On a related note

[james_davis_nicoll]

What should go on a Top Ten "In retrospect, what the hell were we thinking" list of once-popular SF?

Comments

[gohover.livejournal.com]

I don't follow your comment regarding the gender balance in a World Out Of Time - the prepubescent "Boys" with a capital B were genetically modified to have an extremely long life,the Girls had been wiped out by the Boys, and the normal humans from whom the Boys selected replacements for losses in their ranks were under the control of the Boys and used as a breeding stock. Perhaps Niven doesn't mention it (I don't remember), but the Boys would have been capable of controlling the population of the normal humans, who were just treated as livestock. Of course, given the high tech available, biological handwavium could have been used instead (cloning, etc), but such explanations are unnecessary as far as I can recall.

I completely agree about the potassium deficiency -- and as you and probably most people reading this already know, there are decades of criticism examining Niven's science mistakes -- that kind of criticism is what makes Hard Sf fun. Two thoughts: 1) I think Niven's later work is unpopular primarily because his narrative technique changed -- his books became much harder to enjoy just at the words and sentences level. I obviously am a Niven fan, but I just couldn't figure out what was going on in Rainbow Mars. 2) The potassium deficiency is just a particular egregious example of Niven playing the Hard SF game and making a regrettable mistake. In comparison, what annoyed me about his first collaboration with Lerner (I haven't read the sequel), is that they didn't seem to engage their imaginations to create a plausible alien world over most of the book. The Puppeteer's computing environment was central to the plot, and yet it was depicted as ridiculously similar to our own contemporary computing environments -- Niven and Lerner didn't even try to imagine to something different, nor try to explain why there might be similarities, despite the technology having a completely different origin and being in a much different state of maturity. That seems much worse than what happened in Destiny's Road.

--

I look forward to reading fictional proposals for and/or commentary on techniques for moving the Earth. Sounds like fun! The last I heard, Gregory Laughlin (from the Systemic blog oklo.org) co-authored a paper that described a plausible way to to this and I haven't seen the idea used in science fiction. (Has anyone else?) The idea was to shepherd a medium size asteroid to make nearly yearly passes for 5,000 or so years. This seems to be the paper http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0102126 and googling "Moving the earth" and "Gregory Laughlin" yields many popular discussions of the idea.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

a World Out Of Time - the prepubescent "Boys" with a capital B were genetically modified to have an extremely long life,the Girls had been wiped out by the Boys, and the normal humans from whom the Boys selected replacements for losses in their ranks were under the control of the Boys and used as a breeding stock.

My point is (at risk of getting too deep into the minutiae of AWOoT) this: there's a 5:1 gender split, female/male, in the normal humans. This means around 80% of the male population are being recruited by the boys. Which means these "immortals" have an average life expectancy barely longer than the "normal humans" -- unless there is a vastly higher population of "boys" wandering around than we see (in which case, why does the group we are shown know the breeder colony as individuals?). There seems to be a basic arithmetic error hiding in here somewhere ...

(I used a variation on the Laughlin proposal which I think makes it work better -- albeit over a longer time period.)

[gohover.livejournal.com]

Oh, I see. Thanks! I didn't recall that the adults had a gender disparity. It has been a long time since I've read the book, so I just picked it up and leafed through it. Although perhaps I missed it in my once over, it looks to me like Niven doesn't explain the source of the gender disparity in the adult "dicta" other than to say that it will end when the dicta escape being controlled by Boys. So perhaps you're quite right that the lack of adult males is due to their selection as Boys, but perhaps the Boys are arranging the gender ratio in some other way ( a way which could be quite malevolent or relatively benign). It certainly seems like a hole in the story at best, and an unnecessary detail. Given the treatment of sex in the book, I suppose Niven wanted to create an erotic scenario, and the gender ratio among the adults was just one otherwise unexamined aspect of that.

The scheme to move the Earth was the most memorable aspect of Niven's story, and I'm looking forward to reading your take on how to do it.

[gohover.livejournal.com]

Diversity awareness comment: I'm not trying to suggest that it would be "normal" to find the scenario erotic. Racefail09 makes me twitchy.