Larry Niven: "The Soft Weapon," "Flatlander," "The Ethics of Madness," and "Grendel"

Larry Niven's 1968 collection Neutron Star contains eight stories.  We've already read four, "Handicap," "Neutron Star," "A Relic of the Empire," and "At the Core;" let's read the other four, all of them set in the same fictional universe, Niven's "Known Space."

"The Soft Weapon" (1967)

Here we have another story about humans beings hired for a mission by one of the cowardly and manipulative puppeteers, and another story in which artifacts of the Slaver period of history, a billion and a half years ago, play a central role.  "The Soft Weapon" dramatizes the quest for knowledge and the way technology can change history and society, and, like so much SF, portrays quick thinking and trickery saving the day.  Niven also structures much of what happens in the story around how the cultures and mores of two of his alien species--the puppeteers and the perpetually bellicose and honor-obsessed cat-people, the Kzin--determines characters' behavior.

Two humans, Jason Papandreu and his wife Anne-Marie, have been hired to take a passenger, a mentally ill puppeteer, Nessus, to a meeting with a third race of aliens to collect some cargo.  The rendezvous was a success, and they are on the return trip.  Jason decides to take a little sight-seeing detour, and they are captured by a ship with a small crew of Kzin.  The Kzin seize the puppeteer's cargo--it turns out to be an assortment of supplies, equipment and personal items over a billion years old, artifacts of one of the races subordinate to the Slavers, a race of expert technologists who rose up against the Slavers.

"The Soft Weapon" is kind of long, and a lot of time is spent on Kzin efforts to figure out how the principal piece of ancient equipment operates, and Jason and Anne-Marie's efforts to manipulate the Kzin into neutralizing themselves by misusing the device; this malleable, plastic thing has like ten different forms and uses, as a communications device, as a propulsion unit, as various super weapons, and as a super computer.  The humans and the puppeteer are desperate to prevent the Kzin from bringing the device back to their people, as it might give them an insuperable military edge over the human and puppeteer polities.  Victory is secured by the good guys, in part because the puppeteer in the story is, as I mentioned, mentally ill--healthy puppeteers are cowards, but being essentially insane, Nessus demonstrates courage that takes the cat-people by surprise and gives the anti-Kzin side a chance.

Niven includes tons of cool SF stuff in this story, astronomy and airlocks and forcefields and ray weapons and spacesuits and innovative uses of propulsion systems and all that, and some horror stuff, too, as the Kzin use the humans as guinea pigs upon which to test the ancient artifact, torture them, and even plan on eating them.  But don't worry, dear reader--the good guys live to tell the tale, and the high-tech medical care that figures in so many of these Known Space stories can regenerate any limbs they may have lost, and the Kzin all suffer horribly gory comeuppances.       

Pretty good.  Wikipedia is telling me "The Soft Weapon" was adapted into an episode of the Star Trek cartoon.  The Karel Thole cover to the abridged Italian translation of Neutron Star is inspired by "The Soft Weapon" and depicts the billion-and-a-half-year-old stuff the puppeteer bought and the Kzin tried to seize.  As I have remarked before, Thole really must have read the stories he illustrated.   

"Flatlander" (1967)

"Flatlander" debuted in the issue of If that contains Harlan Ellison's famous "I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream," which I should reread someday.  Groff Conklin included "Flatlander" in his 1968 anthology Seven Trips Through Time and Space, a book which I own--I read a Kris Neville story from it back in 2015. 

"Flatlander" stars the same spendthrift pilot we met in  "Neutron Star" and "At the Core," Beowulf Shaeffer.  I guess Niven has written seven or eight stories about this guy.

As this story begins, Shaeffer, our narrator, is a passenger on an Earthbound ship.  Niven portrays space travel as being mentally taxing--there are no windows for passengers because the sight of hyperspace drives people insane, so passengers habitually spend their trips between star systems cheating on their spouses and getting drunk.  Beowulf gets beaten up by the husband of the woman he is fooling around with on the trip, so he makes friends with an overweight man called Elephant and they spend their time drinking and playing cards and swapping stories.  Shaeffer was born on a planet whose first settlement was called Crashlanding City. so he and his people are known as Crashlanders.  Elephant, as an Earthman, is called a Flatlander, which he resents; he wishes he could have a space adventure which would prove that this nickname for Earthpeople shouldn't be applied to him.

Beowulf and Elephant separate when they arrive on Earth, but Beowulf finds Earth bewildering and even dangerous.  Niven portrays Earth as a sort of wild and decadent place, where people dress crazily (dying their hair and skin nonsensical colors like green and blue), picking pockets is not illegal and is in fact routinized, and many people have risky hobbies, like racing primitive ground cars on the few intact ground roads, vehicles that lack radar safety systems and automatic controls and might even crash.  Beowulf feels the need of a guide and tracks down Elephant, whom he learns is one of the richest men in human civilization, his ancestor having invented the ubiquitous teleporters people use to move on the surface of human-settled planets.

Elephant shows Beowulf around Earth, and then they go on the kind of adventure together Elephant has long wished he could.  He contacts a race of mysterious aliens, the Outsiders, who are famous for selling information, and asks to be directed to the most unusual planet they know of.  It turns out to be a small world orbiting a protostar--planet and protostar are moving at amazing speed through our galaxy, apparently having come from some other galaxy.  Niven unleashes some speculative astronomy, physics and biology on us.  In the end, Elephant's flatlander status is only confirmed--had they approached the extragalactic visitor planet they would have been killed, and Beowulf's caution, the product of his training as a space pilot and real life piloting experience, preserves them.

One of the things Niven seems to like to do is set up rules in his fictional universe (like how puppeteers are cowardly) and then show us an exception to the rule (like Nessus the insane puppeteer who attacks a Kzin in "The Soft Weapon.")  Here in "Flatlander" one of the puppeteer space hulls, which have never been breached, is disintegrated by antimatter, which is rare in our galaxy but which makes up the substance of the small planet orbiting the protostar.

Not bad.

"The Ethics of Madness" (1967)

This story takes place many years before the other stories we are reading today, before the invention of the hyperdrive that allows Beowulf Shaeffer and others to travel between the stars in months.

Doug Hooker, son of the owner of a major corporation, was born with a chemical imbalance that makes him a paranoid.  The overcrowded Earth's eugenics apparatus forbids him to have children, which ruins his marriage, but robotic medical machines monitor him every day and pump him full of drugs that balance his brain chemistry so his paranoia won't manifest itself.  Unfortunately, a mechanical malfunction in his "autodoc" interrupts his daily injections and Hooker becomes paranoid!  Following a demented logic, he decides that he must murder his only friend, Greg Loeffler, whom he hasn't seen in years.  Loeffler invented the ramscoop spaceship that made Hooker's company rich, and then left Earth on a trip of some twelve years on one of them to colonize an alien world.

Hooker steals one of the ramscoop ships and pursues his friend.  He is quickly arrested upon arriving at the colony planet twelve years later, but not before he has massacred Loeffler's family.  He gets therapy, and having been cured, leaves the colony in one of the ramscoop vessels.  Loeffler, bent on vengeance, follows in a ramscoop ship of his own.  A chase of thousands of years' duration ensues (the autodocs on the ships can keep people alive forever) with a tragic twist ending!

Niven fills this story with descriptions of the colony world's geography, architecture, and theories of ethics, Hooker's twisted thinking, medical and transport technology, and speculations on what the effect of living alone in a space ship for years--or centuries!--might be.  I like it.

"The Ethics of Madness" debuted in an issue of If adorned with multiple Gray Morrow illustrations of shapely young ladies.  It was included in a 1969 French edition of Galaxy, but otherwise seems to be confined to the many editions of Neutron Star. 

"Grendel" (1968)

It looks like "Grendel" was first printed here in Neutron Star; it would later reappear in Crashlander, a fix-up that collects the Beowulf Shaeffer stories.

As the story begins, Beowulf is on a space liner, depressed because the woman he wants to have children with can't leave Earth (many Earthers are psychologically unable to leave the mother world) and the Earth eugenics establishment forbids albinos like himself (about a quarter of Crashlanders are albinos) to have children.  The captain of the ship, a woman so good-looking she could have been a movie star if she hadn't been beguiled by the call of space, comes out of hyperspace so they can watch a mile-wide space monster spread its wings, a rare sight.  The sight-seeing detour in "The Soft Weapon" landed the humans in an alien trap, and this detour also spells bad news for the good guys.  Everyone on the ship is knocked unconscious by gas and when they wake up one of the passengers, a ten-foot-tall dragon-like alien artist, is gone, presumably kidnapped by pirates nobody on the ship had a chance to see. 

One of the other human passengers, Emil, and Beowulf use their knowledge of the area and of the kidnapped alien's race to figure out what planet he must have been taken to and probably which of the dozen or so space ships in the region.  Beowulf is reluctant to get directly involved, but his new friend Emil is an eager beaver who urges him to live up to his heroic first name.  (One of the cute things about these stories is how Beowulf, born far from Earth, didn't know what an elephant was and here is revealed to have never heard of he literary figure he was named after.)  Soon they are in an aircar flying for hours to get to the party of rich people on holiday whom they suspect are the kidnappers.  It's a small galaxy after all, and Beowulf, through rich guy Elephant, knows one of the rich holiday makers.

Then we get adventure stuff: a march through a monster-haunted jungle, weapons fire, chases and fist fights, people getting captured and people escaping captivity.  In "Flatlander," Beowulf's caution was contrasted with the recklessness of Elephant, and here in "Grendel" Emil is similarly humbled.  "Grendel's" action scenes hinge on the behavior of real and imagined pieces of technology--like flywheels and gyros and sonic stunners and forcefields that perform the function of a late 20th-century car's airbags--and on peoples' special attributes--one guy from a low-grav planet has long limbs, another guy from a high-grav planet has short limbs, an alien has no eyes but he does have sonar so he can detect tiny movements, etc.  One of the standard criticisms of adventure SF is that such stories are just like Earthbound 19th- and 20th-century Westerns or detective yarns, but with ray guns instead of six-guns or .45s, but Niven here really integrates hard SF elements into the action--"Grendel" is both an action-adventure story and a "real" science fiction story bubbling over with science and speculation on mankind's future on other planets.

In the end the wealthy friend who masterminded the plot is killed, the alien sculptor is OK--he goes on to immortalize in art the villains who abused him as well as the two men who saved and avenged him, Beowulf and Emil--and Beowulf figures out the identity of the inside man on the kidnapping job--of course it was the beautiful space captain.  Instead of handing her over to the authorities or somehow extrajudicially punishing her, Beowulf begins a torrid two-year sexual affair with her.    

One of the interesting, and at times alarming, things Niven does in "Grendel," as in "Flatlander" and "The Ethics of Madness," is speculate about crime in the future--why will particular individuals commit crimes, how will law-abiding individuals react to crime, and what will the larger society's attitude towards and response to crime be?  In "Flatlander" we saw that on Earth people more or less accepted the plying of their trade by pickpockets, and in "Grendel" we see a somewhat similar attitude towards kidnappers among the humans (the sculptor and his people have an older idea of justice perhaps closer to that of the average 20th-century American who doesn't have a graduate degree.)  Beowulf made friends with the person who picked his pocket in "Flatlander," and in "Grendel" is still willing to be friends with a man and the lover of a woman who turn out to be kidnappers who put the lives of multiple innocent people at risk.  Beowulf endeavors to foil the kidnappers not out of a larger sense of justice or a commitment to community but for the selfish reason that he doesn't want the kidnappers to think they put one over on him.  I personally find this disturbing, even offensive--to me it is satisfying when dangerous criminals in fiction suffer a severe punishment and I certainly think a functioning society in real life must strongly discourage pickpockets and kidnappers--but we read SF in part to experience wacky new ideas and see traditional ideas challenged, not just to have our old ideas repeated back to us, so this isn't a criticism of the story's merit, but I must admit I found the ending of "Grendel" less satisfying than the ending of "The Soft Weapon," in which the ambushers and torturers are all killed.  

(I'll also note the small footprint of official law enforcement and government in general in these stories.)

Another thing "Grendel" has in common with "The Ethics of Madness" is speculation on the psychological and sociological effects of longevity treatments--the kidnappers are like 300 years old but still quite fit, and one reason they take terrible risks and break all the rules is a desire for exciting experiences.    

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All four of these stories are good solid traditional SF.  They revolve around technology and the hard sciences, speculations about different types of space craft and energy weapons and astrophysics and astronomy, but Niven also speculates about psychology and sociology in an entertaining way, and tries to give his characters (most of whom are business people instead of scientists or government employees, which is nice) compelling personalities, so the stories have something to offer people who don't know how a flywheel or a trojan point works.     

So, thumbs up for these stories and the entire Neutron Star collection.  We may be seeing Niven and Beowulf Shaeffer again soon.