Wednesday, March 07, 2001
Listened to Niven's Protector Yesterday
Spent much of the day yesterday at home tooling away on PhotoShop working on a mock-up for a new Web site on behalf of my employers. While doing so, I listened enjoyably to MP3s of Larry Niven's Protector. This is a change from my normal fare of listening to biographies and histories -- with the recent exception of the Harry Potter series of novels. I first read this book while a teen in high-school. I remember at the time being somewhat "worried" about the way in which the author tries to posit the origin of man off of the planet. I remember being keenly aware of Creationist doggeral at the time, and thought that this book obliquely tied into it. This time, in listening to it again, I heard it more for the story, and for the pseudo-intellectual romp it is. There's not much in the way of character development here, more a series of ideas and arguments. In a way, I think of the metaphor used in the book of the hyper-intelligent Pak not having much in the way of choices/free will, I kind of think that this book was written in much the same way. A fun read. Nice thing is that I read it so long ago that I only vaguely remembered some of its plot points. Ought to go back and search for more books from Niven's "Known Space" series (man there are a lot of cheesy scf-fi pages out there. The previous link rates high on the cheese-o-meter, but is still better than some of the other ones I ran across before hitting this site).
Spent much of the day yesterday at home tooling away on PhotoShop working on a mock-up for a new Web site on behalf of my employers. While doing so, I listened enjoyably to MP3s of Larry Niven's Protector. This is a change from my normal fare of listening to biographies and histories -- with the recent exception of the Harry Potter series of novels. I first read this book while a teen in high-school. I remember at the time being somewhat "worried" about the way in which the author tries to posit the origin of man off of the planet. I remember being keenly aware of Creationist doggeral at the time, and thought that this book obliquely tied into it. This time, in listening to it again, I heard it more for the story, and for the pseudo-intellectual romp it is. There's not much in the way of character development here, more a series of ideas and arguments. In a way, I think of the metaphor used in the book of the hyper-intelligent Pak not having much in the way of choices/free will, I kind of think that this book was written in much the same way. A fun read. Nice thing is that I read it so long ago that I only vaguely remembered some of its plot points. Ought to go back and search for more books from Niven's "Known Space" series (man there are a lot of cheesy scf-fi pages out there. The previous link rates high on the cheese-o-meter, but is still better than some of the other ones I ran across before hitting this site). # posted by Keith : 8:14 AM
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