda

The Return of William Proxmire

The Tale of the Jinni and the Sisters

Madness Has Its Place

Niven's Laws

The Kiteman

The Alien in Our Minds

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Space

Bibliography of Larry Niven

N-SPACE

INTRODUCTION

THE MAKER OF WORLDS BY TOM CLANCY

Some years ago, when I was still dreaming about becoming that special breed of cat called

"author," I had a birthday coming up and my wife was out of ideas. I told her to check out the

bookstores for any book by Larry Niven except the three I'd already acquired. I don't remember how

many Wanda returned with, but I do know that I still read them periodically.

One of the bad things about being a writer (and there are many) is that when writing a novel, you

often find it impossible to read someone else's novel. Some evil agency inside your brain takes

note of the fact that you are reading instead of writing and forbids you to read more than thirty

or forty pages. So, often you go back to vegetating in front of the TV because you can only write

so much in a day, and the reason you picked up that book in the first place is to get your mind

off what you were doing that morning. Writing is, therefore, both a form of compulsive behavior

and, I frequently tell people, a self-induced form of mental illness. Those few writers who don't

start off by being a little nuts soon get that way as a direct result of their vocation.

When I find myself in desperate need of removing my mind from THE PLOT so that I can look at it

just a little more objectively the next day, my helper and pshrink is Larry Niven. For some

reason, my brain does not recognize him as a threat to my compulsion.

The scope of Larry's work is so vast that only a writer of supreme talent could disguise the fact

as well as he does. He doesn't just set up a cute little story of ETs or interplanetary war. Not

Larry-he builds a complete universe. Oh, sure, he keeps the galaxy pretty much as we know it (or

think we know it), but he peoples it with whole sets of civilizations, some active, some extinct,

all interrelated somehow or other. Now, that's a pretty tall order, and if you're not careful how

you go about it, the reader would soon be overwhelmed by the background and have trouble catching

on to the story itself. But not with Larry. With little more than an occasional oh, by the way he

sets all the scenery in place and then gets on with his tale, which is always a story with an

interesting point and a fairly tight focus embellished by the scenery instead of being dominated

by it.

And this ain't easy. Trust me, I write for a living, too.

All authors get fan mail, some good, and some not so good. There are two kinds that really matter.

The stuff you get from kids is very special. Kids who read for recreation, and then have the

audacity actually to write a letter to the author (I never did) are something that always touches

you. These kids will go on to accomplish things, and it's rather nice to think that you've

influenced them a little bit. Next best is the mail you occasionally get from fellow writers. To

be read by someone in the same line of work-and the worst thing about being a writer is that it

really murders your reading-is rather like being a fighter pilot and having a beer handed to you

by another fighter pilot. Your basic good feeling. I expect that Larry gets a lot of such letters.

In the times when I need to escape from inside my head and relax, Larry's the guy who relaxes me.

As I suspect he does with a lot of others. Thanks, pal.

ON NIVEN

The first time I met Larry Niven I accused him, in a jocular way, of stealing some of my best

ideas and publishing them before I had even had them. For instance, I read PROTECTOR about a year

after I'd had the idea about why immortality in an individual would never make sense. There happen

to be powerful Darwinistic reasons for people to die and get out of the way and stop breeding.

However, Larry had already taken this notion, explored it so thoroughly that, in effect, no one

could ever explore that territory again without tipping his hat to Larry. This is actually a

fairly rapacious thing to do. If you think that the territory of notions is limited, then the hard

sf writer is like a wildcat miner drilling out resources that are shrinking. For whatever it's

worth, some people think that way. A lot of sf writers aren't writing hard science fiction because

they think most of it has been written. If their reasoning is true-and I don't think it is-one of

the reasons is that you have writers like Larry Niven out there mining out whole veins and leaving

nothing left for the rest of us to explore.

In hard science fiction originality is especially prized. If you're the first to explore a certain

idea, a new technology-black holes, neutron stars-you get a fair amount of acclaim. But for Niven

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it's not enough to be the first. He has to also be last. That is his attitude, and in a sense it

is a very aggressive attitude.

So in the end we writers revere Larry Niven, even though he makes our jobs harder. He not only

mines all these marvelous veins of ideas, he mines them to exhaustion.

-David Brin

I met Larry in the mid-1960s, when he was just starting as a writer. Like many of us he began

shakily, unsure of many aspects of his craft, but absolutely firm in the realm of ideas. He knew

what he thought and felt a solid assurance.

I saw in him then a facet I've witnessed since in many university students: a love for the

scientific worldview, but an impatience with the humdrum daily grind of science itself as

universities too often present the field. Larry always liked the big picture, the supple

intersection of ideas. After Cal-Tech and his mathematics degree, he seemed to feel an urge for

larger landscapes.

I suspect many sf writers encounter such a moment, which becomes the launching point for careers.

Poul Anderson finished his degree in physics and then turned not to ornate calculations but to a

typewriter. This desire to sing rather than walk the pedestrian pathways of science is all to the

good: we need our bards. Indeed, perhaps we need them more than we need more careful but closed

thinkers.

Many science fiction readers are similar sorts. Larry was a breath of Campbellian clarity in the

New Wave murk, and he is the natural voice of a whole segment of the scientific-technical

community, irreplaceable and golden. Long may he sing!

-Gregory Benford

The first time I read Larry Niven? It was in college just before a chemistry exam. I discovered

these Larry Niven books and read straight through them instead of studying for the exam.

I eventually got to meet him, and I've known Larry ever since-about fifteen years now (longer if

you count knowing him through his books). I think my favorite thing about Larry personally is that

he always has time for people. If you show an interest in him or what he does, he's always ready

to listen to you-I mean listen intently. You never feel as if you have just a little bit of his

attention. He puts his whole self into listening and talking.

There are a lot of science fiction writers who frighten fans. Fans are actually scared of them.

Larry's never been that way. Never.

-Wendy All

Larry is probably the most beloved pro in the science fiction fan world. Panels in which he is

participating, parties at which he is likely to appear, are thronged. With good reason. He says

wonderful things. He is truly congenial (which few science fiction pros are). People like to be

around him.

-John Hertz

About 11 years ago I'd done a lot of writing but the only payment I'd received was something like

1/5 of a cent a word or payment in contributor's copies. Still I considered myself a writer.

So one day I'm in the club house of the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society, and Larry Niven walks

in. When Larry walks in, you understand, he is completely surrounded by the people there. It's

like he's a god, and this is his domain.

I walked up to him and said: "Hello, Mr. Niven, my name's Steven Barnes, and I'm a writer."

He took a puff on his pipe, looked at me and said: "Okay, tell me a story."

I just about died. But it so happened I'd sent out a story earlier that day about a compulsive

gambler who pawns his pacemaker, and somehow I stumbled through it.

After that we started talking. He seemed kind of reserved, but even then I could see he was still

in touch with his child-personality. I could especially see it in his eyes. In some ways it was as

if the beard and pipe were props to convince you that, yes, these are the badges of adulthood. But

back there were these little boy's eyes.

I asked him if he'd read a story, and he said he would, and the next week I gave him an envelope

containing three. I saw him the week following and asked if he had read them, and he said, yes,

Jerry Poumelle and he had both read them. He said he was intrigued and asked me whether I'd be

interested in looking at a story he'd tried writing ten years before and hadn't been able to

complete to his satisfaction.

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Thank God the problems with the story had nothing to do with astrophysics or any of the technical

things that Larry is a master of. They had to do with the way the human beings were relating to

one another, and I was able to fix it.

We've been collaborating ever since.

The imperative for men in our culture is that they must go out and create-work, produce, change

the land around them. Now people often think that it's easy when you have a lot of money handed to

you as a kid, as Larry had. All that does is say to you that the chances are very good you'll

never live up to the man who created all that wealth.

But Larry created a career separate from anything his family had handed him. He could have taken

their money and lain by the side of the pool and vegetated or put it into land or condominiums and

made a lot of money. And, indeed, he has made money off the money his father handed him. But the

most important thing Larry did was to go out and define a whole new world. If his world in

California had already been conquered, then Larry would create new worlds to conquer and people

them with his own creations.

-from a conversation with Steven Barnes

Since I happened to be the lucky editor who published Larry Niven's first story, I've been asked

to tell a little bit about him, which I'm glad to do. Let me tell you about that first story . . .

but forgive me if I start by explaining something about my own editorial practices.

When I was editing Galaxy and If in the 1960s I had made it a condition of employment that no one

was to expect me to spend much time in the office of the publishing company. I was willing to

appear now and then-one afternoon a week wasn't objectionable-but that was as far as I would go.

Between times I had an assistant to sit at a desk in the office for the purpose of answering the

telephone and dealing with whatever routine things had to be dealt with. (For most of that time my

assistant was a young woman named Judy-Lynn Benjamin, later Judy-Lynn del Rey, who went on to

considerably better things later on-Del Rey Books is named after her.) One of Judy-Lynn's jobs was

to go through the week's accumulations of w~isolicited manuscripts by unknown writers

(unflatteringly called "the slush pile") for me. She wasn't to read them-I have always read

everything that was submitted to me myself, on the grounds that, as Frank Munsey once said, no

magazine can survive the mistakes of more than one person-but Judy-Lynn took the stories out of

the envelopes they arrived in, clipped rejection slips on them, put them in return envelopes with

postage attached and stacked them up, unsealed, for me to pick up when I came in. Then, in the

smoking car of the train back to the Jersey Shore each week, I read the fifty or a hundred stories

that had turned up in that week's slush. There would generally be a handful that required some

sort of letter to the author, and, if I was very lucky, one or two that I could actually buy. All

the rest I sealed up and dropped into the mailbox at the Red Bank train station, and that was the

end of that. One doesn't expect much out of the slush, you see. One is generally right about that,

too.

So it was on just such a train ride, somewhere between Newark and Matawan, that I pulled out of

its envelope a slim little manuscript called "The Coldest Place," by some previously unknown

person who said his name was Larry Niven.

That manuscript didn't get mailed back. "The Coldest Place" wasn't a great story. But it had a

number of good things going for it. It started with a clever science-based idea-the "coldest

place" of the title, paradoxically, was on the dark side of the very hottest planet in the solar

system, Mercury-and the writing was competent enough, and besides the story was beautifully short.

(I was always particularly looking for short stories, because-since we paid by the word-all those

savvy professional writers had learned early that they ate better if they wrote long ones.)

So I kept that story out, and wrote a letter to the author saying I would be happy to buy it (for

very little money, to be sure), and asked him a few questions about himself. And by return mail he

answered that he'd take the offer and, yes, he had never sold a story before so I could call it a

"first." I put the check through, and marked it up for the printer, and all was well.

Or so I thought.

You never know, though, do you? There was a wholly unexpected development. Just at that time some

busybody scientists, who should have found some more productive use for their time, were

conducting radar studies of Mercury. They came up with the surprising (and just at that moment

really unwelcome) information that the planet did not always present the same face to the Sun, as

everyone (including Larry and I) had always thought. The damn thing revolved. It didn't have a

"coldest place."

It was evident that Larry Niven read the same journals as I did, because a day or two later I got

a worried letter from him to say that he'd just discovered his story had turned out to be

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scientifically wrong, and should he give the money back?

By then I had been giving the question some hard thought at my end. There was a kind of moral

question involved. I believe that science-fiction writers have a duty to be careful about the

science in their stories (and over the years I rejected a good many otherwise good stories, most

of which sold elsewhere, because of scientific flaws).

On the other hand, I don't believe that science-fiction writers have to be more right than the

scientists themselves are. Larry had done his homework. At the time he had written "The Coldest

Place" the science in it was fine; it wasn't his fault that the scientists had changed their

minds. (We can still read, for instance, Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom stories with as much

pleasure as ever, in spite of the fact that the Percival Lowell picture that he based them on of a

somewhat habitable Mars turned out to be all wrong.) Besides, for any writer his very first sale

is a major landmark, and I didn't have the heart to ask him to unsell it.

In any case, the story was already well along in the assembly line, and so I let it go through and

it appeared as written. No one seemed to mind.

The key thing that struck me about Larry was that he not only wrote well, he had gone to the

trouble of getting his science right, and even of making the science an important part of his

stories. He still does. Larry is a member of that sub-class of the class of science-fiction

writers which

I particularly admire: He doesn't just like science fiction, he likes science, and he even does

his best to keep up with and understand it.

Finding somebody like Larry Niven was a delight for me, because I could suggest science-based

story ideas to him, and rely on him to make the most of them. He was a natural. Writing science

fiction asks more of an author than getting the science right; the characters have to be good, the

settings have to be imaginative, the societies and psychologies involved need to be worked out

carefully and consistently. Larry was fine in all those ways.

For instance: Neutron stars were a new discovery in the 1960s, so I suggested he write a story

about a neutron star. He sat right down and wrote it, and he put into it some grand picaresque

characters with intriguing plot problems. Between us we thought of a wonderful title for the story

about the neutron star-we called it "Neutron Star' '-and it won him his first Hugo the following

year. A little later Freeman Dyson, at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, came out

with his suggestion that a truly advanced civilization would want to capture all the energy

radiated from its parent star by building a sort of shell around the star to trap it for their use-

what came to be called a "Dyson sphere." And of course I immediately asked Larry to write me one

of those.

I'm sorry to say that I never got to print that one. The magazines I edited were sold to another

publisher around then, and I didn't want to go along. Actually, the story never quite got written

quite the way Dyson had in mind, either, because when Larry got down to serious thinking about it

he redesigned the concept. Instead of a sphere, the artifact became a sort of hula-hoop around the

star, peopled with Larry's always intriguing aliens. He called the story that came out of it

RINGWORLD, and it remains one of his best novels.

I think I did one other important thing for Larry Niven around that time. I wanted to encourage

his interest in science-not that he needed much encouragement-and, most of all, to make it easier

for him to keep in touch with the up-to-the-minute developments, even the developments that hadn't

quite happened yet, by getting a chance to talk with some of the actual scientists who were doing

the latest research. So I suggested to him a couple of research establishments he might want to

visit, and in particular recommended he go and talk to some of my friends in the Artificial

Intelligence labs at MIT.

I suspect that that was Larry's first encounter with the MIT people, which led to coming to know

the MIT Science Fiction Society. . . which led to his meeting a member who chanced to be a pretty

young female fan called "Fuzzy Pink." A few years later I was delighted to be an

usher at the wedding which transformed Fuzzy Pink into Mrs. Marilyn Niven-a marriage which still

sturdily survives and shows every sign of having been made in heaven.

You will have noted from the above evidence of one of the great character flaws shared by almost

all editors: They love to brag about the writers they have "discovered," and the ways in which

through their fond parental guidance and instruction the writers attained success.

Partly that's jealousy; a successful writer generally winds up with a lot more success than the

editor who buys his stories. Editors have expense accounts, but writers have more fun. (That's the

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