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Jun. 14th, 2012
X Minus One: The Native Problem
Jun. 14th, 2012 10:56 amX Minus One: The Native Problem
Another Sheckley, another group of idiots, although not a particularly difficult to believe in group of idiots [1]. I think large parts of the plot make sense if you assume there have been many waves of interstellar colonization and when the Hutter people refer to "natives", what they mean is "descendants of previous colonist ships whose stuff we plan to take."
It is a bit odd that the protagonist got himself put down on a planet without anything in the way of physical goods from Earth - like a newspaper, the death of the paper newspaper not being something the ancients of the 1950s foresaw - that would support his story.
On a related note, I often get the feeling from 1950s SF that sex is something with only theoretical existence for the authors.
1: Depending on when you claim the Indian Wars ended, they'd only been over at this point somewhere between 66 years (Wounded Knee) and 33 years (The Posey War) when this story was published. Even if a reader had not been alive at the time, they probably once knew someone who had been during the Indian Wars.
Another Sheckley, another group of idiots, although not a particularly difficult to believe in group of idiots [1]. I think large parts of the plot make sense if you assume there have been many waves of interstellar colonization and when the Hutter people refer to "natives", what they mean is "descendants of previous colonist ships whose stuff we plan to take."
It is a bit odd that the protagonist got himself put down on a planet without anything in the way of physical goods from Earth - like a newspaper, the death of the paper newspaper not being something the ancients of the 1950s foresaw - that would support his story.
On a related note, I often get the feeling from 1950s SF that sex is something with only theoretical existence for the authors.
1: Depending on when you claim the Indian Wars ended, they'd only been over at this point somewhere between 66 years (Wounded Knee) and 33 years (The Posey War) when this story was published. Even if a reader had not been alive at the time, they probably once knew someone who had been during the Indian Wars.
(First few paras skipped due to what I consider poor word choice)
You know what I don't see in this article? Examples of praiseworthy work by Niven that are particularly recent.
I think it’s fair to say that Niven is the quintessential “hard” SF writer. He was born in 1938 and fits into that generation in between Golden Agers like Bradbury and Asimov and Heinlein and the cyber-info-punks like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson. Hard SF — as I choose to define it, irresponsibly, with no reference to or knowledge of how other people define it — is SF that takes its science and engineering seriously. There’s a school of science fiction where the writer decides where they want the story to go and then makes up a world or a technology or a branch of physics that will get it there. This is not that. Hard SF works the opposite way — it allows its stories to be shaped by what we know about technology and the universe and how they work. With a hard SF writer like Niven, the story emerges out of the world: the world and its rules and laws are what generate and drive and constrain the story.
You know what I don't see in this article? Examples of praiseworthy work by Niven that are particularly recent.
X Minus One: A Wind is Rising
I kept getting distracted by questions like "how are there still mountains on this planet?" [1] That said, I'm pretty sure the alien native was smirking at the jerk-ass humans there at the end.
1: Also "what's so great about this place from a human point of view?" "Why is the water tank or whatever it was so far from the base?" also came to mind.
X Minus One: Death Wish
See if you can pick out the moment early on when I was tempted to turn this off and listen to music instead. The annoying thing is it would have been so easy to salvage the early part of the story, although you cannot avoid the "let's ask the genie" angle without writing an entirely different story.
What I wonder if there is a second one of those computers on Earth or Mars that can be spared long enough for the people in the solar system to ask it what the one on the ship would have suggested.
I kept getting distracted by questions like "how are there still mountains on this planet?" [1] That said, I'm pretty sure the alien native was smirking at the jerk-ass humans there at the end.
1: Also "what's so great about this place from a human point of view?" "Why is the water tank or whatever it was so far from the base?" also came to mind.
X Minus One: Death Wish
See if you can pick out the moment early on when I was tempted to turn this off and listen to music instead. The annoying thing is it would have been so easy to salvage the early part of the story, although you cannot avoid the "let's ask the genie" angle without writing an entirely different story.
What I wonder if there is a second one of those computers on Earth or Mars that can be spared long enough for the people in the solar system to ask it what the one on the ship would have suggested.