Playgrounds of the Mind Read online

  “One of the best damned storytellers in the business.”

  —Poul Anderson

  “One of our finest.”

  —Seattle Times

  “I had a birthday coming up and my wife was out of ideas. I told her to check out the bookstores for any book by Larry Niven except the three I’d already acquired. I don’t remember how many Wanda returned with, but I do know that I still read them periodically.”

  —Tom Clancy

  Author of such classics as Ringworld and Ringworld Engineers; co-author of bestsellers like The Mote in God’s Eye, Lucifer’s Hammer and Footfall; Nebula winner and five-time recipient of SF’s Hugo Award, Larry Niven is known to millions as “the premier writer of hard SF.”

  In Playgrounds of the Mind Larry Niven presents us with a dazzling new retrospective collection. A stunning sequel to N-Space, Playgrounds of the Mind spans the second half of Niven’s career. A masterwork in its own right, it is packed with a plethora of stories—many previously unpublished in book form—a wealth of gossip and anecdotes, plus all the storytelling vigor that has made Larry Niven the undisputed king of hard science fiction.

  Playgrounds of the Mind—along with its companion-piece, N-Space—contains, very simply, the best SF of Larry Niven’s long and distinguished career.

  Here is the exciting new masterwork by the man Frederik Pohl has dubbed “a true master,” Gregory Benford calls “the paradigm SF personality of the last several decades;” the man Arthur C. Clarke has hailed as his “favorite SF writer.”

  Tor books by Larry Niven

  Achilles’ Choice (with Steven Barnes)

  The Descent of Anansi (with Steven Barnes)

  N-Space

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

  PLAYGROUNDS OF THE MIND

  Copyright © 1991 by Larry Niven

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

  49 West 24th Street

  New York, N.Y. 10010

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Niven, Larry.

  Playgrounds of the mind / Larry Niven.

  p. cm.

  “A Tom Doherty Associates book.”

  ISBN 0-312-85219-3

  1. Science fiction, American. I. Title.

  PS3564.I9P57 1991

  813’.54—dc20

  91-21440

  CIP

  First edition: October 1991

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CONTENTS

  Thraxisp: A Memoir

  A Teardrop Falls

  From INFERNO (with Jerry Pournelle)

  From A WORLD OUT OF TIME

  Rammer

  From “THE ETHICS OF MADNESS”

  Becalmed in Hell

  Wait It Out

  A Relic of the Empire

  From LUCIFER’S HAMMER (with Jerry Pournelle)

  The Soft Weapon

  The Borderland of Sol

  From THE RINGWORLD ENGINEERS

  What Good Is a Glass Dagger?

  From THE MAGIC GOES AWAY

  The Defenseless Dead

  From THE PATCHWORK GIRL

  Leviathan!

  From OATH OF FEALTY (with Jerry Pournelle)

  Unfinished Story

  Cautionary Tales

  The Dreadful White Page

  From DREAM PARK (with Steven Barnes)

  Retrospective

  The Green Marauder

  Assimilating Our Culture, That’s What They’re Doing!

  War Movie

  Limits

  The Lost Ideas

  Bigger than Worlds

  Ghetto? But I Thought…

  Adrienne and Irish Coffee

  One Night at the Draco Tavern

  TrantorCon Report

  Why Men Fight Wars, and What You Can Do About It!

  Comics

  From GREEN LANTERN BIBLE

  Criticism

  From THE LEGACY OF HEOROT (with Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes)

  The Portrait of Daryanree the King

  The Wishing Game

  The Lion in His Attic

  From FOOTFALL (with Jerry Pournelle)

  Works in Progress

  From THE MOAT AROUND MURCHESON’S EYE

  From FALLEN ANGELS

  Wanted Fan

  The California Voodoo Game

  Letter

  PLAYGROUNDS

  OF THE MIND

  • • •

  THRAXISP

  A MEMOIR

  John and Bjo Trimble were science fiction fans long before I was. I met them the night I found the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society.

  They’re organized.

  They’ve led treks into the desert when it’s blooming. On such a trek I discovered a plant called squaw cabbage: a green vase with a tiny scarlet flower at the tip. It looks like something seeded from Mars…and I examined it in awe and delight while the rest of the trekkers stared at me.

  Fans remember Jack Harness discovering the blazing desert starscape on another trek. He stretched out on his sleeping bag and lay there, staring up…and they found him in the morning, on his sleeping bag, half frozen.

  The Trimbles are compulsive organizers. They created Equicon, an annual science fiction convention local to Los Angeles. Equicon merged with Filmcon, which is media-oriented: movies, TV, comic books, posters, role-playing games. Then—

  The World-Building Project was Joel Hagen’s idea. He had made the suggestion to other convention committees. When he talked to John and Bjo Trimble, they said Yes.

  Joel Hagen is a sculptor. The work he displays at conventions is generally bones: skulls and skeletons from other worlds. Sometimes they come with provenances, details on the worlds where they were exhumed, signed by UPXAS, the United Planets Xenoarcheological Society.

  Joel chose and assembled the rest of us: Art Costa, Don Dixon, Patricia Ortega, Rick Sternbach (all artists), Paul Preuss and me (writers of fiction), and Dr. William K. Hartmann (astronomer, artist, writer of articles and fiction).

  At Equicon/Filmcon, in April 1981, the Trimbles gave us eight hotel rooms plus a big lecture room on the mezzanine. The World Builders Room was to remain open 24 hours a day. We eight artists and writers would spend as much of the convention there as we could. Actually we were more than eight; Rick Sternbach’s wife Asenath was present most of the time, Marilyn kept wandering in, and there were others.

  Most of us arrived Thursday night. We gathered on Friday morning and set to work.

  I feared that we would duplicate the results of another world-building consortium, Harlan Ellison’s Medea-building group. The World Builders chose a tidally locked habitable moon of a super-Jovian world, like Ellison’s Medea. (Nobody used the term “brown dwarf star” yet.) But we changed some parameters to get something different.

  Due to orbital elements chosen by Dr. Hartmann, Thrassus—too Latin! I changed it—Thraxisp is heated by both its sun and the super-Jovian planet. It’s too hot for life except at the poles and in the seas.

  Life would crawl out onto the land at each pole. Life thenceforth would travel separate evolutionary paths.

  So Saturday we split into two groups.

  I got tired of saying crawl. “My creatures will fly onto the land!” I cried. Flight first, then lungs…our flying lungfish would eventually nest in trees, then evolve legs and design a civilization. The volleks would be natural pilots. Okay, Preuss, top that!

  “Min
e will roll,” Paul gloated. His team designed a sand dollar. It rolled onto the land mass at the south pole and became a miner. The tunneks became a race of sessile philosophers, sensing their world with taste and seismic effects, getting their nourishment by chemical mining, consuming nothing organic.

  The room was open to all. Convention attendees could wander in at any time. At set times we would lecture on our progress. At all times the artwork would be on display, and somebody would always be there to talk.

  There was a globe of Thraxisp. There were paintings as seen from the surface, with the brown dwarf hanging tremendous in the sky; Joel was making and refining sculptures of the volleks and tunneks and their more primitive ancestors.

  Convention attendees did wander in, but not many. We could have used more action.

  But we were having fun.

  What we were evolving was two races of natural space travelers.

  They would have everything going for them. The tunneks would work on understanding physics. The volleks were natural pilots and explorers. For mines and chemical sources we had tunneks and the Teakettle: an asteroid-impact crater on the equator, facing directly toward the primary: a confined region where the ocean boils gently at all times, precipitating interesting salts and chemicals into glittering hills. Thraxisp’s gravity is low; it has to be, because otherwise the gas torus effect will give it too much atmosphere (see THE INTEGRAL TREES). That makes escape velocity low. We gave them an endless variety of moons to explore, all easily accessible to the most primitive spacecraft. And first contact with alien intelligence would come for both of them before they ever left the atmosphere!

  By mid-Sunday, the end of the convention, we had hoped to introduce human explorers. My memory says we didn’t get that far.

  We didn’t get as much crowd as we earned. The movie fans weren’t interested. The Trimbles were disappointed.

  But we eight continued to work.

  Bill Hartmann wrote up the convention and published the result in Smithsonian magazine, March 1982, with some of our illustrations. The money was shared. Our plan was to share every nickel of fallout, 12½% each.

  The thought of an eventual book must have been in the back of every mind. Now we dared speak of it, and now we dared make more elaborate plans. We sent human explorers to Thrax, aboard the Ring City taken from my “Bigger Than Worlds” article. The artists modified it extensively. We set up a loose plot-line, in blocks of short story embedded in artwork of intense variety. Volleks would meet the Ring City in orbit in primitive comic-book spacecraft. The payoff would be the discovery, by inference, of the tunneks, whose existence the volleks are hiding. We assigned each other blocks of text.

  More material emerged. The tunneks became musicians: they built great wind-operated pipe systems from careful deposits of slag. We have the recordings. We argued back and forth about designs for Ring City. Elaborate maps emerged, and sociological studies too.

  We gathered—never all eight of us together—at universities and conventions to display our work.

  We gathered (only five of us) to correlate notes, and to try to sell a book on the basis of what we had. We didn’t have enough, or else it wasn’t organized enough. The publisher’s representative was interested but not sufficiently.

  Here we stalled.

  What happened?

  Too many artists, not enough writers. Five and a half artists, two and a half writers, counting Hartmann as split down the middle. That’s good for building a convention display, but bad for a book. It turns out Paul doesn’t like the short-story form; that didn’t help.

  Too much ingenuity. Ideas scintillated back and forth, and each had to be considered…added to the canon…memorized by all…worked into the larger picture…

  In a normal collaboration, each of two people has to be willing to do about 80% of the work. With eight of us, and with the enormous complexity the Project attained, organization took far too much of the effort available. We’d each be doing 80% of the work…for 12½% of the take.

  Granted that the project was a true kick in the ass, a mind stretcher, the kind of awesome world-building the mundanes can’t even dream about, an experience to shape the rest of our lives. It’s still true that each of us could earn more, faster, more surely, by working alone.

  I’ve no reason to think that this ever crossed anyone’s mind but mine. I’ve never asked.

  And on the gripping hand…with eight successful writers/artists working on a long-term project, isn’t it obvious that one or another would get involved in something else? Other collaborations or other obligations, or personal problems, or something to bring in quicker money…It was my first thought when Joel conned me into this. We tried it anyway.

  Somebody was lured away, and it was me.

  The first major step on the road to success: learn how to turn down bad offers. The second major step: learn how to turn down good offers. This can be very difficult. I say this in my own defense: Jerry Pournelle and I worked these rules out as a basic truth; but I was better at using it, or else I needed the money less. Jerry is still trying to dig out from under too many obligations, all these years later.

  But I was snowed under when it was Thraxisp time. I was working on a book with Steven Barnes and a book with Jerry and at least one of my own. That one could be slighted—none of my publishers have ever complained about lateness, Ghod bless them—but the rent is always presumed due for my collaborators. Fair’s fair.

  This was how it ended:

  November 18, 1986

  Generic Thraxisp Participant

  Dear Generic,

  Paul isn’t interested in blitzing THRAXISP. I haven’t been able to reach Dr. Hartmann by phone. Me, I would need to be re-inspired. We are the three writers in the Thraxisp Group, and it is we who would need to write text.

  So. My position is this:

  1) We’ve had a learning experience. It was pleasant and educational too.

  2) The trick is to make money by having fun. But none of the writers is available to turn Thraxisp into a book. It follows that we can only make money by selling individual contributions.

  3) The artists have busted their asses at this; and I include Dr. Hartmann as both writer and artist. The artists may sell their artwork and keep the money, no strings attached. (I don’t know of any piece of artwork that was a collaboration. If such exists, work your own deals.)

  4) The writers may sell whatever they write in future, no strings attached, using the Thraxisp system as a communal idea pool. This includes fiction and also articles. (Bill, you sold an article with illustrations and split the money with us all. Thank you. I hope that the ethics of changing the rules now don’t bother you; but give us some input.)

  I presently have no such stories in mind; but such might arise in future.

  Artists may also make and sell new material, no strings attached.

  5) I don’t know what to do about existing text. Some of the text was done in solo flights, and those blocks should belong to the author; but I suggest that any of the eight of us may quote from any of the text, making it a communal pool.

  6) Obviously, illustrations are available for fiction and articles. I suggest that the artists and writers can cut their deals in the usual fashion.

  7) Whatever happens, I suggest we keep each other informed.

  8) I don’t plan any more eight-part collaborations. The only thing wrong with this bag of snakes is, it was too big!

  I’m well aware that the one who ran out of time to work was me. It’s embarrassing…and I don’t want to go through that again either.

  Best wishes,

  Larry Niven.

  Copies to Art Costa, Don Dixon, Joel Hagen, Dr. William K. Hartmann, Patricia Ortega, Paul Preuss. I don’t have an address for Rick Sternbach.

  The true heir to all of this is an annual event called Contact.

  At Contact, all of the invited guests are “soft” scientists—biologists, anthropologists, sociologists—or science fiction
writers with an emphasis in the “soft” sciences. There are lectures, there are displays—not like the usual convention art show, but more of an anthropological museum display. At night there are films suitable for a college class. The badges are neat. They feature Joel Hagen’s alien skulls.

  Contact was Jim Funaro’s idea. Seven or eight of us carved out details while sitting around a big table in the bar at a Westercon. Joel Hagen and I were there. At the first Contact Paul Preuss was also among the guests: three out of eight veterans of the World-Builders Project at Equicon/Filmcon.

  Contact includes the Bateson Project: a world-building exercise. The paying guests get to watch ten to fifteen very good minds shaping worlds in the fashion of the World-Builders: artwork, sociology charts, a globe or two, sculpture. At set times the participants lecture on what they’ve accomplished.

  At the first Contact the guests had to produce their worlds from scratch. Didn’t work. Anthro-bio-sociologists break laws of physics without noticing.

  At the second Joel Hagen handed us a sculpture, a thing that was mostly legs…and no anus. We made Joel put one in. We called it a squitch and extrapolated a world.

  Ideally the Contact guests need a world to start with. Jim invites a hard science fiction writer or two (Poul Anderson, Jerry Pournelle, me) to make one. He arrives Thursday night with a stack of notes and maps, and lectures on the physics, orbits, climatology, etc. Then the life-sciences people take over.

  It’s always been two teams. One handles the aliens. One team designs a human culture; and that can be weirder yet. On Sunday they run ’em together, on stage.

  Ending is much too strong a word.

  Thraxisp hasn’t disappeared. We have all the material for an elaborate franchise universe.

  Each of us has learned. Cooperation is not easy for professional dreamers. Keeping a dream world consistent isn’t easy for anyone. We gave our creatures biology, history, cultures, art forms, vehicles and habitats.

  We learned how to play. It’s damned few of our five billion who are really good at that.

  • • •

  • • •