The spaceship
Anansi vital mission to earth is hindered by the schemes of a rival
corporation.
As is often
the case with Larry Niven stories this one got some wonderful and amazing scifi
concepts but struggle with the rest.
The setting
is the near future, the beginning of the colonization of space. Everything is
believable and a rational extrapolation of the possible future.
The famous
weak point of Larry Niven stories resurface here. The characters are all really
weak and it’s very hard to care about them. Their relationships are bluntly spelled
out with the same style normally used in a travel guide. At the core of
everything there is possibly the most awkward love triangle ever.
In
practical terms this means that for the first half of the novel is kinda hard
to get into the various events. Too much time is spent on people that we don’t
like but then Niven plotting get into gear.
An incident
of purely Scifi nature happens and the various characters stop acting like they
were living in a remake of “The bold and the beautiful” and start acting to
solve stuff.
This is
Niven at his best. The problem is interesting, the solution even more
interesting and very original. The only problem here is that it’s complicated
and fairly hard to visualize stuff.
Conclusion:
Hard Scifi people will love it but even they will have an hard time with all
the pointless characters.
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