" Essay by Richard Finhold" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

The most intriguing of the extraterrestrial aliens who inhabit Known Space are the supremely advanced but instinctively cowardly Puppeteers, who were given this name because they resemble "a headless, three-legged centaur wearing two Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent puppets on its arms." In "At the Core" (1966) the Puppeteers blackmail a human adventurer named Beowulf Shaeffer into piloting an experimentally fast hyperpace ship to the galactic core, where he finds that millions of suns have gone supernova in a giant chain reaction. Radiation from the explosion, which will not reach Known Space for thirty thousand years, will eventually make the whole galaxy uninhabitable. The frightened Puppeteers, who never take any chances, begin immediately to move their home planet at sublight speed toward the outer edges of the galaxy and beyond.

As Ringworld opens, the Puppeteers have been absent from Known Space for over two hundred years. A Puppeteer named Nessus, who is considered insane by other Puppeteers for having once displayed humanlike courage, returns to Known Space in Shaeffer's experimental ship to enlist the aid of a two-hundred-year-old human named Louis Wu. The Puppeteers want Louis and Nessus to investigate the life-support potential of an artificially constructed "ringworld" that Puppeteer scouts have discovered in an area far outside Known Space.

This ringworld is spinning on its axis, for artificial gravity, at almost eight hundred miles per second around a yellow-dwarf sun. It is ninety-three million miles in radius, equal to that of Earth's orbit, and its inner inhabited surface is a million miles wide and six hundred million miles long. Nessus and Louis are accompanied on their mission by a huge alien called Speaker-To-Animals, a member of the fierce, catlike kzinti species, and by a young human female named Teela Brown, the descendant of six generations of winners in Earth's birth lotteries, who is brought along on the theory that natural selection has provided her with the kind of luck they will all need to survive their mission. They crash-land on the inner surface to find an Earthlike environment of staggering dimensions and a fallen human civilization that has shrouded the technological origins of the ringworld to religious superstition and has continued to worship the memory of its long-dead class of "engineers," the Builders. Setting off for the rim, which is five hundred thousand miles away, they find themselves on a quest to discover not only a way off the surface but also the mysterious cause of the civilization's technological decline.

With this novel, Niven seems to have added a corollary to Arthur C. Clarke's proposition that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" - specifically, that any sufficiently advanced technology can also be indistinguishable from nature itself. To the primitive superstitious ringworlders, the lasers and flycycles of Puppeteer technology are indistinguishable from magic, and the ringworlders conceptualize the giant ring that looms over their sky as an "Arch" raised by the divine Builders, as a "sign of the Covenant with Man." Ironically, even Louis, who has seen the entire ringworld from space at a godlike perspective, has trouble resisting this interpretation of the phenomenon. And, owing to his persistent tendency to view everything on the ringworld as the product of nature rather than mankind, he fails at first to recognize a volcano for what it really is, a giant meteor puncture in the ring's base material.

In The Ascent of Man (1973) Jacob Bronowski observes that a machine, whether as simple as a hammer or as complex as a fusion reactor, is nothing more than "a device for tapping the power in nature." Louis Wu and his companions discover, likewise, that a machine as sophisticated as the now battered ringworld is a Pandora's box primed to destroy its inhabitants because it taps into powers that scientists cannot even comprehend, much less control. And Niven seems to be suggesting that such is the magnitude of the ringworld's powers that they should only be approached with piety and religious awe. So, the noblest and finally the wisest of the characters in the novel seems to be a ringworlder of mythic proportions named Seeker, who is on a holy quest, significantly at a right angle to the direction of Louis' group, to find the base of the Arch.

There are many ironic references in the novel to the folly of using technology to "play god"; and, toward the end of their quest, Louis, Speaker, and Teela discover that the Puppeteers have earned their name through the centuries by tampering with the natural selection processes of human and kzinti evolution. In their mania for leaving nothing to chance, the Puppeteers have finally outsmarted themselves. Centuries before, they had fixed Earth's birth lotteries in order to breed humans having luck as powerful as Teela's. But now Nessus discovers that in doing so his race upset the laws of probability and inadvertently subjected the whole galaxy to a select number of infallibly lucky humans. So, for example, they were destined to crash-land so that Teela would meet Seeker, the man she was "born to love." Nessus, Speaker, and Louis finally discover a way off the surface, leaving the immortal Teela and her lover (with her luck, nothing can kill them) to pursue an endless quest around and around the inside of the ring, safe from the galactic core explosion since the dense material of the ring lies in the plane of the advancing energy wave.

Niven's fans virtually forced him to produce a sequel. In The Ringworld Engineers (1979) Louis Wu returns some twenty years after his first adventure to find that the ring's orbit has become unstable. The novel is well done but less compelling than the original because the plot seems designed mostly as an excuse to expose Louis to one technological discovery after another. For instance, we learn the cause of the fall of the floating cities, the surprising source of a superconductor-eating bacterium, and the fact that the ring has attitude jets and a spillpipe system. The novel is perhaps best thought of as an example of the sophisticated game that writers of hard science fiction often play with their readers. In his dedication to the novel, Niven says that people have never stopped writing to him about "the assumptions, overt and hidden, and the mathematics and the ecology and the philosophical implications" of the ringworld itself. It is for the small group of science fiction purists who treat the ringworld as "a proposed engineering project" that this sequel was written.

In The Mote in God's Eye, as in Ringworld, the plot revolves around the way in which a technologically advanced future human civilization blunders into opening a Pandora's box that, once opened, threatens a holocaust. In the year A.D. 3017, a space vessel of the Second Empire of Man intercepts an alien space probe that has entered human space from the direction of a yellow-dwarf sun located inside that mysterious "nebular mass of dust and gas" known as the "Coal Sack." The superstitious followers of the "Church of Him" on the planet New Scotland believe the Coal Sack to be the face of God; a red-giant star at its center gives it the appearance of a huge, glowing eye (the yellow dwarf is the "Mote" in the eye) looking out from the dark hood covering God's enormous head. Two ships of the Empire make the jump across hyperspace (in zero time, thanks to the most significant invention of their civilization, the Alderson drive) to the Mote, where they confront the strange but technologically adept aliens the Empire humans come to call "Moties." Moties are furry creatures with two thin right arms and a massive left arm, the only asymmetrical species in the known universe. They are the product of a peculiar sequence of engineered mutations that has caused the race to evolve in a number of directions simultaneously.

There is something mysteriously wrong with the Motie civilization. Although highly advanced, it seems to have undergone "thousands of Cycles ... of collapses back to slavery." What the humans do not discover until they have actually brought Motie ambassadors back to human space is that, owing to the vagaries of their evolution, fertile Moties must breed to stay alive - a fact that puts enormous pressure on the limited resources of their solar system. It also puts life-or-deach pressure on each succeeding civilization, since each must race to expand its technological capacities before its ticking population bomb explodes. So far, no Motie civilization has won its race against time, and sane Moties accept with stoicism the inevitability of the natural cycles. From time to time, though, a Motie goes "Crazy Eddie," acting "as if the impossible could be achieved," as did the one who launched the probe the humans intercepted and their aspirations only make things worse.

By this definition, of course, the whole human race is "Crazy Eddie," and the humans now discover that they are faced with a moral dilemma they cannot solve. Once the Moties know of the existence of hyperspace, they will use their superior technological instincts to develop an Alderson drive of their own, making every uninhabited planet in human space a place to dump excess Motie populations. It seems that the only way the humans can avoid being overrun is by exterminating the entire Motie civilization immediately. But, before this is done, the Motie ambassadors devise an ingenious solution to the problem, providing the "Crazy Eddie" Second Empire of Man with a morally acceptable way to put the lid back on a box that neither a sane Motie nor a reverent member of the Church of Him would have been foolish enough to open in the first place.

Niven and Pournelle have since collaborated on three other novels - Inferno (1976), Lucifer's Hammer (1977), and Oath of Fealty (1981) - and they are reportedly working on a sequel to The Mote in God's Eye. Inferno is a modern version of Dante's Inferno; it seems to be predicated less on its authors' recognition that their novel is a fantasy and more on the conceit that Dante's work was really science fiction. Allen Carpentier, a famous science fiction writer, falls to his death while showing off for his fans at a "sci-fi" convention and wakes to find himself in the Vestibule of the Hell envisioned by Dante.

A guide named Benito (Mussolini, as we subsequently discover) assures Allen that "the route to Heaven is at the center of Hell"; and, as they pursue their quest through one torture after another, Allen discovers that he can "quit looking for justice in Hell" where "there was only macabre humor." It is his ironic fate as a science fiction writer to be looking always for the technical apparatus that underlies Hell's marvels. He develops the hypothesis that Hell is actually an "Infernoland," part of an extravagant amusement park built by an advanced civilization whose technology is to him "indistinguishable from magic." To this Benito replies, "Yours is the most curious delusion I have yet encountered here." But, ironically, this hypothesis is not too far from the final revelation that Hell is actually "the violent ward of a hospital for the theologically insane." It is a testing ground engineered by God as a "last attempt" to get the attention of human beings too proud of their technology and too self-centered in their humanism to accept the reality of an eternal, omnipotent, ghostly Presence in both technology and nature. Humbled, Benito observes: "Remember there is a way. Downward, accepting everything-."

During the 1970's Niven wrote a series of science fiction mysteries that are not as ambitious in theme as his major works of fiction but demonstrate many of his most engaging qualities. The stories concern the adventures of Gil Hamilton, an agent of A.R.M. in the twenty-second century who solves his cases with the aid of an imaginary, psychic "arm" (see The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton, 1976).