There’s a marvelous sequence in Ringworld in which he gives us a quick primer on how real-world laser combat would work. (He imagines the extra energy getting thrown off as heat.) A traditional laser battle isn’t rigorous enough for Niven.

(Point of interest: Niven has a degree in, I believe, mathematics.)įor example: you can teleport, but if you go from one elevation to another you’ll have to account for the change in potential energy. But he allows this technology to be limited, or at least shaped and articulated, by actual physics. The “Known Space” stories and novels, for which he’s probably most famous, are far-future affairs that posit hyperdrives and nigh-invulnerable spaceship hulls and transfer booths (teleportation) and so on. Which isn’t to say that Niven is constrained by what we now know to be possible. With a hard SF writer like Niven, the story emerges out of the world: the world and its rules and laws are what generate and drive and constrain the story. Hard SF works the opposite way - it allows its stories to be shaped by what we know about technology and the universe and how they work.

There’s a school of science fiction where the writer decides where they want the story to go and then makes up a world or a technology or a branch of physics that will get it there. Hard SF - as I choose to define it, irresponsibly, with no reference to or knowledge of how other people define it - is SF that takes its science and engineering seriously. He was born in 1938 and fits into that generation in between Golden Agers like Bradbury and Asimov and Heinlein and the cyber-info-punks like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson. I think it’s fair to say that Niven is the quintessential “hard” SF writer. You know who I don’t hear enough about? Larry Niven. So in case that one needs explanation, it basically means “refusing to shut up.”)Īnd I can crap on with the best/worst of them about Joyce and Woolf and Kafka and whoever else, but there’s already been plenty of crapping on about them. She’s Australian, and at this point I no longer know which idioms are American or Australian anymore. (“Crapping on” is one of my wife’s expressions. You know how it is with your literary heroes - you never want to stop crapping on about how great they are. Follow Grossman writes about books here on Wednesdays.

Larry niven ring world