here is something very quiet about Larry Niven's new book. It is not a young quiet, though it is not the quiet of the grave. Destiny's Road, which appears something more than 30 years after Niven burst into the full exfoliation of plumage of World of Ptavvs (1966), has little of the phoenix glare of the first book--"Hi! Guys! I'm Larry Niven! I'm Heinlein reborn! I'm bright! I'm nano! I'm hard!" But it may be a wiser book, a realer tale.
We are not in Known Space, the series which Ptavvs inaugurates in book form, and which, over the years, became comically overcrowded; can-does, cranky aliens, predecessor species by the peck, various explanations of the nature of things that jostled like rats in a cage. Destiny's Road is set in the same chastened universe that was introduced in the appalling Heorot sequence, authored by Niven and Pournelle and Steven Barnes: too many cooks, pale broth. And, it might be, Destiny's Road is an apology for the crassness of that sequence.
Humanity, in the new universe, has had something of a struggle establishing itself beyond the home solar system. The planet Avalon, where Heorot is set, has proved disastrous. The humans who have settled there suffer under various disabilities: they are brain damaged, through a side effect of interstellar travel; they are hegemony thugs, whose instinct on discovering they have invaded a planet whose dominant species is intelligent is to kill its children; and they occupy novels of a wooden ineptitude beyond the scope of satire.
This time they are saved
Destiny, the next planet to be colonized by humans, also poses a few crucifying problems. By a complex process -- which Niven makes pretty clear, I believe, though I did not master the explanation -- potassium has leached out of Destiny's ecosystem. Very quickly, the colonists are forced to attempt to cope with the first and most significant result of this lack: they all become brain-damaged.
But this time they are saved -- long before the novel begins -- through the discovery of a region on the planet where volcanic action (or something: this reviewer does not claim to be very good at paraphrasing the hard stuff) has reintroduced potassium into Destiny's life cycle.
The other problem Destiny offers is less technically tractable. Destiny also has an intelligent species, the seaborn "otterfolk," who (it is decided, this time round) must be protected.
We are still in back story.
The solution arrived at by the first colonists -- who suffer various schisms rendered to us through complicated speculations at first and only at the end of the text through a computer which knows all -- is to transform Spiral City, the original settlement, into a complex control experiment, and to engineer this through the construction of the titular road, a high-tech scar which begins Yellow-Brick-Road-like at the heart of Spiral City, and runs north through controlled territory, across a guarded isthmus, and into the land where potassium grows. A migrant caravan culture is created to trade the potassium, known as speckles, and to monitor the control.
The novel itself, which does not have the quiet of death, follows a young man a couple of hundred years later on his quest for knowledge. He takes the Road north, meets folk, fucks a lot of women (exogamy being necessary to keep the breed awake), learns how to cook, opens a restaurant, stays there for 27 years (a period jumped by means of one of Niven's now-famous caesuras), takes his wife, who has been burned, to hospital, accesses a computer and finds out everything.
The book is wrong...
The book is all wrong of course: almost everything of interest in the protagonist's life either happens to him before he abandons his story for 27 years (and therefore has nothing at all to do with his eventual discovery of the truth), or is told to him by a machine, at book's end.
But it doesn't matter.
And in fact it is something of a relief. Jemmy (his name) only begins to transform the entire planet at the very end of the tale, when he discovers how to make speckles grow in controlled territory. For most of the book, we have scenery, exogamy, the longing to travel, sun and sea and gossip. Destiny's Road is chastened, belated; the story it tells for most of its length has nothing to do with the story of the world itself; sure.
But there is a quiet glow of satisfaction that a job has been done (by Larry Niven), that a world has been encountered (by us), and that (at novel's close), we do not have to be embarrassed by any fake triumphs.
The otterfolk remain.
Jemmy's restaurant is thriving.
A new world begins to look like life.
John Clute is a writer, editor, critic and scholar of science fiction. He is the author of the Hugo Award winning Illustrated Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, as well as one of the co-founders of the British SF publication Interzone. His criticism and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, Omni, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other places too numerous to list. His latest book, Look at the Evidence, has been nominated for the 1997 Hugo Award.
