Introduction:
My Universe and Welcome to It!
TWELVE YEARS AGO I started writing. Eleven years ago I started selling what I wrote. And eleven years ago I started a future history-the history of Known Space.
The Known Space Series now spans a thousand years of future history, with data on conditions up to a billion and a half years in the past. Most of the stories take place either in Human Space (the human-colonized worlds and the space between, a bubble sixty light-years across by Louis Wu's time) or in Known Space (the much larger bubble of space explored by Human-built ships but controlled by other species); but arms of exploration reach 200 light-years up along galactic north, and 33,000 light-years to the galactic core. The series now includes four novels (World of Ptavvs, Protector, A Gift from Earth, Ringworld) plus the stories in the collection Neutron Star, plus the book now in your hands, plus one other to be published in February of 1976 to be called The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton.
Future histories tend to be chaotic. They grow from a common base, from individual stories with common assumptions; but each story must--to be fair to readers stand by itself. The future history chronicled in the Known Space Series is as chaotic as real history. Even the styles vary in these stories, because my writing skills have evolved over eleven years of real time.
But this is the book with the crib sheets. The stories Published here are in chronological order. I've scattered supplementary notes between them, to explain what is going on between and around the individual novels and stories, in a region small on the galactic scale but huge in human experience.
A few general notes are in order here:
1. The tales of Gil the ARM are missing. This book became so big that we had to cut these three science- fiction/detective stories--60,000 words worth-to make room. Gil's career hits its high point around 2121 AD, between World of Ptavvs and Protector. We'll be publishing these stories in one volume sometime next year.
2. I dithered over including "The Coldest Place" and "Eye of an Octopus." They were my first and sixth story sales, respectively; and they aren't that good. Furthermore, "The Coldest Place" was obsolete before it ever reached print. But these two stories are part of the fabric of the series, so I've included them.
3. You may feel that Mars itself is changing as you read through the book. Right you are.
"Eye of an Octopus" is set on pre-Mariner Mars. Mariner IV's photographs of the craters on Mars sparked "How the Heroes Die." Sometime later, an article in Analog shaped the, new view of the planet in "At the Bottom of a Hole." If the space probes keep redesigning our planets, what can we do but write new stories?
4. I was sore tempted to rewrite some of the older, clumsier stories. But how would I have known where to stop? You would then have been reading updated stories with the facts changed around. I've assumed that that isn't what you're after. I hope I'm right.
5. The Tales of Known Space cluster around five eras.
First there is the near future, the exploration of interplanetary space during the next quarter-century.
There is the era of Lucas Garner and Gil "the ARM' Hamilton: 2106-2125 AD. Interplanetary civilization has loosened its ties with Earth, has taken on a character of its own. Other stellar systems are being explored and settled. The organ bank problem is at its sociological worst on Earth. The existence of nonhuman intelligence has become obtrusively plan; humanity must adjust.
There is an intermediate era centering around 2340 AD. In Sol System it is a period of peace and prosperity. On colony worlds like Plateau times are turbulent. At the edge of Sol System, a creature that used to be Jack Brennan fights a lone war. The era of peace begins with the subtle interventions of the Brennan-monster (see Protector); it ends in contact with the Kzinti Empire.
The fourth period, following the Man-Kzin Wars, covers part of the twenty-sixth century AD. It is a time of easy tourism and interspecies trade, in which the human species neither rules nor is ruled. New planets have been settled, some of which were wrested from the Kzinti Empire during the wars.
The fifth period resembles the fourth. Little has changed in two hundred years, at least on the surface. The thruster drive has replaced the less efficient fusion drives; a new species has joined the community of worlds. But there is one fundamental change. The Teela Brown gene--the "ultimate psychic power"--is spreading through humanity. The teelas have been bred for luck.
A fundamental change in human nature--and the teelas are that--makes life difficult for a writer. The period following Ringworld might be pleasant to live in, but it is short of interesting disasters. Only one story survives from this period; "Safe at Any Speed:" a kind of advertisement. There will be no others.
There is something about future histories, and Known Space in particular, that gets to people. They start worrying about the facts, the mathematics, the chronology. They work out elaborate charts or they program their computers for close-approach orbits around point-masses. They send me maps of Human, Kzinti, and Kdatlyno space, dynamic analyses of the Ringworld, ten-thousand-word plot outlines for the novel that will wrap it all up into a bundle, and treatises on The Grog Problem. To all of you who have thus entertained me and stroked my ego, thanks.
Thanks are due to Tim Kyger for his aid in compiling the Bibliography, and to Spike MacPhee and Jerry Boyajian for their assistance with the Timeline. They belong to the above group and they saved me a lot of research.
-Larry Niven
Los Angeles, California
January, 1975
The Coldest Place
IN THE COLDEST place in the solar system, I hesitated outside the ship for a moment. It was too dark out there. I fought an urge to stay close by the ship, by the comfortable ungainly bulk of warm metal which held the warm bright Earth inside it.
"See anything?" asked Eric.
"No, of course not. It's too hot here anyway, what with heat radiation from the ship. You remember the way they scattered away from the probe."
"Yeah. Look, you want me to hold your hand or something? Go."
I sighed and started off, with the heavy collector bouncing gently on my shoulder. I bounced too. The spikes on my boots kept me from sliding.
I walked up the side of the wide, shallow crater the ship had created by vaporizing the layered air all the way down to the water ice level. Crags rose about me, masses of frozen gas with smooth, rounded edges. They gleamed soft white where the light from my headlamp touched them. Elsewhere all was as black as eternity. Brilliant stars shone above the soft crags; but the light made no impression on the black land. The ship got smaller and darker and disappeared.
There was supposed to be life here. Nobody had even tried to guess what it might be like. Two years ago the Messenger VI probe had moved into close orbit about the planet and then landed about here, partly to find out if the cap of frozen gasses might be inflammable. In the field of view of the camera during the landing, things like shadows had wriggled across the, snow and out of the light thrown by the probe. The films had shown it beautifully. Naturally some wise ones had suggested that they were only shadows.
I'd seen the films. I knew better. There was life.
Something alive, that hated light Something out there in the dark. Something huge... "Eric, you there?"
"Where would I go?" he mocked me.
"Well," said I, "if I watched every word I spoke I'd never get anything said." All the same, I had been tactless. Eric had had a bad accident once, very bad. He wouldn't be going anywhere unless the ship went along.
"TouchЋ," said Eric.
"Are you getting much heat leakage from your suit?"
