Customer Reviews

Rainbow Mars a

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(23)

 

 

This isn't a bad book. The original Svetz stories are buried in the back, which makes the new material disappointingly lean by comparison. Actually, I wish the space had been used to elongate the Mars story, because there are some beautiful things in here that just seem to get hurried along. Niven's "rationalization" of some of Burrough's and Bradbury's material is nifty.

Sadly, I can't give this book a whole-hearted recommendation, though. If it were ONLY one or two classic Martian tales in play here, it would have been better. Instead the story gets bogged down with too many things to take care of and the beautiful ideas seem lost in it. If you're a Niven fan, as many others writing reviews here are, then you'll probably like it... but not love it.

I have always looked forward to Larry Nivens' works. As a master of "hard" science fiction Mr. Niven has few equals. Too bad this book is fantasy. I enjoyed the compilation of short stories previously published as "Flight of the Horse", now I realize why. They were short indulgences. A sideline to his normal, excellent SF. While long time SF readers will recognize the Martians encountered by Svetz and company during their "travels" to Mars' past, the book never develops past these recognitions. Entertaining to a degree but not what I look for from Larry Niven.

I'm a hardcore Niven fan and have been ever since I first read "A Gift From Earth", but with that said - this book is mediocre at best. I suppose it is just a matter of taste, but I found this book to be tedious and confusing. I usually appreciate his sense of humor, (anyone who hasn't read Man Of Steel/Woman of Kleenex is really missing out) but this time I have to say I just don't get it.

I hadn't read a science fiction book in several years, but decided to buy one when browsing a bookstore. I had always greatly enjoyed Larry Niven's novels and (especially) short stories, so I picked up this book. What an unfortunate choice! This book has few creative ideas. Since Niven is usually weak on characterization, this leaves little reason to read it. The references to some of the standard works on Mars are mildly interesting, but all-in-all, the book is dull and tedious. Very disappointing.

I have read just about everything Larry has put to paper and I was told to avoid this book. Despite the advice I picked it up and I liked it. Well, almost liked it. The odd placement of the novella BEFORE the short stories was and odd choice since you end up reading the chronology backwards by the time your done. It is one of the few "time travel" books I have ever read and liked. I hate time travel books, period. The jokes are cute but the casual fan of si-fi may not spot them all. Niven's style is as solid as ever. Shallow people with no depth and aliens that act alien. If you like Larry's books, pick this one up but read it BACKWARDS. Start with the short stories and work you way to novella. You won't regret it.

Something has happened to Niven in the last few years, his writing is still great for novel ideas but its getting hard or perhaps less enjoyable to read. Rainbow mars fits this mold. The plot includes a fascinating idea for getting into orbit, but his writing skips and jumps and is a little hard to follow at times. Its almost as if he is publishing a first draft (well maybe a second). In Rainbow mars we can see the new story and the old and compare the writing. We have the old time travel stories, finely crafted with excellent well thought lines (for example) "it was terrible in its beauty, the flight of the horse" (describing the gallop of a unicorn) a quote that stays with you. Nothing similar exists in the new story. Still worth buying though.

This is an excellent story, as most of Niven's are, but without the help of his usual collaborators (Pournelle and Barnes) it suffers from being very badly written. Same problem he had with the Ringworld sequel, which was unreadable. He's lost something. My suspicion is that he has been caught up mentally in the screenplay syndrom, where you sit down at your PC with the plot of your book whizzing in your head visually and just type furiously without thinking of syntax or verbal description. It's like: "Ooh!" "What?" "ZAP" "Damn, they just blew up our spaceship." Who did? How? What's going on here? Books don't have special effects floating out of their pages yet, unfortunately. The writer is supposed to supply that, and Niven doesn't.

Otherwise, I agree with the other review I read here. Very nice idea that time travel is really into fantasy-land, not reality as it was. That if you have to go back in (Earth) time to the era before the Industrial Revolution, when it was suspected that Mars was inhabited, not barren as the NASA expeditions have shown us -- then of course if you transport to Mars, it will be -- with four-armed Burroughsian humanoids, canals, egg-laying humans, and Wellsian Octopoids.

This is yet another in the increasingly long series of truly bad books from larry Niven. Why do I keep reading them? I'm a Niven fan from decades ago, and keep thinking that the next book will be a return to previous excellence, but this is another disappointment.

The book has some typically fascinating ideas, and Niven is obviously having some fun interjecting raw fantasy and mythology into his science fiction. Unfortunately, it suffers terribly from very poor writing and development. Imagine my surprise also when I discovered the story ends at the books midpoint, and the rest is filled with short stories on the same subject.

If there's one thing I've learned, it's that more people will give a good review to a bad book, than a bad review to a good book. Trust the reviews you read, you'll save money and time.

While certainly not the author's best work, it is indeed different. I am sure it is just me, but I had a terrible time tracking on this one. The initial chapters were loaded with imagined "tech talk," most of which left me quite confussed as to just what was going on. Being a fan of most of the older SiFi and Fantasy authors, I did enjoy the references to their works. I really do not feel this work will satisfy the hard cord SiFi fan, nor, for that matter, the hard core fantasy fan. On the other hand, I have certainly read worse. I did not feel the author did all that well in his character development and left more unanswered questions about them than he answered. Parts of the main story had real substance, where quite well written and were actually fun to read. Then the author would drift off to...well, I am not sure where. I suppose if you are a hard core fan of Niven, this will be one you may want to read. For the rest, your reading time could probably be spent more wisely elsewhere.

I was excited to see Larry Niven had put out a new book, since his name seems to be a guarantee of an engaging read. This, however is an exception. To begin with, it isn't at all clear from the blurbs that this is actually a novella and a bunch of short stories (I blame the publisher for that). And the short stories are all just more of the same. I mean, how many times do we have to sit through the timeline changing and people are suffocating because the air is now clean? The problem, of course, is they weren't meant to be read back-to-back, but rather over time in various publications. Forgetting that disappointment, the novella has some interesting premises and characters... BUT the writing style seems to be a concerted effort to appear to be a 40s or 50s potboiler SciFi. Mostly it was just annoying.

My advice is to pass this one up and go directly to Mr. Niven's next novel.