“Looks like a star with a hoop around it,” said Louis. The blue strip was perfectly straight, sharp-edged, solid, and artificial, and wider than the lighted disc. Partially behind it, against a space-black background, was a strip of sky blue.
But the blazing object could not have been a sun. There was a small, intensely white disc that might have been a sun, G0 or K9 or K8, with a shallow chord sliced off along a straight black edge. He took the holo print and looked into it.Īt first it made no sense at all, but he kept looking, waiting for it to resolve. The only information he will give Louis is a picture: The Puppeteer, who calls himself Nessus, is putting together an exploration mission to a point 200 light years from earth. No human ever heard from them again or knew where they went. Having learned the galactic core had exploded and the resultant wave front would reach Known Space in 20,000 years, they decided it was time to find safety. Then, two hundred years ago, they pulled up stakes and left Known Space. Once, the three-legged, two-headed aliens maintained a vast commercial empire, trading in highly advanced technologies.
In 2850, while celebrating his 200th birthday, wandering the globe to avoid his own guests, stepping from one teleportation booth to another, Louis suddenly appears in an unexpected location with an even more unexpected host - a Pierson’s Puppeteer. The 1968 story, “There Is A Tide,” describes one of his voyages in great detail. In the past, he has taken what he calls “sabbaticals,” and gone on months-long solo deep space jaunts. Bored with an Earth where everywhere and everyone has blended into a bland homogeneity. Along the way he introduced some of the most iconic sci-fi aliens, including the cowardly Pierson’s Puppeteers and the ferocious Kzin (who now feature in their own unending series of shared-world anthologies).
Over the next six years, he wrote about another twenty novels and stories that span from the late 21st century to the 32nd. Despite having won numerous awards and a career that’s spanned over five decades, it remains the book he’s best known for.īeginning with 1964’s “The Coldest Place,” Larry Niven began laying out the history of humanity’s expansion and exploits across a 30-light year bubble of of the Milky Way he dubbed Known Space. It’s got its flaws, some pretty big ones in fact, but for much of its length it remains a terrific read. Rereading it yesterday, I was thrilled to discover it still does. I had never read anything that conveyed the feeling of BIGNESS so powerfully and so well. Back in around 1980, when I read Larry Niven’s multi-award winning Ringworld (1970) for the first time, it totally blew my mind.
0 kommentar(er)
