Customer Reviews

Scatterbrain

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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 There's no publication information at all (no citations for published items, no dates for unpublished ones).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.

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

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...

This collection is for the most loyal of Larry Niven fans though those science fiction readers who have tried him might enjoy a taste of the award-winning author. SCATTERBRAIN is all over the spectrum ranging from extracts from recent novels such as THE RINGWORLD THRONE to non-fiction philosophical ramblings on Mars and saving civilization and some cold cash as well as short stories and interviews with co-authors.

The anthology is zany and all over the place. Though each item is well written and catches the reader's mind and especially that of Mr. Niven, the collection can prove difficult to find a pattern - duh - SCATTERBRAIN. The book reminds this reviewer of Jahn's (not sure of the spelling being a geriatric, perhaps Jan's?) ice cream parlor in the Bronx where they offered a dish called the "kitchen Sink". Eat one without puking and get a second one free. In other words readers will either full appreciate Mr. Niven's assortment of "crazy ideas' and seek previous wild but fun rides or puke out of the total lack of discipline. This reviewer fully enjoyed the trek to the center of the mind and heart of Larry Niven.

Harriet Klausner

Larry Niven is a good writer who has written some excellent books. He is not a great writer and not everything he ever penned or typed needs to be collected. That's what proves frustrating about "Scatterbrain." There are some fine stories and highlights from some of his novels in this book. But there are also quick essays and emails that do not instruct or entertain. Niven often tells the same stories over and over again--here is another about his t-shirt about the space station he advised on. Now Niven feels the need to include emails with a co-author about their Christmas plans. When in doubt, Niven name drops Robert Heinlen. Now he tells us that a group--which included him--came up with SDI and that won the Cold War (apparently the Marxist economy and the Soviet war in Afghanistan must take a backseat to Niven in leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union). Now Niven tells us he is going to toy with the Green Lantern's universe. There are some gems to be sure. Niven is actually spot on with his assesment that 9/11 would lead to more travel progams on televison and his essay on autographs is excellent. If Larry Niven is going to be remembered in 50 years, it will be due to his sci fi novels and not his essays on space and the future. They simply are not that interesting to read a decade after they were first published. In the meantime, if you ever wanted to read about Larry Niven's various medical problems and his trip to Norway, feel free to refer to this book. The rest of us--even those of who us who admire Niven--are better off without this mess of a book.

Like most of his collections so far (N-Space, etc), this is filled with some short stories, some essays, and excerpts from the novels he's promoting at the time the collection was written. I love the short stories and the essays about writing the novels. Unfortunately, this collection has a lot more of the novel excerpts, and felt more like a "coming soon from Niven Productions" than a real addition to my collection of Niven works.

This latest collection from Larry Niven lives up to its title. The subject matter is all over the place with novel excerpts, stories, essays, logs, e-mails, and notes.

Unfortunately for Niven fans, this collection came out late enough that they will probably have all of the novels excerpted here. But there are also tales of Gil Hamilton, Beowulf Shaefer, and Draco's Tavern. We are also treated to communications between Mr. Niven and collaborators and editors that helps to show how ideas come to fruition.

Mr. Niven also talks about how his mind works. Sort of a slower da Vinci, Niven spawns ideas and pushes them to their conclusions in almost frightening ways. He calls himself scatterbrained but really he can just see the path of an idea and where it leads (i.e. heat exchangers on Pluto).

The other drawback to the collection is it seems too short. It isn't, but it seems that way. If you have already read the novels excerpted, the rest seems to fly by just a little too quickly. Of course most of the reason is that it reads well and thus faster. Still, I can't help but feel it will be too long before I get another crack at a fresh collection from one of my favorite authors.

I was delighted to get my hands on Scatterbrain, as I've enjoyed previous "Random Thoughts from Larry Niven's Brain" books in the past. It marries excerpts and short stories with information on the writing process, stories from SciFi Cons, etc. It was well worth what I paid for it, and only continues to confirm why Mr. Niven is one of the TOP hard science SciFi writers of our time.

Like 'All the Myriad Ways' or 'Neutron Star', this is Niven collection of good short stories. He gets into teleoperation, though he's yet to do a 'Theory and Practice of Teleoperation' like he did for time travel and teleportation; like some of us are waiting for. How long, o Lord, How long?
If you like clean chaste prose and loony slutty ideas you love Niven.