01-Human Space
Page 15
As for Known Space, it doesn't seem to be through with me.
Magazine artwork
How the Heroes Die
Galaxy SF, October 1966
(illustrated by Virgil Finlay)
cover by Dember
At the Bottom of a Hole
Galaxy SF, December 1966
(illustrated by Castellon)
The Deceivers
Galaxy SF, April 1968
(illustrated by Jack Gaughan)
Cloak of Anarchy
Analog SF, March 1972
(illustrated by Jack Gaughan)
About the Cover
The colored baubles set against the background of a spiral galaxy represent some of the stars closest to our sun, the G-type star Sol. Many of them are the settings for stories Larry Niven has written dealing with a thirty-light year diameter volume of the sky called Known Space.
Readers already familiar with the Known Space series will immediately recognize names such as Wunderland, Down, and Jinx as but a few of the fascinating and sometimes dangerous planets on and around which space-faring man has travelled..
The story of how the cover illustration came about is interesting in that it combined the talents of people in three different disciplines, all working in the field of science fiction: the author, editor, and art director; the artist; and a particular group of intelligent readers in Boston, Massachusetts; who have been busily cataloging everything in Known Space.
After a preliminary sketch of the galaxy was approved, I set out to try to render the local star group.
When I approached James L. Burrows, a member of the New England Science Fiction Association who is conversant with computers, he had, not surprisingly, already written a program to produce the position map. What the computer gave him were the coordinates for the stars on a two-dimensional grid, as though viewed from roughly sixty-three degrees above the plane of the Milky Way. He put it simply: “Imagine traveling in space along the Earth’s—pointed at the North Star—and looking back past the sun from a great many light years. This is what you’d see.”
Just how big would Known Space be in this view of the galaxy?
Obviously the brightly painted stars in the foreground are part of an enlarged picture of the local neighborhood. If the Milky Way is 100,000 light-years across, then, at the size of a paperback cover, all of Known Space is a pinpoint .001”—a thousandth of an inch—from edge to edge.
One of the rewards of my kind of work is that I can add things to paintings that are visible on the original board, but not always in the reproduced version. Or are they?
If you look carefully, you’ll find all fourteen black holes, two Puppeteer-built General Products spacecraft hulls, egg-shaped Jinx, and… there. The Ringworld, too, of course.
Rick Sternbach
Introduction:
My Universe and Welcome to It!
Thirty-two years ago I started writing. Thirty-one years ago I started selling what I wrote. And thirty-one years ago I started a future history—the history of Known Space.
Known Space 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 six novels (including the brand-new The Ringworld Throne) plus the stories in Flatlander (Gil the Arm's tales) and Crashlander (the stories of Beowulf Shaeffer) and the stories you're holding now, plus eight volumes of stories set during the period of the Man-Kzin Wars and written by other authors. See the updated Timeline for details.
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 is. 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. These stories, including two novels, are published 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 terms of human experience.
A few general notes are in order here:
1. The tales of Gil the Arm are missing. Gil's career hits its high point around A.D. 2121, between World of Ptavvs and Protector. His stories appear all together in the collection called Flatlander.
2. I dithered over including certain stories. "The Coldest Place" was. obsolete before it reached print. That story and "Eye of an Octopus" show the hand of the amateur. But these stories are part of the fabric of Known Space, so they're here. And Mercury rotates once per solar orbit—in Known Space but not in the real universe!
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? Mars continues to change, and I should be keeping up. But the field is seething with recent Mars stories. If the best writers in the field insist on writing my stories for me, what can I offer but gratitude?
4. I was sorely 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 six 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: A.D. 2106-2130. 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 plain; humanity must adjust.
There is an intermediate era centering around A.D. 2340. In Sol system it is a period of peace and prosperity. On colony worlds such as 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 tales of the Man-Kzin Wars have been written mostly by others. It still amazes me that I could get these masters to play in my universe instead of their own. From them I've learned more about kzinti family life, intelligent female carnivores, esoteric cosmology, and military maneuverings than I ever guessed was there. Poul Anderson gives us ancient worlds covered in natural plastics and bucky-balls (now "fullerenes"). Pournelle and Sterling did aerobraking through a sun, using a stasis field. Benford and Martin expanded the Known Space cosmology beyond this universe. Donald Kingsbury's cowardly Kzin is beyond this universe. Donald Kingsbury's cowardly Kzin is scary as hell. A kzinti scout died in India in Kipling's time, a notch short of bringing the Patriarchy to Earth.
The fourth period, following the Man-Kzin Wars, covers part of the twenty-sixth century A.D. 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, and a new species has joined the community of worlds. But there i
s one fundamental change: the Teela Brown gene—the "ultimate psychic power"—spreading through humanity. The teelas have been bred for luck.
It always seems that I have more to say about Known Space.
Teela Brown was bred for luck. Or else she's a fluke of statistics, no more remarkable than any lottery winner. How can you tell? Teela's luck has some amazing implications, and it took me twenty-five years to find them.
Characters more intelligent than the author are the greatest challenge an author can face, and the Ringworld is crawling with them. They're called "protectors." Strangers around the globe keep telling me things I didn't know about the Ringworld's structure, and I've found a few of my own. I've been playing games of anthropology across habitable land three million times the surface area of the Earth.
But 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 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 into a bundle; and treatises on the Grog problem. To all of you who have thus entertained me and stroked my ego, thanks.
The chronology in this book is the work of decades on the part of a whole army of people.
Tim Kyger, Spike MacPhee, and Jerry Boyajian got involved in the 1970s. I've updated it.
John Hewitt did the research that shaped Chaosium's tabletop Ringworld game. He did that by bracing me at conventions and demanding that I make decisions: conflicting dates, shapes for tools and weapons, explanations and descriptions. His work "hardened" Known Space. He later helped me find the pages I needed to form a bible for the Man-Kzin Wars authors, and Jim Baen and I have been using it ever since.
The Guide to Larry Niven's Ringworld, by Kevin Stein, is a guide to all of Known Space. I've found it more accurate than my fallible memory.
—Larry Niven
Tarzana, California
September 1995