I used to read Larry Niven back in the early 1980s. Ringworld (1970, USA), of course, was considered a classic, and even in the 21st century is in the SF Masterworks series — although the book’s reputation rests entirely on its titular Big Dumb Object. I think I started reading Niven at school, after being drawn to a copy of Protector (1973, USA) by the striking Peter Andrew Jones cover art (on the Orbit paperback, published 1979-1989). I explored his oeuvre further, including his collaborations with Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes — I even reviewed The Legacy of Heorot, by all three of them, for the BSFA — but by the end of the decade I’d pretty much given up on his books.
So why return to him now?
To be honest, I’ve no idea. I bought a copy of A Gift from Earth (1968, USA) at the recent Eurocon here in Sweden — in my defence, it was only 10 crowns (around 85 cents, 75p, or 90 US cents). It’s the second novel in Niven’s Known Space universe — which, when I looked into it, proved a less extensive series than I’d thought, only four novels and six collections… not including the Ringworld and Fleet of World series, and a seemingly near-endless run of Man-Kzin Wars shared-world anthologies…
A Gift from Earth is set on the world of Mount Lookitthat, which orbits Tau Ceti. The human colony occupies a plateau of 20,000 square miles on the top of a mountain forty miles above the surface. It’s the only habitable area on the planet. A few centuries after landing, the colony is a repressive oligarchy, with the descendants of the original six crew of the ship, now numbering in their ten of thousands, oppressing hundreds of thousands of descendants of the fifty colonists who were carried as cargo.
On Mount Lookitthat, every crime, no matter how trivial, is punishable by death, and all sentenced criminals’ organs are harvested… and used to maintain the health and longevity of the crew.
A new “ramrobot” supply ship arrives from Earth — they’re sent out to all the colony worlds at regular intervals — and this one contains a cargo that threatens the existing social order. The Sons of Earth, a rebel group who seems to have been mostly ineffectual, learn of the ramrobot’s cargo, prompting a raid by Implementation, the colony’s police force, on a party hosted by members of the Sons of Earth.
Matt Keller narrowly escapes arrest during the raid, although he’s not a member of the rebel group; he was only there as a potential recruit. But during his escape, he discovers he has an unnatural, and uncontrollable, talent: people forget he is standing in front of them; he is effectively invisible. Using this new-found power, Keller attempts to rescue a young woman captured by Implementation, and, inadvertently, triggers an actual rebellion that brings down the crew’s brutal regime.
The idea of a series of interstellar colonies kept up to date by slower-than-light supply ships reminds me of William Barton’s Dark Sky Legion (1992, USA). Given the rarity of STL futures in science fiction — the only other ones that spring to mind are Alastair Reynolds’s Revelation Space novels, and Le Guin’s Ekumen, and there it’s called “NAFAL” — I have to wonder if Niven’s Known Space inspired Barton. It wouldn’t surprise me. Barton is of an age to have encountered Niven’s books in his late teens or early twenties. To Barton’s credit, he puts a lot more thought into how a STL interstellar polity maintains stability over vast distances and vast time-periods, but then that’s the point of his novel.
And yet, it’s true, one of the points made by A Gift from Earth, and I suspect it’s pretty much accidental, is that long-distance rule is by its nature disruptive, especially when the channels of communication only go one way: out from the centre. However, Niven is more concerned with a blow-by-blow account of the disruption, rather than interrogating the mechanism of Earth’s hegemony.
I like the idea of Mount Lookitthat’s physical location, a habitable plateau miles above an uninhabitable surface. But I’m less impressed by the colony’s society, and I find it hard to believe six people could dominate fifty to such an extent that hundreds of years later their descendants enjoy lives of luxury on the slave labour of the colonists’ descendants. And it is indeed not far from slavery — the crew limit the colonists’ access to technology, not just medical, but even ownership of, for example, cars (well, aircars).
This is perhaps not that uncommon a trope, particularly in US science fiction of the 1960s and 1970s. There are many novels written during that period which appear to extol oligarchy or autocracy. HG Wells, albeit British, popularised the idea of a scientific world-state some fifty years earlier; but also a straw poll by Donald A Wollheim — and I’ve yet to find a confirmation of this, so perhaps it’s not actually true — in which sf fans voted “benevolent dictatorship” as their preferred system of government.
But perhaps I’m reading more into the book than the author intended — one of the privileges of criticism, I’m afraid: the author’s unconscious choices are just as open to analysis as their conscious ones. I may not have known Niven was a conservative (i.e., right-wing) author when I first read him back in my schooldays, I may not have even known what that meant. Now, when my politics are firmly left-leaning, there’s no way I can read Niven without his politics colouring my reading experience.
The universal death penalty in A Gift from Earth, for example, which I believe was introduced in earlier short stories set on an over-populated Earth (1960s US sf was overly concerned with Malthusian futures), makes no sense. Especially since it’s clear its chief reason for existence is maintenance of the elite.
Niven makes this explicit halfway through the novel, detailing notes on a lecture given by a prominent member of the crew, who recognises the ramrobot’s cargo is a game-changer. Science fiction may have a reputation as a left-wing genre, but it’s mostly unearned as many of its twentieth-century practitioners were right of centre. Especially Niven. (Although not as much as Pournelle.) It still comes as something of a surprise, especially since I don’t remember Ringworld as being especially right-wing, to see how close Niven’s fiction came to fascism. Mount Lookitthat is a police state, pure and simple, ruled by fear.
I’d also forgotten how much Niven based his plots on frankly rubbish ideas about mind powers. Not just Keller’s “invisibility” here, but also Teela Brown’s “luck” in Ringworld, and even the telekinetic arm of Gill Hamilton. It’s not in the slightest bit plausible, and it’s to A Gift from Earth’s detriment its plot depends entirely on Keller’s implausible psionic power.
The novel has other faults. While the writing is pedestrian at best, Niven occasionally breaks the fourth wall — but it’s so random, it feels less like a feature of the story than it does a failure on Niven’s part to understand how narratives work.
“Geologists (don’t give me a hard time about that word) believed Mount Lookitthat…” (p59)
“Harry Kane used a word your publisher will cut.” (p139)
Then there’s the male gaze and misogyny. Given the time the novel was published, and the fact the author is male, straight, white, conservative and American, this is hardly unexpected — although it does feel a little excessive even for US sf of the late 1960s. Keller is drawn to Polly wholly because of her looks, but she falls victim to his mind power and walks away, seemingly ignoring him. (A later passage explains Keller is still a virgin because of his power, as if that were its only impact on his life.) Later, Keller sleeps with Laney — because he meets her when it’s dark, so his “invisibility” is ineffective. Nonetheless, it’s Polly’s capture by Implementation which drives him to attack the Hospital, and so kick off the rebellion against the crew. He doesn’t know Polly; he knows Laney. But Polly’s rescue is what motivates him.
I have in recent years been drawn to series. If you want me to read your book, make it part of series and release each instalment in a uniform edition. I once bought a second copy of a DVD in a film trilogy because its cover didn’t match the design of the other two DVDs… only to discover the covers were reversible and the matching design was on the inside of the DVD I already owned. Embarrassing, but true.
So I am, in a sense, drawn to Niven’s Known Space stories and novels since they comprise a series, set in a common universe. The quality is almost irrelevant — or rather, the quality, or lack thereof, is a known factor, since I’ve reread both Ringworld and Protector in recent years, and I know pretty much what to expect.
I can’t recommend A Gift from Earth; I can’t recommend any of Niven’s fiction, based on that I’ve read. He’s no longer relevant, even though he’s still being published. And even at the height of his popularity in the 1970s and 1980s, his reputation mostly rested on Ringworld, the Big Dumbo Object perhaps more than the novel — which no doubt explains the extensive sequels.
(As an aside, it’s perhaps telling, and certainly amusing, it’s the Kzin, giant feline warrior aliens, from Niven’s universe who should prove so popular they spawned a long shared-world anthology series. Of all the things in Known Space to get excited about… alien samurai cats? wtf?)
Visiting your childhood favourites pretty much always leads to poisoning the well, but I can’t honestly say Niven was ever a favourite. There’s something fascinating about the universe, the structure, he built during the 1970s, and I find myself coming back to it now, fifty years later, perhaps chiefly because the late 1960s is when sf authors began to realise the benefits, both creatively and commercially, of a common universe for their stories.
It is , I suppose, a way of reading about science fiction by reading science fiction. And that, I suspect, is all Niven’s oeuvre is good for.
