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25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Dumpster-diving at the Nivens's, March 7, 2005
How can you know that you are really, really famous? One strong hint would be that people are willing--even happy--to pay good money for a reprint of your old emails. On that criterion, and based on the cheerful other reviews, Larry Niven is really, really famous.
Don't get me wrong; on my shelves are 22 books with Niven's name on the spine. But this one is a shoddy collection of castoffs, cobbled together not (I hope) by Niven himself, but by some marketing droid desperate to have some more Niven "product" to sell. It contains four actual stories totalling 100pp; the rest is trivial filler, including the above-mentioned printout of emails.
Those might be of interest to a PhD candidate in English writing a thesis on"Collaborative Methods In Science Fiction of the 1990s" -- but they are really for the wanna-be SF writer who wants to fantasize that he or she is among the lucky handful who actually get to collaborate with Larry Niven. In fact the emails are no more interesting than email between you and your co-workers. There's no writerly advice from Larry to his pals, no "here's the golden secret of good plotting." You could read a megabyte of such email and be not one adverb closer to publication of your work.
The rest of the trivia includes brief, uninteresting excerpts from novels; old, short, and dated essays; a report on a trip to an SF Con; a brief intro to someone else's book; and fragments of the "canon" (i.e. notes) on the milieu of the Man-Kzin Wars.
This stuff is just sweepings from the writer's office floor. They show you nothing of Niven's imagination or plotting skills. Their content would have near-zero interest but for the fact that they were not swept up from your office floor, but from Larry Niven's.
The editing is shoddy as well. There's no publication information at all (no citations for published items, no dates for unpublished ones). There's just no way to tell what has been published before, nor where. For example, half of the 100pp of actual fiction is a story, "Procrustes," but there's no hint that it was previously published as part of Crashlander (Ballantine, 1994). The lack of this data makes the book irritating to read (ok, when WAS this Intercon he reports on?), and useless as scholarly source material.
This book is for the library of an obsessive Niven completist collector. Ordinary readers will do well to save their $7.
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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Aggragate of the Author's Writings, December 16, 2003
This review is from: Scatterbrain (Hardcover)
Scatterbrain (2003) is the third general collection of the author's works, much like N-Space and Playgrounds of the Mind. This volume contains 26 works of various kinds, all previously published except for the Introduction and the Epilogue.
The Introduction is an interesting discussion of how the author comes up with his crazy ideas. It seems that he is "scatterbrained", notions just pop up in his mind and stick to each other. More than that, he has a tendency to daydream almost anywhere as these ideas pop up and breed.
This volume contains excerpts and other material from four recent novels: Destiny's Road, The Ringworld Throne, The Burning City and Saturn's Race. It also contains previously uncollected tales about Gil Hamilton and Beowulf Shaeffer, a recent Draco Tavern story, a couple of articles about the Man-Kzin Wars series, assorted other non-fiction, and two other stories.
Loki is a tale about a space probe on an alien world that gets to talking with the natives. Ice and Mirrors describes an ecological survey of an ice world for a group of aliens.
The Epilogue is also about the way the author thinks. As he summed up his talk to a convention of librarians: "If there is only one thing you could teach a child, it ought to be this: play with his mind". He further elaborated: "To make his own homework".
Highly recommended for Niven fans and for anyone else who enjoys reading about the author as well as samples of his works.
-Arthur W. Jordin
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A thin new collection with a few "must have" stories, June 24, 2004
This review is from: Scatterbrain (Hardcover)
This is a fun little collection, not to be confused with the huge omnibus collections like N-Space or Playgrounds of the Mind. Still, the shorter collections of Larry Niven's work have never, to my knowledge, been out of print and for good reason. His short fiction is always amoung the most entertaining (his novels ain't bad either). Although I'd read most of this book's contents elsewhere, it's nice to finally have Procrustes or the most recent Gil Hamilton story bound up in a volume. And the book benefits nicely from Niven's "Harlan Ellison-esque" personal introductions, foreward and epilogue. On the downside, the back of this book is a bit thin on content and there are lengthy email exchanges with his collaborators reproduced. It's amusing "inside baseball" stuff, but really there isn't enough material to sustain this book (certainly in hardcover). The fiction is worth the price of admission, for me at least, and the personal pieces are all good fun. Still, I'd prefer if Niven wrote some more fiction...
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