Fleet of Worlds

Fleet of Worlds co-authored by Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner is one of those novels which I sat down fully expecting to enjoy.  I found it to be, in a lot of ways, quite disappointing.  While the story was interesting and the characters were for the most part well done, there was just too much else wrong with it, too much that didn’t fit or tried too hard to fit.

Fleet of Worlds is set in Larry Niven’s Known Space universe.  Also in this universe is Ringworld, and it’s sequels, probably his most well known an awarded novel.  This is the universe of the Amalgamated Regional Militia (ARM), Jinxians, Bandersnatchi, Louis Wu, the Man-Kzin wars, Beowulf Schaeffer, Piersen’s Puppeteers, and… I can go on and on.  Anyway the point being, that this is a well established universe.

It takes place mainly in and around the Fleet of Worlds, the Puppeteer homeworld and concerns humans and Pierson’s Puppeteers - an alien race of sentient, technologically superior, perpetual cowards.  There are in fact two groups of humans in this story, the ones living in and around Earth and it’s colonies - referred to as wild humans by the Puppeteers - and the Colonists, a group of humans descended from a failed colony ship living on one of the Puppeteers food worlds.  The Colonists are virtual slaves to the Puppeteers and are kept completely ignorant of their true past and of the rest of humanity living on Earth and it’s colonies.  The Colonists serve the Puppeteers, whom they call Citizens, and are handed only the technology and information that the Citizens feel it is safe to let them have.  A small group of Colonists are being groomed and trained to act as forward scouts for the Fleet of Worlds, and it is in their training and work for this that these humans begin to question the story they have been told about their history and begin to question their previous blind devotion to the Citizens.  Also in this story are two Puppeteers; Nike an overly ambitious being who is striving for political power for both himself and his Experimentalist political party and Nessus a half crazed - due to the fact that he is willing to risk his life in such frightening ways as daring to fly in spacecraft and to meet face to face with humans (I did say they are perpetual cowards as a race) - Scout and agent willing to take whatever risks to win Nike’s love.  Throughout the story of the humans struggle for knowledge and eventually independence we get to see Nike’s schemes and plots which will eventually lead him to become the Hindmost (supreme political leader of the Puppeteers) and Nessus’s complete infatuation and pursuing of Nike, at almost any cost, a lot of which involves working with and manipulating the humans.

I had two main problems with Fleet of Worlds.  First, it just didn’t feel like a Larry Niven novel.  There was something so indefinable and yet so essential missing.  One thing which I can point to is his characters.  They were very interesting, but somehow they just didn’t read like Larry Niven characters.  One of the things I have always enjoyed about his characters is how intuitive they are.  Well, the ones that survive at least.  And a big part of that enjoyment is in seeing these characters connect the dots right in front of my eyes and I still don’t get it.  Yes, you read that right, I like not knowing what is going on.  Well for a moment at least, it creates wonderful suspense to know that all the groundwork has been laid out and that it will all make sense in a moment when the characters explain themselves, but that for the time being I can only guess and speculate.  The main human characters in Fleet of Worlds, Kristen, Omar and Eric are all wonderfully intuitive, but they take the time to explain - right in the middle of the action and the crisis - what it is they have figured out.  It drove me crazy.

My other main complaint about Fleet of Worlds was that it tried to do too much.  There was too much it tried to explain and connect.  And in a lot of ways all those connections and explanations seemed to invalidate a lot of what had come before.  It’s always difficult when an author goes back and fills in the backstory.  But I think there was just too much done here.  In the interest of not summarizing the entire plot (and at the risk of sounding like a complete geek) I will be both brief and general in my descriptions.  The authors connected stories which stood on their own - I felt that the Puppeteer involvement in Forward station, from a Beowulf Schaeffer story, really detracted and distracted from the fun short story that it had been.  It seemed to me that the Gwo’th were a re-imagining of the Jokoti from the Man-Kzin wars - either they are newly emerging as an industrialized race or they are a former galactic power now subjugated, you can’t have it both ways.  The Puppeteer’s meddling with Earth’s Fertility Board was another such example, the Fertility Board scandal being a bit of back story in several short stories.  The authors spent a lot of time establishing that it wouldn’t be easy - and at the same time making it seem so half-assed - it wouldn’t be easy but all that was done was throwing obscene amounts of money at human agents and then occasionally monitoring them.  I was bothered also by the entire treatment of Nessus - a character who shows up in several known space short stories, and who is one of the main characters in Ringworld.   I found the character to be less and less sympathetic and less and less competent the longer the story went on and the more fill-in-the-story work that he was made to do.  The romance - if you could call it that - between Nessus and Nike seemed boring and cumbersome and made me care very little for two previously fascinating characters.

I have enjoyed some of Larry Niven’s previous collaborations - for example The Mote in God’s Eye with Jerry Pournelle was one of the most original stories I have ever read - but they tend to lack the excitement of his solo work.  So when I picked up this novel I was both a teeny tiny bit leery of it as a collaborative work, and quite overly excited to have more Known Space to consume.  After reading this my conclusion is that Mr. Niven should leave his Known Space alone, it’s beautiful as it is and he keeps fucking it up.  I was disappointed by his last installment of the Ringworld stories, Ringworld’s Children, and I was disappointed with and angered by Fleet of Worlds.   There are two more books following this and I must say that even being as much of a completist as I am - I will not touch them.

The story of the Colonists was quite interesting, but not at the expense of all that had come before.