
by Larry Niven (1969-1973) 
I just got this back from long-term loan to
Phil, and I just couldn't resist reading it
clean through once again. It's a quick, light read, and I honestly
couldn't really justify my love of it to a dispassionate third party.
But Niven's stuff, particularly his early short stories like this, are
always a nostalgia trip for me, representative of the ideas that got me
into science fiction as a kid in the first place. He writes throwaway
tales of quirky worlds, but each one is crafted with such a singularly
consistent exploration of the logical implications of a single, simple
premise, that with hindsight, suddenly complicit in the gag, you can
almost see how each story's conclusion grew inescapably out of the very
opening paragraphs.
It's very much Niven's modus operandi, and it lends itself well to a
book like this, which is essentially a couple of sets of related short
stories, in settings that verge on fantasy, but which abide by a strict
internal logic that makes them indisputably hard SF to me.
The first sequence follows the fortunes of a 24th century
post-apocalyptic time traveller, who is trying his best to investigate
the past - our time, and pre-industrial ages - and bring back specimens
of long-extinct species. Things never quite go according to plan - the
horse he bags has an unexpected horn, and the whale he sought turns out
to be a biblical leviathan, until eventually, he figures out the hard
way what we the reader should have known all along - his time machine is
screwy, slipping a little sideways in time every time he travels back
to the past, sometimes a little, to worlds that differ from ours merely
in happenstance, or sometimes further, to worlds that never could have
been, in which mythical beasts roam and humanity is a very different
breed.
The second series explores a similarly simple premise - that countless
generations ago, deep in prehistory, when magic thrived and was a
practical art in the world, a sorcerer discovers a terrible secret: that
magic uses up energy from its surroundings, and that eventually this
mana runs out, leaving an area sterile of magical potential, deadly to
aged magicians, uninhabitable by mythical beasts. The knowledge is
exploited to further various agendas, a vicious cycle that accelerates
the process, that we the reader can see will inevitably lead to the fall
of their civilisation, and the immeasurable dark ages before our own
recorded history began.
It's the sort of stuff that people who don't 'do' SF clearly won't have
any patience for. But if you can conjour up a little willing suspension,
can overlook the writer's unsubtle early works, then the imagination and
clarity of the tales shines through, weaving entertaining worlds of both
humour and grandeur.
Rating: 7/10