Haven't Future Histories Come A Long Way?

"The Man Who Sold The Moon" is the title story of the first volume of Robert Heinlein's Future History. Genesis, a late novel by Poul Anderson, is a single volume future history. D.D. Harriman, the entrepreneur who "sold the Moon," lived underground because, despite its suitably comfortable interior, his dwelling was an elaborate nuclear air raid shelter. Laurinda Ashcroft, a human-AI interface in Genesis, lives underground because the ecology is planned. Thus, these works reflect the concerns of the different periods in which they were written.

When Laurinda receives a visitor in her underground home, there is, for me, a faint echo of Delos Harriman's conversation with his wife in their underground home but the most notable feature of these works is the many differences between them. Harriman and Laurinda inhabit earlier and later periods of different fictitious timelines so they cannot meet except in the imagination of a reader who sees some tenuous connection between them.

Another measure of the distance travelled by future histories is simply the vast difference in scope and scale between Heinlein's Future History and Anderson's much longer History of Technic Civilisation. In the Future History, capitalism develops the Solar System but becomes oppressive. Social disorder on Earth leads to an American theocracy. This is followed by the Covenant which, after some further troubles, leads to a "mature culture." In the Technic History, capitalism develops a vast volume of interstellar space but becomes monopolistic. Social breakdown in the Solar System leads to an Empire which lasts for several centuries and volumes and is followed, after the barbarism of the "Long Night" period, by bigger and stabler civilisations in several spiral arms.

 

"If This Goes On -" is the first of only two novels in Heinlein's Future History. Ringworld's Children is the fourth novel in Larry Niven's Ringworld Tetralogy and maybe the eleventh novel in his Known Space future history depending on how we count them. (There are works written by Niven, co-written by Niven and written by others.) "If This Goes On -" occupies partly familiar territory. All the action is on Earth and Americans still go to church. If anything, sociologically, they have moved backwards to a form of medievalism with the Prophetic priesthood misusing modern communications technology until they are overthrown by the Second American Revolution. By contrast, Ringworld's Children is set not only much further in the future but also not even on a planetary surface. 

Several intelligent species contend in the space around the Ringworld, sometimes using anti-matter as a weapon. A ghoul protector uses nanotech to move the Ringworld out of Known Space through hyper-space. At least three terms here require explanation: Ringworld; ghoul; protector. But my point is simply the vast distance travelled conceptually and technologically from "If This Goes On -" to Ringworld's Children.

However, both Anderson and Niven have written in an American future historical tradition initiated by Heinlein. Without Harriman and the Prophets, there might never have been a Technic Civilisation, a Laurinda or a Ringworld. 

Strengths and Weaknesses of Larry Niven

Strengths

Larry Niven is, I think, the most ingenious American future historian, particularly in the Ringworld Tetralogy that concludes his Known Space future history. The Ringworld is an inhabited artefact encircling a star at a planetary distance. Known Space is like an update of Robert Heinlein’s Future History and an improvement on Isaac Asimov’s future history. Heinlein describes terrestrial conflicts and extraterrestrial colonies. Asimov describes extrasolar colonies and interstellar civilisation. Niven describes all four.

The first four short stories in the Known Space Series describe the exploration of the solar system in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Niven’s Mars is the one revealed by Mariner probes. His "Belters" colonise not the planets but the asteroids because the latter contain more easily accessible industrial wealth. Alien motives differ and matter.

Asimov’s characters merely build robots and travel through hyperspace to inhabitable, uninhabited planets. Niven’s characters, both human and alien, do much more: 

use ramjets before hyperspace; 
build and populate the Ringworld; 
fight and trade with other species; 
extend lifespans; 
become immortal "protectors" or genetically lucky "teelas"; 
move a Fleet of Worlds to the Greater Magellanic Cloud to escape the Core explosion; 
use teleportation booths in known space and stepping discs on the Fleet of Worlds; 
apply anti-matter and nanotech. 

Asimov posited a Galactic Empire only to get a population big enough for "psychohistorical" predictions to work, not, like Anderson or Niven, to speculate imaginatively about environments elsewhere in the galaxy. Niven’s future history is diverse and open-ended, not unilinear. It cannot be summarised in a single narrative and is not dominated by a single character.

Weaknesses

As the Known Space Series grows, a stylistic problem develops. Niven wants us to know that his characters are intelligent enough to witness an event and immediately to understand its implications without having to articulate these to each other. Unfortunately, to make this point, the characters and their author often do not articulate the implications, or even sometimes describe the event, to the readers either so that we are left wondering what is happening.

Niven’s style becomes cryptic and allusive. He italicizes a word as if for conversational emphasis although the reason for the emphasis may not be clear to a reader. 

" ‘…and I haven’t seen any insects.’
…" ‘Carrion?’
"He guessed her meaning." (1)

I do not.

(Added on 26-7-09: I did not. I am currently enjoying re-reading the Tetralogy. At this point in the text, the continuing dialogue does provide an explanatory context for the query, " 'Carrion?' " Why did I not understand this before? I reached the characteristically cryptic "He guessed her meaning...", stopped reading in irritation, then later resumed reading from that point, thus missing the connection between " 'Carrion?' " and, three sentences later, a reference to (carrion-eating) "Ghouls". How much of this is my fault as a reader? Niven's style had predisposed me to be irritated rather than intrigued by opaque statements like "He guessed her meaning" when we do not yet know her meaning.)

I do not understand why a character laughs when hearing some Ringworlders described.( 2) Characters interrupt each other:

" ‘Did you see any sign of-’
‘Yes, of course…" (3)

See what and why "of course"?

(Added on 26-7-09: Again, I think I have got this on re-reading. It would have been clearer if the first speaker had been allowed to complete his question.)

- or expect us to finish their sentences:

"Give them decent telescopes? No, they’d still – Ah." (4)

They’d still what?

Louis Wu (human) races a kzin (a carnivorous feline alien) along a mile-long ship and through an on-board garden that had fed herds for kzinti sailors. When asked how he knew that he would win the race even though the kzin had started first, Louis replies that men chase fleeing prey whereas kzinti find something slower. Does this statement alone answer the question? (5)

" ‘…now we have to guess whether Teela saw it.’
" ‘And if she did?’
"Louis sighed. ‘Bram, what have you got on living protectors?’ " (6)

Why do they have to guess whether Teela, a protector, saw "it" (evidence of the activities of other protectors)? We later learn that, if she did, then this gave her a reason for wanting to die. But Louis already knew one reason for this and does not seem to need the information in any case.

"Bram must have noted Louis’ rapt gaze. ‘What strikes you, Louis?’
"What struck Louis was that the Hindmost [a cowardly ‘puppeteer’] wasn’t going to be much help to Louis Wu. Bram had had too much time to intimidate the puppeteer. Louis said instead, ‘I had an insight…’ " (7)

Louis then discusses puppeteer reproduction and suggests research on digger wasps but never returns to the subject. It took me a long time to suspect that Louis refers to reproduction and wasps only in order to prevent Bram from drawing unwelcome inferences from his "rapt gaze." If those who have not read Niven find this confusing, so did I.

Long journeys and dramatic battles are described as briefly and colorlessly as possible. Niven becomes the master of the telegrammic epic which is a pity because his scientific imagination rivals or surpasses that of Blish or Anderson.

(Added on 3-2-08: Fleet of Worlds by Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner, published 2007, does not suffer from the stylistic problems discussed above.)

1. Larry Niven, The Ringworld Throne (London: Orbit, 1998), p. 175.
2. ibid, p. 297.
3. ibid, p. 237.
4. ibid, p. 274.
5. ibid, pp. 272-273.
6. ibid, p. 295.
7. ibid, p. 284.

Larry Niven's Future Histories

Introduction

We can enjoy an imaginative science fiction series but forget most of its complicated details. Writing the following summaries increased my enjoyment of Larry Niven’s future histories. Publishing them might either increase your enjoyment or encourage you to read the works for the first time.

Known Space

In Niven’s Known Space future history, the interstellar Slaver Empire, based on hypnotic telepathy, was overthrown a billion and a half years ago. Stasis boxes contain imperial relics, including, in one case, a live Slaver with the Power. Members of the Pak species develop through three stages: child, breeder and protector. Protectors use enhanced speed, strength and intelligence and an indefinite life span to defend their bloodlines. A protector whose bloodline is wiped out loses motivation, stops eating and dies unless he can opt to protect his entire species.

Terrestrial human beings are mutated Pak breeder colonists of a former Slaver food planet. When tree-of-life, which transforms unintelligent breeders into superintelligent protectors, had failed to grow on Earth, unprotected breeders became intelligent by natural selection. When a few human beings acquire tree-of-life, human protectors fly towards the galactic Core to battle approaching Pak.

The Asteroid Belt colonies become politically independent of the UN Earth-Moon government. On Earth, banks of organs for transplants are filled by increasing the number of capital offenses until jails become obsolete. The demand for organs also generates the crime of “organlegging," killing people for their organs, but, eventually, medical progress makes transplants obsolete. A human protector hiding in the cometary halo but secretly intervening in the inhabited Solar System has invested in alloplasty and regeneration as alternatives to transplants. His interventions initiate a Golden Age in the Solar System. Later, coffin-like “autodocs” heal all injuries and cure all illnesses. Later again, a nanotech autodoc re-grows a body from a severed head and transforms a protector back into a breeder.

Early interstellar exploration is by unmanned interstellar ramjets. Colonization is by “slow ships” with cold sleep and, later, stasis fields gained from Slaver technology. Some barely habitable planets are colonized. For example, the East and West Poles of Jinx rise above its atmosphere.

Terrestrial human beings stabilize their population at eighteen billion. Earth is so crowded that picking pockets is legalized. “Flatlanders," Earth dwellers, carry only small change in wallets displaying their names and addresses so that pick-pockets can post them back. Believing that humanity avoided nuclear war, pollution, ecological disaster and asteroid strikes by luck and that luck is a psychic power, two-headed, three-legged, herbivorous “puppeteers” economically manipulate the Earth Fertility Board into running Birthright Lotteries, thus breeding luckier humans beings. Later, human space is crisis-free because its inhabitants are genetically lucky.

Space-dwelling Outsiders, with superfluid helium metabolisms, unaccountably follow organisms called “starseeds” through interstellar space. Puppeteers deliberately lure starseeds into human space, thus enabling Outsiders to meet men and to sell them the faster than light drive which ensures human victory in the Man-Kzin Wars. The feline kzinti are intelligent, hunting carnivores who tend to attack before they are ready so that their most aggressive representatives die fighting men. Thus, the puppeteers breed more cautious, diplomatic kzinti. Anderson, Pournelle and others contribute many volumes of “Man-Kzin Wars” stories. After the wars, a kzinti apprentice ambassador to Earth who has not yet earned a name is styled only by his profession, Speaker-To-Animals.

Puppeteers accelerate their home planet, accompanied by four agricultural planets, towards the Magellanic Clouds ostensibly in order to avoid radiation from the exploding Core, which will make this part of the galaxy uninhabitable in about 20,000 years. However, traveling at near light speed, they must be able to shield their planets from gamma rays and therefore should not need to flee from the Core explosion. Beowulf Shaeffer theorizes that the puppeteers intend to turn towards the Core and occupy sterilized planets. (It looks as if Niven is, rightly, rethinking his premises.)

Human beings use enclosed transfer booths, like telephone kiosks, for teleportation but puppeteers use small, open stepping disks.

Known Space: Ringworld

Many hominid species inhabit the Pak-built Ringworld, a terraformed artifact encircling a star at a planetary distance. The Pak found a system where, over billions of years, a gas giant had been drawn close to its sun, destroying lesser planets as it came. With a system already cleared and most of the mass gathered into a single body twenty times as massive as Jupiter, Pak built the Ringworld, using the star’s magnetic fields to confine the masses needed, including hydrogen for fusion motors to spin the ring.

The Ringworld has three million times the area of Earth, and is the scene of a tetralogy. Its tensile strength is approximately the force holding an atomic nucleus together. Centrifugal force replaces gravity. Thousand mile high rim walls hold the atmosphere. Rim wall attitude jets counteract orbital instability. Pipes circulate topsoil from the oceans, under the floor and back over the walls. Shadow squares, orbiting between the Ringworld and its sun, duplicate day and night.

Defense against meteors or invaders comprises solar flares generated, then transformed into laser beams, by a superconducting network embedded in the dense Ringworld floor. One Moon-sized body did hit the underside of the Ringworld, deforming the landscape upwards, thus creating the thousand mile high Fist-of-God mountain with a crater opening into space above the atmosphere. Because the Ring is visible overhead at night, many Ringworlders believe that they live not inside a ring but under an Arch.

The Ringworld has many contoured seas and rivers and two counterbalancing oceans. Islands in the Great Ocean are inhabited one-to-one scale models of Earth, Mars, Kzin, Jinx and other inhabited planets, although a human protector had exterminated the original Martians back in the Solar System as a threat to humanity. Archaic kzinti from the Map of Kzin cross the ocean in a mile-long ship to conquer the Map of Earth. The Other Ocean contains thirty two one to one scale models of the Pak home planet. Pak protectors fought for control of the Ringworld Repair Center hidden under the Map of Mars. Defeated rebels were each confined to a single Map of Pak with a breeder population to protect.

The ruling protectors died. We are told that they were killed by a disease but we also learn that anything said by one of the characters may turn out to have been a mistake or a lie. Unprotected breeders evolved to fill every ecological niche, including water dwellers, grass eaters, fliers, non-sapient, blood-sucking “vampires” etc. Many niches were previously unoccupied because the Ringworld builders had not imported any life-forms dangerous to their own species.
 

The large population and land area enable natural selection to occur more quickly than it does on planets. Many breeders became intelligent and built civilizations. In 1733 A. D., puppeteers, seeking a trade advantage, introduced a superconductor plague to the Ringworld, thus causing the Fall of the Cities, when magnetically levitated buildings literally fell from the sky, reducing most Ringworlders to barbarism.

Some Ringworlders dismounted attitude jets for interstellar travel. The unstable Ringworld would have brushed against its sun if visiting aliens and native protectors had not repaired the damage. Ringworlders call planet dwellers “Ball People." Different species produce protectors who fight to control Ringworld maintenance systems. Ghouls, eaters of the dead, a single species throughout the Ringworld, communicate by mirrors along the rim wall and become ideal protectors of the entire Ringworld because they must preserve all other species as their own food source. If any hominids cremate their dead, then Ghouls attack the living. They can administer the funeral rites of all Ringworld religions.

Human, kzinti and other spacecraft approach the Ringworld and endanger its structure by fighting each other with weapons including anti-matter. The UN and the Patriarchy want Ringworld technology but are not concerned for the safety of the Ringworld’s inhabitants. A Ghoul protector changes the superconducter network with stolen nanotechnology in such a way that he is able to move the Ringworld out of known space through hyperspace.

Sentient beings who look directly into hyperspace, whether through a spaceship window or, in this case, in the Ringworld sky, temporarily lose the power and even the memory of sight. Those who are forewarned and prepared can take control.

with Jerry Pournelle

Pournelle’s Moties, co-written by Niven, are asymmetrical, three-armed aliens who die if they do not become pregnant, therefore cannot control their population. The Second Empire of Man blockades the Moties’ planetary system. Thus confined, the Moties cannot prevent their civilization from periodically rising and falling.

also

In Niven’s second, unnamed, future history, a frozen dead man’s memories are transferred to a brain-wiped criminal who survives for three million years by time dilation and cold sleep. On returning to a much changed Solar System, where Earth has been moved into a Jovian orbit, he is rejuvenated when the chemicals associated with aging are teleported from his body. Meanwhile, human beings colonize the Smoke Ring, a breathable atmosphere encircling a star at a planetary distance.

Comparisons

Known Space is like an update of Heinlein and an improvement on Asimov. Heinlein describes terrestrial conflicts and extraterrestrial colonies. Asimov describes extrasolar colonization and interstellar civilization. Niven describes all four. His first four stories describe the exploration of Mercury, Pluto and Mars in the last quarter of the twentieth century. His Mars is the one revealed by Mariner probes. His characters colonize the asteroids, not Mars or Venus. Mars is uninviting, Venus uninhabitable and the Belt holds more easily accessible industrial wealth than the planets.

Niven’s interstellar civilization involves multi-species interaction. The different motivations of kzinti, protectors, Outsiders, puppeteers etc affect events. Kzinti, initially intending only to enslave and eat human beings, learn to treat them with respect. Outsiders do not need gravity or oxygen. They have no reason for any conflict with planet dwellers and they trade for information. Protectors become irrationally uncooperative if they realize that a proposed course of action remotely threatens the interests of any of their descendants.

Puppeteers are sane only when they are what men or kzinti regard as cowardly. An insane puppeteer represents his species to others. When disagreeing with another reader about how the puppeteers would respond to a particular crisis, I realized that we were both right because we were articulating puppeteer Conservatism and Experimentalism, respectively. This, in turn, meant that he was right because the Experimentalists win elections during crises.

Known Space is more closely based than the Foundation series in the physical sciences. Asimov’s characters merely travel through hyperspace in order to colonize inhabitable but uninhabited planets. Niven’s characters do considerably more, as demonstrated in the preceding summary. Asimov posited a Galactic Empire only to give him a population big enough for pyschohistorical predictions to work, not to speculate imaginatively about environments elsewhere in the galaxy.

Niven’s fictitious history is diverse, not unilinear. It cannot be summarized as a single narrative and is not dominated by a single character like Asimov’s Daneel or Seldon. Louis Wu is the central character of the Ringworld tetralogy but the third and fourth volumes also present Ringworlder view points. We still do not know what happened to the Pak fleet approaching from the Core. Not only is the galaxy a big place: the Ringworld alone is a very big place. We learn a lot more about its history, structure and inhabitants in each volume but, as with real history, the story remains open-ended. 

Strengths And Weaknesses Of Larry Niven