A World out of Time

Who starts their novel with a trip to the center of the universe? That’s how you end a novel! Well, not Niven, he starts out this novel with complex, incredible, hard sci-fi ideas (at least at the time), and then follows it up with a whole another series of imaginative and complex concepts including......more

"If you hadn't taken me so damn seriously, we would've been home two million nine hundred and thirty thousand years ago" Larry Niven's A World Out of Time starts out with a 'corpsicle,' our protagonist Jerome Corbell, trying to figure out his place in a near future now controlled by 'the state.' I de......more

First he flies around a huge black hole and narrowly escapes being sucked into it. Later on in the book, they stick a giant tube into Uranus, turning it into some kind of planet-sized rocket, and use it to rearrange the Solar System's architecture. I know so little about Freudian psychology that I im......more

Too much of Brave New World to start off with and too similar to The Time Machine (with the 'master and slave races' thread) for the rest of the book. It is tough to keep a book together with only one interesting character, especially when it is not the main character, and sticks around for less tha......more

As always Larry Niven is better at coming up with great story ideas than actually writing them. This one starts out feeling like a short-story, and as such it is fantastic. Without giving away too much of the plot, the first part of the story is a grand adventure of galactic proportions. Then the re......more