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Neo-opsis
Review
Fleet of Worlds and Juggler of
Worlds
Larry
Niven and Edward M Lerner
Fleet of World starts off with an interstellar craft
full of human colonists, who are captured by two headed aliens and forced to be
slaves. A hokey ‘Saturday afternoon movie’ sounding premise, to be sure, but
Niven and Lermer pull the story off well. The story jumps ahead hundreds of
years, switching between stories of the humans living as slaves and stories of
the ‘wild humans,’ as the aliens refer to free humans.
Juggler of Worlds deals primarily with UN special agent
Sigmund Ausfaller and his ability to use his clinical paranoia as a tool to
track human and alien conspiracies. This expands upon a theme brought up in
Niven’s short story, “Madness has its Place.”
The two novels weave through Niven’s pre-existing Known
Space stories in interesting ways (touching on such stories as
“Procrustes,” “The Borderland of Sol,” “There is a Tide”), and showing us more
of the lives of such characters as Carlos Wu, Beowulf Shaeffer, Nessus the
Puppeteer (best known from Ringworld) and the above mentioned Sigmund
Ausfaller.
Some of the events from other stories, such as “At the
Core,” are hinted at briefly, while we’re immersed in and shown different
details of the events from other stories. A notable example is the interactions
with the events in the story “The Soft Weapon” (1967). The short story was told
from the perspective of the human character Jason Papandreou, where as the
novel Juggler of Worlds takes us through some of the events from the
perspective of Nessus the Puppeteer instead.
While there is a fair amount of new content in these books,
they could be considered akin to TV shows that do the clip episode, where they
have no new ideas. They just use clips from previous episodes, tied together
with lines like, “hey do you remember when...” I didn’t feel cheated at all by
this, because these novels expand upon the ‘clips’ and show us the stories from
different perspectives with additional details. It didn’t feel like just a
rehash. It felt a new view of the stories from a different perspective.
While reading, I had the impression that part of the
authors’ intent with these novels was to correct or explain what might look
like inconsistencies or technical inaccuracies throughout the series. These
books are well recommended for fans of the minutia of the Known Space
series.
These books will likely be enjoyed by people who haven’t
read any of the other Known Space stories, but I expect they work better
if read by someone familiar with at least some of the series.
The third book in this collection, Destroyer of Worlds,
is in print.
Larry
Niven. Canadian Publishers and Writers Party. Worldcon 2009, Montreal.
Review by Karl Johanson
Originally in Neo-opsis
issue 19.
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