Matthew Joseph Harrington

This read like a bit of an over the top homage to Robert Heinlein. Literary references every fourth sentence, men and women who have transcended normal humanity and know better than everyone else because they're both intellectual geniuses and physically perfect, and a bit of a lecture while they teach various aspects of humanity how much better they are.

I knew to expect that from Heinlein in books like Number of the Beast, but this almost seemed like an attempt to impress the readers with how smart we should think Niven and Harrington are.

Don't get me wrong ... I did enjoy the book overall. It was a quick read, but sadly, the story ended just as you thought it was getting to the interesting bits, and you're left with both a huge sense of "and then?" as well as "oh well, these supermen will figure it out while tossing around witty banter regardless."… (plus d'informations)

Larry Niven used to be one of my favorite writers. As a teenager, I read his works voraciously, but as I got older, the increasing paranoia in his work about government, democracy, and people who don't share his worldview became more and more disturbing. In this book, his right-wing alarmist fantasies have overwhelmed what might have been a good story. Much of the book is a litany of libertarian whipping horses: the U.S. is a socialist society hell-bent on crushing creativity; global warming and climate change are a hoax that has been disproven by 2052; the scientific process is fundamentally broken and anyone who challenges the received wisdom is crushed (i.e. a character who knows that the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs hit what is now Iceland); while socialism is bad, it is okay for an enlightened character to declare themselves judge, jury, and executioner of 600 million people because they had bad thoughts (in this case, about women; and while I agree with the point that abusive/sexist behavior is unacceptable, mass murder isn't ultimately a moral or ethical solution) and to kill off multiple species of animals (goats, sheep) because doing so will force people into adopting more financially lucrative lifestyles. The science fiction story that emerges in bits and pieces in between the libertarian sermonizing is intriguing. What if our nanotech does exactly what we asked it to do but not necessarily in the way we had anticipated? Would we act in knee-jerk terror? If our nanotechnology achieved sentience, would we try to communicate before trying to destroy it? Those are interesting questions that science fiction is a perfect platform to explore. But that story gets lost in a series of dark fantasies about contemporary life. It has more to do with the misinformation that lead to the current political debacle in the United States than it does with an honest, exploration of the future that is based on extrapolation from the actual dynamics in the world and the direction that current technology is taking. This is the sad endpoint of the literary career of a man I admired for many years and whose works I will no longer purchase or read.… (plus d'informations)

Hal Colebatch wrote 3 stories that form half the book. The first story is a Man-Kzin "dark and stormy night" story (this story is why I gave the book 4.5 stars instead of 5). The other two involve Pak Protectors and "can we trust each other" plot lines. The next 2 stories, by Matthew J. Harrington continue the themes set by Colebatch, but involve more plot obfuscation in that the clues to the real story lines are introduced as an aside and caused me to reread the stories to validate my understanding of what just happened, and why. The last story, by Niven, is an off-hand speculation on why we're so damned deadly in the first place.… (plus d'informations)