Larry Niven

In 1970, when The Flying Sorcerers was serialized as "The Misspelled Magician" in The Worlds of If, Larry Niven was months away from hitting it big with Ringworld. His co-author, David Gerrold, had already written the short stories he would combine into When H.A.R.L.I.E. Was One, the novel that would earn his first Hugo and Nebula nominations. As far as I know, The Flying Sorcerers is their only collaboration, which is a shame because their talents mesh well. Niven is a genius at building new worlds with plausible physics and engineering. Gerrold combines acerbic social satire with believable characters. Sorcerers provides an early example of the sort of tongue-in-cheek sci-fi fantasy that would define the careers of Robert Asprin, Douglas Adams, and Terry Pratchett.

A scientist-explorer lands on a planet inhabited by furry humanoids, close enough to human that the women can do what they call “the family-making thing” with the scientist. Each village has a resident magician, and much of the humor comes from the three-way debate between the practical head man, the stubborn scientist, and the hard-headed magician.

The satire has the subtlety of a slap-in-the face. The village women are hobbled, have no names, have sister wives, and are treated like beasts of burden. The industrial revolution the scientist inspires will give them names and make their labor valuable. They are amazed that they can sit down to spin thread.

And there are puns, shameless anachronistic puns. We have two brothers building a flying machine. Their names, of course, are Wilville and Orbur. The best (or worst) of the puns involves the scientist's name. The villagers call him Purple because, he says, “the translator makes two-language puns! As a color, shade of purple-gray! As a mauve. Oh, how delightful.”

I know, but science fiction fans will get it.… (more)

This is quite a decent collection, all the stories are just about rereadable, although my fondness for them varies. My favourite by a long way is “The Fourth Profession”, which I’d already read somehow before buying this book in 1976.

After buying it and reading it, as with all collections of short stories, I didn’t normally reread the book as a whole, but dipped into it and reread the odd story from time to time.

The “Rammer” story is OK as a bit of a curiosity. It’s also available as the first chapter of the novel [b:A World Out of Time|64725|A World Out of Time (The State, #1)|Larry Niven|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388988844l/64725._SY75_.jpg|1634535]; perhaps the best part? I seem to have read the novel twice but have almost no memory of it now.

The next three stories are about the social consequences of displacement booths: instantaneous matter-transmission technology. Mildly interesting.

Then “All the Bridges Rusting” is about the effect of matter transmission on space travel.

I’m quite fond of “There Is a Tide”, in which a man looking casually for Slaver stasis boxes finds something else that just happens to look like a stasis box. Slaver stasis boxes hark back to Niven’s first novel, [b:The World of Ptavvs|218463|The World of Ptavvs (Known Space)|Larry Niven|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1392285253l/218463._SY75_.jpg|1787391], which I’m also fond of.

“Bigger Than Worlds” is a non-fiction essay about Dyson spheres, Ringworlds, and the like.

The next two stories are fairly forgettable, and then the book ends with “The Fourth Profession”, which I’m very fond of—although it’s a hard science-fiction story with a mischievous touch of added fantasy, which I don’t approve of in principle but can’t help liking in this case.… (more)

I find Ringworld hard to rate. It’s full of imagination and ideas, the story is well paced and pulls you along, but I find it somewhat unsatisfying, and it’s not one of my favourite stories even from Niven.

I think this is because there are only four or five significant characters in the story, and they’re not inherently interesting. Two of them are non-human, and the humans have unusual attributes of different kinds, so they’re all superficially interesting, but fundamentally they’re all quite similar: intelligent, rational puzzle-solvers who think in the same kind of way.

Niven has difficulty in imagining people who are very different from himself, and his characters tend to be interchangeable. Perhaps this is why he’s often written about non-humans: to force some variety into his characters. But even the non-humans tend to think and talk like Niven apart from a few simple differences.

As a work of fiction, I might be tempted to give it only three stars, but I suppose the way he throws out all these ideas and ingeniously knits them together deserves more acclaim than that, so I’ll give it four overall.

It’s a book for sf readers, who’ll be impressed by the ideas and don’t need to feed on deep characterization or a finely descriptive writing style. Niven’s writing style is in the sf tradition, plain and simple, he describes the essentials briefly and moves straight on to the next idea or plot development.… (more)