When you look at the listing for the audiobook of Larry Niven's wonderful 1984 novel "The Integral Trees" on Amazon, it has a parenthetical comment, "(The State series, Book 2)." The Kindle and print listings note this same novel as "(The Smoke Ring series Book 1)." Was there a pre-IT novel written about a powerful State for that ominous year? Yes, and this is it. In 1976, well ahead of building the world of "The Smoke Ring series," Niven published a far-future novel that included many of the cultural building-blocks of that series: AI personalities super-loyal to the State, slave corpsicles, and evolutionary, adaptive changes to the human body and mind.
This novel begins long before the ship arrives at the gas-torus smoke ring. Jaybee Corbell had legally died long ago from the cancer that led him to be cryogenically preserved, but RNA from his frozen cells retained enough of his personal memories to be harvested and implanted in an empty body. The predecessor in Corbell's new corpus had been a brain-wiped criminal.
Corbell is not a citizen. As a "corpsicle," he owes the State his life. He can pay his debt with thirty or forty years of slave labor, and become a citizen in the end. But the only job he's suited for is ramjet driver, and that's a life sentence alone in space. The State has strict plans for his tasks and journey aboard the starship he will command, and they program his loyalty with suitable additional RNA doses.
Unfortunately for the State, Corbell has his own plan, to travel to the galactic core, and he manages to overcome his programmed State loyalty to steal the ramjet on its way out of the Solar System. In a last-ditch effort to bring him back, a minion of the State remote-programs his ship's computer with his own personality, but to no avail. Eventually, Corbell's 200+ years of ship-time bring him back to an Earth nearly 3 million years advanced. Changed. Moved to orbit Jupiter after something made Sol run hotter.
It is not only the planet that has changed. Humanity has split again; once corpsicles and citizens, now it is immortal—but sexless—Boys and Girls, and normally aging and dying—but reproductively active—adults. There is even at least one survivor (via a "zero-time" prison) from the time of Corbell's State.
Then there's the AI ship, 'Perssa,' who might yet, at last, have something to say about Corbell's fate.
Wide-ranging, epic even with its world-building restricted to the Solar System, this novel deserved to be resurrected and included with the SR novels. I'm glad the cryptic Amazon label on an audiobook sent me looking for it.
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