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Destiny's Road by Larry Niven
Niven's
newest saga of Terran colonization fits into his second universe as a sequel to Beowulf's Children and Legacy of Heroit. This time it's about a colony expedition sent by the Terran UN following the presumed failure of Earth's first colony, Camelot, in the TauCeti System. The previous books were written by the writing team of Niven, Barnes and Pournelle, but Destiny's Road is pure Niven. The fleshing out of near space colonization is a theme Niven made his career on, filling the universe with Puppeteers, Protectors and the ever popular Kzin. Like a number of authors whose careers have outlived their early vision though, Niven is now writing in a universe constrained by contemporary technology. Many of the best authors in SF have given up FTL and teleportation along with a universe rife with aliens. Slowboats and aliens too diverse for us to easily understand are now the rule. In Protector, Niven's story of the super-intelligent alien progenitors, he points out that intelligence and freedom are tradeoffs. When you know the results of your actions before you take them, you are forced to accept responsibility for them. Gibson, Niven, even Clarke have rewritten their future history's to acknowledge the maturing of both their characters and the technologies that drive SF.
Jemmy Bloocher is a farmboy in Spiral Town, the eldest son and due to soon take over as head of the house. When he kills a merchant in a bar, he flees his home where the cost of protecting him would be the loss of the merchants trade. The merchants are hated for their intrusion into Spiral Town's culture, but tolerated for the life sustaining spice called "speckles". Destiny's Road starts in Spiral Town at one end of a road carved by the fusion engines of one of the colony's two lander/shuttles as, according to local history, the lander crew deserted the colony. The road is traveled by caravans of merchants bringing speckles, a seed containing a mineral lacking in the local diet and necessary to human survival. To tell too much is to rob the author the chance to unfold the culture and biosystem of Destiny, which he does in the best tradition of SF.
This is a journey saga as Jemmy travels the road to find it's end, and unravel the mystery of the deserting lander, a journey from which no one has ever returned. Along the way he learns about love, surfing, life on the lam and how to cook a pretty fair omelet. He also learns what lies at the end of the road, and It's pretty good Niven. The characters benefit from the author's experience, but it's not the new Ringworld that his new cosmology needs to equal the previous N-Space. There is a larger story being told here, beyond the individual lives and worlds in the series and I'm looking forward to traveling Niven's road to find out where it leads.
Ernest Lilley
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