Limits, Larry Niven [the best motivational books .TXT] 📗

Phoenix World Science fiction convention in 1979, I told James Baen that I had run out of anything to say about the Warlock’s Era.

Jim made me a proposal. “We’ll invite some good people to write stories set in the Warlock’s world. You be editor. I’ll do all the work, you take all the credit.”

I don’t think either of us believed it would work out that way, and it didn’t. (I didn’t expect Jim to leave Ace Books!) I also had my doubts as to whether one writer would want to work in another’s universe. But we tried it. I hoped, wistfully, that reading stories set in my own universe might reinspire me.

It did. Dian Girard is an old friend, and writing “Talisman” with her was a delightful experience. I wrote “The Lion in His Attic” on my own, by moving my favorite restaurant and restaurateur 14,000 years into the past. (That’s Mon Grenier, in Reseda, owned and run by Andre Lion.) Both stories have appeared in More Magic, three years overdue.

“The Roentgen Standard” was party conversation among some of the crazier members of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society. Most of what I did that night was listen. When Omni bought the article, I earmarked half the money as a LASFS contribution.

The LASFS turned the money over to the Viking Fund, lest mankind sever communications with Mars.

Beginning around 1970, Harlan Ellison enlisted a team to build a solar system and to write stories within it. The project was to become a book, Harlan’s World: Medea. When the book appears, Harlan will assuredly tell the tale of Medea’s creation in detail; and so I need not.

But my patience is legendary—read: half imaginary—and I don’t write stories to be read only by an editor. “Flare Time” must be ten years old by now. I managed to get Harlan’s reluctant permission to publish “Flare Time” in a British anthology, Andromeda, and, some years later, in Amazing Stories. I took the right to publish it here.

I like bars. Gavagan’s Bar, Jorkens and the Billiards Club, the White Hart, Callahan’s Saloon: I like the ambience, the decor, the funny chemicals. I wanted one for my own.

I wanted a vehicle for dealing with philosophical questions.

I wanted to write vignettes. How else would I find time to write anything but novels?

I found it all in the Draco Tavern. The chirpsithra in particular claim to own the galaxy (though they only use tidally locked worlds of red dwarf stars) and to have been civilized for billions of years. It may be so. If confronted with any easily described, sufficiently universal philosophical question, the chirps may certainly claim to have solved it. Best yet, the Draco Tavern reminds me of those wonderful multispecies gatherings on the old Galaxy covers [Other tales in the Draco Tavern series may be found in my Convergent Series, published by Del Rey Books in 1979.}

On the subject of limits:

We are the creators. A writer accepts what limits he chooses, and no others. Often enough, it’s the limits that make the story.

And we know it. In historical fiction the author may torture probability and even move dates around if it moves his main character into the most interesting event-points; but he would prefer not to, because events form the limits he has chosen. In fantasy he makes the rules, and is bound only by internal consistency. In science fiction he accepts limits set by the universe; and these are the most stringent of all; but only if he so chooses.

One penalty for so choosing is this: the readers may catch him in mistakes. I’ve been caught repeatedly. It’s part of the game, and I’m willing to risk it.

I’ve also been known to give up a law or two for the sake of a story. I’ve broken the lightspeed barrier to move my characters about. I gave up conservation of rotation for a series of tales on teleportation.

You’ll find fantasy here too; but observe how the stories are shaped by the limits I’ve set. Most of my stories have puzzles in them, and puzzles require rules. I seem to be happiest with science fiction, “the literature of the possible,” where an army of scientists is busily defining my rules for me.

What have we here?

Long stories, short stories, very short stories, new and old. Collaborations. Science fiction and fantasy and economic theory.

Have fun.

THE LION IN HIS ATTIC

Before the quake it had been called Castle Minterl; but few outside Minterl remembered that. Small events drown in large ones. Atlantis itself, an entire continent, had drowned in the tectonic event that sank this small peninsula.

For seventy years the seat of government had been at Beesh, and that place was called Castle Minterl. Outsiders called this drowned place Nihilil’s Castle, for its last lord, if they remembered at all. Three and a fraction stories of what had been the south tower still stood above the waves. They bore a third name now: Rordray’s Attic.

The sea was choppy today. Durily squinted against bright sunlight glinting off waves. Nothing of Nihilil’s Castle showed beneath the froth.

The lovely golden-haired woman ceased peering over the side of the boat. She lifted her eyes to watch the south tower come toward them. She murmured into Karskon’s ear, “And that’s all that’s left.”

Thone was out of earshot, busy lowering the sails; but he might glance back. The boy was not likely to have seen a lovelier woman in his life; and as far as Thone was concerned, his passengers were seeing this place for the first time. Karskon turned to look at Durily, and was relieved. She looked interested, eager, even charmed.

But she sounded shaken. “It’s all gone! Tapestries and banquet hall and bedrooms and the big ballroom…the gardens…all down there with the fishes, and not even merpeople to enjoy them…that little knob of rock must have been Crown Hill…Oh, Karskon, I wish you could have seen it.” She shuddered, though her face still wore the mask of eager interest. “Maybe the riding-birds survived.