I collected my cards, shuffled, and started a new game.
It was half a year before the roc’s corpus decomposed enough to let me out. In that time I won five games of double complex solitaire. I’ve only got films for four; the camera ran out. I’m happy to say that the emergency food-maker worked beautifully if a little monotonously, the airmaker never failed, and the clock TV kept perfect time as a clock. As a TV it showed only technicolor ripples of static. The washroom went out along about August, but I got it fixed without much trouble. At 2:00 P.M. on October 24 I forced the door open, hacked my way through the mummified skin and flesh between a couple of roc ribs, and took a deep breath of real air. It smelled of roc. I’d left the cabin door open, and I could hear the airmaker whine crazily as it tried to absorb the smell.
I fired off a few flares, and fifteen minutes later a car dropped to take me home. They say I was the hairiest human being they’d ever seen. I’ve since asked Mr. Dickson, the president of General Transportation, why he didn’t include a depil tube in the emergency stores.
“A castaway is supposed to look like a castaway,” he tells me. “If you’re wearing a year’s growth of hair, your rescuer will know immediately that you’ve been lost for some time and will take the appropriate steps.”
General Transportation has paid me a more than adequate sum in a compensation for the fact that my car was unable to handle a roc. (I’ve heard that they’re changing the guarantees for next year’s model.) They’ve promised me an equal sum for writing this article. It seems there are strange and possibly damaging rumors going around concerning my delayed arrival at Wiggly River.
Rest assured, reader. I not only lived through the accident without harm, but came out of it with a substantial profit. Your car is perfectly safe, provided it was built later than 3100 A.D.
AFTERTHOUGHTS
Near thirty years ago I was just getting into the swing of constructive daydreaming: letting my imagination flow until I had something, then guiding it.
A violent picture ran through my mind, with no story around it at first. I saw men building a campfire out of what they did not know to be stage tree logs…
The stage tree came from World of Ptavvs. I had developed an elaborate background for the race that ruled the galaxy over a billion years ago. The stage tree was the cheapest part of their spacecraft launch industry, an organically grown solid fuel rocket: tree on the outside, chemicals in the core around a star-shaped hollow.
It bothered me, losing all those fascinating life-forms…
…The fire catches slowly, then burns briskly. Suddenly the logs are going off like so much dynamite!
Well, why shouldn’t some of those life-forms have survived in evolved form?
A Relic of the Empire was set in Beowulf Shaeffer’s time, but it linked Lucas Garner’s era to the cosmos of the Man-Kzin Wars and after. From that point on I was elaborating a future history. The kzinti were already involved via “The Warriors.” I set A Gift from Earth in an intermediate era. In Ringworld even the sunflowers of Slaver times were found to have survived. Early tales of planetary exploration became part of the fabric.
It was fun fitting pieces together.
In 1968 or so Norman Spinrad persuaded me that restricting my stories to Known Space was stunting my growth as a writer. So I gave it up. Well, I did! A few days later I started writing Ringworld.
Writing Ringworld made me realize how tangled and complex my basic assumptions had become. There were too many unlikely miracles left over from individual stories: stasis fields, teleportation booths, an invulnerable spacecraft hull, Teela Brown, made lucky by generations of a puppeteer breeding program. Every story set later in time must be examined for reasons why a transfer booth or stasis field or General Products hull, or sheer luck, will not solve the problem.
The Ringworld was settled, as was Earth, by Pak breeders and had been built by Pak protectors. But the story was too complex already; I couldn’t open that topic, too! In Ringworld I let Louis Wu deduce the wrong answer.
Protectors didn’t surface on the Ringworld until The Ringworld Engineers.
It took me twenty-five years to really find the handle on the Teela Brown gene. It’s there, in The Ringworld Throne.
I like to leave the playground open when I leave. It delights me when readers go further than the story and begin to rebuild the playground equipment. I pass on a few interesting suggestions from readers:
Mathematically, the Ringworld can be treated very simply, as a suspension bridge with no endpoints. The Ringworld floor (now called scrith) needs a tensile strength equivalent to the force that holds an atomic nucleus together. MIT students noticed the Ringworld’s instability right away, and a high school class in Florida noticed that most of the topsoil would end up in the sea bottoms in a few thousand years. For them I designed the Ringworld’s attitude jets and flup circulation system.
A metal base with a stasis field around it can be used as the floor of a settlement on an antimatter planet.
Hank Stine suggested Matt Keller’s interestingly limited psychic power, later known as “Plateau eyes.”
Dan Alderson published two thousand words on the Grog problem as raised in Handicap. His conclusion: the Grogs can be controlled, if need be, by Bandersnatchi (as first seen in World of Ptavvs.) The dinosaur-sized sapient creatures are demonstrably immune to hypnotic telepathy. However, they must be spacelifted to Jinx.
“There Is a Tide” was suggested in a conversation with Tom Digby and Dan Alderson. Dan also gave me details for the meteor defense used in The Ringworld Engineers. I miss him a lot.
Many readers have done mathematical treatments of the problem raised in the short story “Neutron Star.” Maximum stress: a million gees at perihelion, at Shaeffer’s head and feet, experienced for a very short time. But Shaeffer’s ship leaves the neutron star spinning outrageously and keeps the spin! Shaeffer won’t survive unless the ship’s been programmed to shed that spin. See Crashlander to see why General Products would have done that.
For quick access to details of Known Space, see Chaosium’s old Ringworld game or The Guide to Larry Niven’s Ringworld by Kevin Stein and The Man-Kzin Wars, eight volumes and counting, all from Baen Books. But these books include ideas that were not mine. For my ideas alone, use the Timeline and Bibliography in this book, absolutely current as of October 1995.
In an early version of Tales of Known Space I told you that the series was complete and invited you to dream up your own stories.
I should have phrased that better! The invitation is to daydream, to criticize or elaborate, to use the playground equipment to your heart’s content…not to violate my copyrights, for Kdapt’s sake! The Man-Kzin Wars are the only legitimate source of Known Space stories not written by Larry Niven, and I’m the editor; the writers enter by invitation only.
As for Known Space, it doesn’t seem to be through with me.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: The Worlds of Larry Niven
Series
KNOWN SPACE (stories in chronological order of appearance; right-hand column is latest publication)
1964
The Coldest Place
Tales of Known Space
1965
World of Ptavvs
World of Ptavvs
One Face
The Shape of Space
Becalmed in Hell
Tales of Known Space
1966
Eye of an Octopus
Tales of Known Space
The Warriors
Tales of Known Space
Bordered in Black
The Shape of Space
Neutron Star
Crashlander
How the Heroes Die
Tales of Known Space
At the Core
Crashlander
A Relic of the Empire
Neutron Star
At the Bottom of a Hole
Tales of Known Space
1967
The Soft Weapons
Neutron Sta
r
Flatlander
Crashlander
The Ethics of Madness
Neutron Star
Safe at Any Speed
Tales of Known Space
The Adults
Protector
The Handicapped
Neutron Star
The Jigsaw Man
Tales of Known Space
1968
Slowboat Cargo *
A Gift from Earth
The Deceivers *
Tales of Known Space
Grendel
Neutron Star
Neutron Star
Crashlander
There is a Tide
Tales of Known Space
World of Ptavvs
World of Ptavvs
A Gift from Earth
A Gift from Earth
Wait It Out
Tales of Known Space
1969
The Organleggers *
The Shape of Space
1970
Ringworld
Ringworld
1972
Cloak of Anarchy
Tales of Known Space
1973
Protector
Protector
The Defenseless Dead
Flatlander
1975
The Borderland of Sol
Crashlander
Tales of Known Space
Tales of Known Space
ARM
Flatlander
1976
The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton
The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton
1978
The Patchwork Girl
Flatlander
1980
The Ringworld Engineers
The Ringworld Engineers
1990
Madness Has Its Place
N-Space
1994
Procrustes
Crashlander
1995
The Woman in Del Rey Crater
Flatlander
1996
The Ringworld Throne
The Ringworld Throne
* Title changed for novelization or appearance in a collection
LESHY CIRCUIT
Passerby (1969
All the Myriad Ways
Rammer (1971
A Hole in Space
The Fourth Profession (1972)
Quark 4
Night on Mispek Moor (1974
Vertex, August 1974
SVETZ
Get a Horse/ (1969) *
The Flight of the Horse
Bird in the Hand (1970
The Flight of the Horse
Leviathan (1970)
The Flight of the Horse
There’s a Wolf in My Time Machine (1970)
The Flight of the Horse
Death in a Cage (1973)
The Flight of the Horse
* Title changed for novelization or appearance in a collection.
TELEPORTATION
By Mind Alone (1966)
If, June
Flash Crowd (1973)
Three Trips in Time and Space
The Alibi Machine (1973)
A Hole in Space
All the Bridges Rusting (1973)
A Hole in Space
A Kind of Murder (1974)
A Hole in Space
The Last Days of the Permanent Floating Riot Club (1974)
A Hole in Space
TIME TRAVEL-PARALLEL UNIVERSE
Wrong Way Street (1965)
Galaxy, April
All the Myriad Ways (1968)
All the Myriad Ways
For a Foggy Night (1971)
All the Myriad Ways
The Return of William Proxmire (1990)
N-Space
WARLOCK’S ERA
Not Long before the End (1969)
All the Myriad Ways
Unfinished Story #1 (1970)
All the Myriad Ways
What Good Is a Glass Dagger? (1972)
The Flight of the Horse
The Magic Goes Away (1978)
The Magic Goes Away
Talisman (with Dian Girard, 1985)
Limits
The Lion in His Attic (1985)
Limits
The Portrait of Daryanree the King (1991)
Playgrounds of the Mind
The Wishing Game (1991)
Playgrounds of the Mind
THE DRACO TAVERN
Cruel and Unusual (1979)
Convergent Series
The Subject Is Closed (1979)
Convergent Series
Grammar Lesson (1979)
Convergent Series
Assimilating Our Culture, That’s What They’re Doing! (1979)
Convergent Series
The Schumann Computer (1979)
Convergent Series
One Night at the Draco Tavern (1984, 1991)
Playgrounds of the Mind
The Green Marauder (1985)
Limits
The Real Thing (1985)
Limits
War Movie (1985)
Limits
Limits (1985)
Limits
DREAM PARK (with Steven Barnes)
Retrospective (1991)
Playgrounds of the Mind
Dream Park (1980)
Dream Park
The Barsoom Project (1989)
Dream Park 2: The Barsoom Project
The California Voodoo Game (1992)
Dream Park 3: The California Voodoo Game
Works Not Part of Any Niven Series
The Long Night (1967)
Dry Run (1968)
Like Banquo’s Ghost (1968)
The Meddler (1968)
The Deadlier Weapon (1969)
The Misspelled Magishun (1970)
No Exit (1971)
Unfinished Story #2 (1971)
Inconstant Moon (1971)
What Can You Say about Chocolate Covered Manhole Covers? (1971)
The Hole Man (1974)
$16,940.00 (1974)
Plaything (1974)
The Mote in God’s Eye (1974)
The Nonesuch (1974)
Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation (1979)
The Last Necronomicon
Cautionary Tales (1979)
Transfer of Power (1979)
In the Cellar (1979)
Flare Time (1985)
Spirals (with Jerry Pournelle, 1985)
The Locusts (with Steven Barnes, 1985)
A Teardrop Falls (1985)
The Tale of the Jinni and the Sisters (1990)
Brenda (1990)
The Dreadful White Page (1991)
The Murder of Halley’s Comet (with David Drake)
NONFICTION
Exercise in Speculation: The Theory and Practice of Teleportation (1969)
All the Myriad Ways
Down in Flames (1969)
Trumpet, No. 9
The Theory and Practice of Time Travel (1971)
All the Myriad Ways
Man of Steel—Woman of Kleenex (1971)
All the Myriad Ways
Bigger Than Worlds (1974)
A Hole in Space
The Words in Science Fiction Future Histories
SFWA Bulletin
From Macrostructures Engineering: Progress Report (1980)
Lunacon program book
On the Marching Morons (with Isaac Asimov, 1981)
Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, January 1981
Niven’s Laws (1984)
Niven’s Laws, N-Space
Convention Stories (1984)
Niven’s Laws
Staying Rich (1984)
Niven’s Laws
The Theory and Practice of Instant Learning (1984)
Niven’s Laws
If Idi Amin Had Had the Bomb (1984)
Niven’s Laws
In Memoriam: Howard Grote Littlemead
Niven’s Laws
Why Men Light Wars and What You Can Do About it (1984)
Niven’s Laws, Playgrounds of the Mind
Collaborations (1984)
Niven’s Laws
Equipment, Method, and the Rest
The Science Fiction Source Book
Tell Me a Story (1986)
Writers of the Future #2
Review of “The Prisoner” (1987)
Reason
Review of “Against the Fall of Night” and “Great Sky River” (1987)
Reason
The Alien in our Minds (1990)
N-Space
The Kiteman (1990)