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LARRY NIVEN
1938-

FOR LARRY NIVEN science fiction is primarily a literature of scientific ideas, an exercise in imaginative speculation in which sophisticated experiments in narrative voice, point of view, symbolism, or Joycean allusiveness would be awkward and pointless. Writing in a period when New Wave contemporaries like Samuel R. Delaney and Harlan Ellison are dazzling their readers with verbal pyrotechnics, Niven eschews stylistic innovations; and, in prose notable for its deliberate simplicity and utility, he seeks, as he puts it, "to train my readers to play with ideas for the sheer joy of it." While castigating the New Wave movement as "a seductive approach, a fine excuse for bad writing and not doing one's homework," Niven sees his own work as a continuation of "an old tradition-namely, the extrapolative story, in which ideas are tracked to expose their implications for the future and their effects on human society" (quotes from "Interview with Larry Niven" in The Science Fiction Review [July 1978]).

Niven's extrapolative stories and novels are always built around what has been known traditionally as the "What if?" proposition, a scientific or visionary hypothesis from which the writer extrapolates conclusions that ideally should be as logical as they are mind-boggling. For example, Niven's 1968 short story "All the Myriad Ways" (nominated for a 1969 Hugo award) has this for an opening paragraph: There were timelines branching and branching, a megauniverse of universes, millions more every minute.... The universe split every time someone made a decision. Split, so that every decision ever made could go both ways. Every choice made by every man, woman and child on Earth was reversed in the universe next door. It was enough to confuse any citizen, let alone Detective-Lieutenant Gene Trimble, who had other problems. Gene Trimble's "other problems" in this story concern a mysterious rash of suicides that has come in the wake of the invention of "Crosstime travel," and the solution to the mystery represents for the reader the logical consequence of the scientific premise laid down in the first paragraph. This kind of opening propositional paragraph, presenting a straightforward subordination of characterization and style to scientific speculation, recurs throughout Niven's mature work and shows him to be a writer who has remained remarkably true to his roots in "hard" science fiction.

On the other hand, it is also clear that Niven's work, although always fascinating at a purely intellectual level, has grown in narrative power through the years. Niven gives his friend and frequent collaborator Jerry Pournelle much credit for teaching him how to supply a complicated background of political and social institutions for his future histories, a background that makes the actions and motivations of his larger-than-life heroes and heroines seem more interesting and believable. In any case, his mature work of the 1970's and early 1980's is a deft blend of brilliant scientific extrapolation and rich social texture. There is, for example, his short story "Inconstant Moon" (1972 Hugo award, for best science fiction short story of 1971). It simultaneously invites us to solve a scientific puzzle based on the evidence available to his characters (did or did not the sun go nova?) while immersing us in the lives of a California couple of the near future who must first solve the problem of how best to spend their last eight hours alive (making love? drinking rare brandy and eating imported cheese? stealing jewelry?) and who then must shift into a hoarding frame of mind as it begins to look like the holocaust might not be total after all.

As a thinker Niven quite often arrives at curiously conservative conclusions. Although he seems to be deep down a believer in reason over feeling, in the ultimate value of science, and in the possibility of human Progress, his fiction tends to sound a warning against an overreliance on technology in achieving that progress.

Nevertheless, as a writer Niven is incurably romantic, delighting in the portrayal of exotic aliens, bizarre natural phenomena, giant technological artifacts,strange alien cultures, and especially in the daring quests of his heroes and heroines. This might explain in part why Niven, whose name became synonymous with hard science fiction in the late 1960's and early 1970's, has been writing more and more stories and novels in the fantasy genre.

It is interesting to compare the fantasy stories in his Warlock series with the science fiction stories of the Known Space series that first made him famous in the 1960's. The Warlock stories, which culminate i in the novel The Magic Goes Away (1978), postulate our prehistoric past as being true to our mythology: an era first ruled by gods, then by magicians, and finally by warriors as "mana," the nonrenewable resource of niagic, is slowly used up. The Known Space stories, in contrast, extrapolate from plausible scientific hypotheses in postulating the first millennium of our future history as an era in which the human race has colonized the stars by virtue of one technological innovation or theoretical breakthrough after another. Radically different in tone and texture, the two sets of stories are equally rigorous in the development of their logical premises; and viewed together, they demonstrate that Niven, as Sandra Miesel has observed in the After- word of The Magic Goes Away, "can extrapolate equally well from possible or impossible premises." Viewed together, they also demonstrate the ways in which Niven has given a much freer rein to his spirited imagination as he has learned to hold his readers' belief and interest by the sheer force of narrative texture.

Typically, the task that confronts Niven's characters is to understand the world with which they are confronted, whether it is the plausible future or the mythical past. In both his hard science fiction and his logical fantasies, Niven's characters usually embark on a quest of discovery, seeking the source of the mysterious powers that transcend and threaten them, whether those powers are the products of advanced technology or of magic. The great theme underlying all of Niven's fiction seems to be the need to discover what Arthur Koestler calls "the ghost in the machine," whether we understand the word "machine" literally or metaphorically as representing the laws and processes of nature. In The Roots of Coincidence (1972) Koestler observes that the deeper scientists probe the mysteries of nature, the more "occult" their theories become, to the point where "the hunting of the quark begins to resemble the mystic's quest for the cloud of unknowing." An overview of Niven's career suggests that Niven has come to share Koestler's notion of machines as oddly organic and nature as ultimately supernatural. It is this insight that seems to have made possible Niven's gradual shift away from old-fashioned, formulaic science fiction toward more daring forms of extrapolation in which physics blends with metaphysics and technology becomes, in Arthur C. Clarke's words, "indistinguishable from magic."

Just as Niven began his career with no intention of ever writing fantasy, he began his college studies in mathematics and the sciences with no apparent intention of ever writing fiction at all. Born in Los Angeles on 30 April 1938, of wealthy parents and as an heir to the Doheny oil fortune, Lawrence van Cott Niven grew up in Beverly Hills and attended an exclusive boarding school for boys in Santa Barbara. In 1956 he enrolled in the California Institute of Technology and later earned a B.A. in mathematics (with a minor in psychology) from Washburn University, Kansas (1962). After one year of graduate work at the University of California, he quit in 1963 to devote his energies to learning how to write science fiction, enrolling in a writing correspondence course during this period.

Niven lived off the proceeds from a trust fund and collected rejection slips for most of the following year before selling his first story, "The Coldest Place," to Frederik Pohl for Worlds of If magazine. Niven sold several more short stories and his first novel to Pohl in quick succession, and his first big break came when his story "Neutron Star" won the 1967 Hugo award as the best science fiction short story of 1966. His first novel, World of Ptavvs, was nominated for a Nebula award the same year, and Niven's career was safely launched.

Eight stories from Niven's Known Space series were collected under the title Neutron Star in 1968. These stories are notable for their subtle charm and intriguing science, and the volume was a science fiction best-seller. But it was Niven's novel Ringworld (1970), a continuation of the Known Space saga, which established his reputation as one of our finest practitioners of hard science fiction; this novel won both the 1970 Nebula and the 1971 Hugo awards for the best science fiction novel. Niven's biggest critical success since Ringworld has been the first novel he coauthored with Jerry Pournelle, The Mote in God's Eye (1974); it is an entertaining and fascinating space opera and was nominated for a Hugo award.

Niven's Known Space is the "little bubble of stars thirty-three thousand light years out from the galactic axis" that contains the home planet of the human species. Most of the Known Space stories are set in an era seven hundred to eight hundred years in our future, and Known Space at this time is about sixty to seventy light years in diameter. Earth's population has been stable at around eighteen billion for hundreds of years, thanks to the rigorous policies of Earth's Fertility Board. Technological wonders of the period include transfer booths, which make travel on Earth and on other planets instantaneous; organ-replacement banks and "booster spice," which make immortality possible for anv human who is not accident prone; hyperspace drive, which has made interstellar trade with alien species practical; terraforming, which is the rebuilding of planetary systems to meet human life-support needs; and stasis fields, which stop time from passing. (The stasis field is the invention of the Slavers, a species extinct now for a billion and a half years but who once ruled the whole galaxy; World of Ptavvs is the story of a Slaver released from stasis into human time and space.)