by Larry Niven

isbn: 0345353129
subject: SF, Fiction and Literature
finished: 10/6/2002

A good book by Larry Niven is one where he takes a Big Idea and successfully writes a decent story around it. In Protector we learn that humanity is merely a mutated version of a larval Pak --- a warlike species from a world near the center of the galaxy. The aging process gives us a foreshadowing of the next stage of Pak development, but lacking a plant that supplies the crucial catalytic hormone, we are doomed to die as "breeders," never reaching the super-intelligent protector stage. This is the first Big Idea. The second is more interesting but less well developed; it concerns the nature of free will for a being so intelligent that it would never think to invent a computer, and always sees the correct course of action. As I have come to expect for books containing super-intelligent beings, this angle is poorly executed: Niven just goes ahead and tells us that super-intelligence is there without doing much in the way of showing it. This is a fun book; not major, but enjoyable and useful since it provides insight into Niven's other works.