PROTECTOR
by Larry Niven
I wish I’d written this ...
... because it's bursting with HUGE ideas.
It's novels like this that, decades ago, made me fall in love with science fiction. It is, if you like, the "purest" variety of SF, in the sense that it concerns space, space ships, aliens, and more than anything else, big, BIG ideas. All the modern requirements for fiction are absent—character development; effective female protagonists; "relatable" events—and it’s all the better for it. With Niven, the principal protagonist is always science, which continually presents to the human (and alien) characters problems that require ingenious solutions. It's a technical approach that could so easily be dull, yet somehow Niven keeps it thrilling, with the unfolding of a grand concept inspiring a sense of wonder that few other SF authors ever manage to so consistently achieve. I'm not always in the mood for this sort of thing, but when I am, Niven is one of my "go to" authors, and he never lets me down. PROTECTOR is, in my opinion, a more satisfying read than his much acclaimed RINGWORLD. The first half is great. The second half is brilliant.
From the publisher
Phssthpok the Pak had been traveling for most of his thirty-two thousand years. His mission: save, develop, and protect the group of Pak breeders sent out into space some two and a half million years before ...
Brennan was a Belter, the product of a fiercely independent, somewhat anarchic society living in, on, and around an outer asteroid belt. The Belters were rebels, one and all, and Brennan was a smuggler. The Belt worlds had been tracking the Pak ship for days — Brennan figured to meet that ship first ...
He was never seen again — at least not by those alive at the time.
The first page
He sat before an eight-foot circle of clear twing, looking endlessly out on a view that was less than exciting.
Even a decade ago those stars had been a sprinkling of dull red dots in his wake. When he cleared the forward view, they would shine a hellish blue, bright enough to read by. To the side, the biggest had been visibly flattened. But now there were only stars, white points sparsely scattered across a sky that was mostly black. This was a lonely sky. Dust clouds hid the blazing glory of home.
The light in the center of the view was not a star. It was big as a sun, dark at the center, and bright enough to have burned holes in a man's retinae. It was the light of a Bussard ramjet, burning a bare eight miles away. Every few years Phssthpok spent some time watching the drive, just to be sure it was burning evenly. A long time ago he had caught a slow, periodic wavering in time to prevent his ship from becoming a tiny nova. But the blue-white light had not changed at all in the weeks he'd been watching it.
For most of a long, slow lifetime the heavens had been crawling past Phssthpok's porthole. Yet he remembered little of that voyage. The time of waiting had been too devoid of events to interest his memory. It is the way with the protector stage of the Pak species, that his leisure memories are of the past, when he was a child and, later, a breeder, when the world was new and bright and free of responsibilities. Only danger to himself or his children can rouse a protector from his normal dreamy lassitude to a fighting fury unsurpassed among sentient beings.
Phssthpok sat dreaming in his disaster couch.
