"Larry Niven - Tales of Known Space (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

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Introduction:

My Universe and Welcome to It!


TWELVE YEARS AGO I started writing. Eleven years ago I started selling what I wrote. And eleven
years ago I started a future history-the history of Known Space.
The Known Space Series now spans a thousand years of future history, with data on conditions up
to a billion and a half years in the past. Most of the stories take place either in Human Space
(the human-colonized worlds and the space between, a bubble sixty light-years across by Louis Wu's
time) or in Known Space (the much larger bubble of space explored by Human-built ships but
controlled by other species); but arms of exploration reach 200 light-years up along galactic
north, and 33,000 light-years to the galactic core. The series now includes four novels (World of
Ptavvs, Protector, A Gift from Earth, Ringworld) plus the stories in the collection Neutron Star,
plus the book now in your hands, plus one other to be published in February of 1976 to be called
The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton.
Future histories tend to be chaotic. They grow from a common base, from individual stories with
common assumptions; but each story must--to be fair to readers stand by itself. The future
history chronicled in the Known Space Series is as chaotic as real history. Even the styles vary
in these stories, because my writing skills have evolved over eleven years of real time.
But this is the book with the crib sheets. The stories Published here are in chronological
order. I've scattered supplementary notes between them, to explain what is going on between and
around the individual novels and stories, in a region small on the galactic scale but huge in
human experience.
A few general notes are in order here:


1. The tales of Gil the ARM are missing. This book became so big that we had to cut these three
science- fiction/detective stories--60,000 words worth-to make room. Gil's career hits its high
point around 2121 AD, between World of Ptavvs and Protector. We'll be publishing these stories in
one volume sometime next year.
2. I dithered over including "The Coldest Place" and "Eye of an Octopus." They were my first and
sixth story sales, respectively; and they aren't that good. Furthermore, "The Coldest Place" was
obsolete before it ever reached print. But these two stories are part of the fabric of the
series, so I've included them.
3. You may feel that Mars itself is changing as you read through the book. Right you are.
"Eye of an Octopus" is set on pre-Mariner Mars. Mariner IV's photographs of the craters on Mars
sparked "How the Heroes Die." Sometime later, an article in Analog shaped the, new view of the
planet in "At the Bottom of a Hole." If the space probes keep redesigning our planets, what can we
do but write new stories?
4. I was sore tempted to rewrite some of the older, clumsier stories. But how would I have known
where to stop? You would then have been reading updated stories with the facts changed around.
I've assumed that that isn't what you're after. I hope I'm right.
5. The Tales of Known Space cluster around five eras.
First there is the near future, the exploration of interplanetary space during the next quarter-
century.
There is the era of Lucas Garner and Gil "the ARM' Hamilton: 2106-2125 AD. Interplanetary
civilization has loosened its ties with Earth, has taken on a character of its own. Other stellar