All the Myriad Ways by Larry Niven
Written: Jan 05 '04 (Updated Nov 25 '04)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Much food for thought, highly imaginative, widely varied, humorous
Cons: A touch implausible in places for my personal tastes
The Bottom Line: Read this book for a lively collection of short stories on parallel universes, time travel and other popular chestnuts.
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| snpmurray's Full Review: All the Myriad Ways |
First published in 1971, this collection of 12 short stories and two fragments presents a wide range of refreshing and entertaining stories including a Hugo-award winner, “Inconstant Moon.”
The stories in this book deal with recurring themes, attacked from different angles.
In connection with the title of the collection, one of the main themes of the book is parallel universes.
Headaches and impossible possibilities…yes, it’s parallel universes
One of the more challenging consequences of quantum theory is that parallel universes are more definite possibilities (at least on paper) than most physicists are willing to entertain. Under the theory of parallel universes, every time something changes from one state to another, a change of any kind occurring in the universe, two potential futures are created. These potential futures are equally valid, equally likely, and indeed, if your consciousness is in the timeline of the first potential future, you will be completely unaware of the other, despite a parallel you existing there too. Sound like science fiction? An immeasurable number of science fiction writers use this theme, including Larry Niven, liberally.
In the first short story “All the myriad ways” we witness a world where a machine has been invented which permits travel between different parallel universes. Since the creation of this machine, ostensibly successful people have been committing suicide for no good reason. Detective Gene Trimble must investigate. What would lead to the random violence being performed by seemingly well-balanced people?
This story examines what might be the consequences on our will to live if we had solid evidence of parallel timelines. If there were one hundred billion versions of you, all of whom react in every permutable manner to every conceivable situation, how would your sense of personal value and self-esteem be affected? Do your actions matter any more if somewhere else you did something different?
Let’s accept the possibility of parallel universes...and there are some senior figures in physics who conclude we must, no matter how mind boggling….see Dr Max Tegmark‘s work here:
Max Tegmark's Parallel Universes
www.hep.upenn.edu/~max/multiverse1.html
Having accepted them, what would it be like to travel between them? Would we even know it had occurred? Perhaps you move between them all the time. This is of course highly unlikely, but in “For a Foggy Night” a mathematician and a stranger strike up a conversation in a bar one night whilst waiting for the fog to lift. Unable too see his hotel across the street, the stranger challenges the mathematician to explain his surety that it is still there. A traveler between alternate realities who unlike most, retains his memory of the previous world, the stranger explains the weird feelings the mathematician has had his whole life about the nature of reality.
Clearly, if we ever move between streams of reality, no residue of knowledge of this is left behind. Good thing too. This story examines what it would be like if it were, and we did. Terrifying, pretty much. If I met a guy in a bar who challenged me to explain why I thought I knew my hotel was still across the street I would be delighted. Where do these people drink?
The next main theme of the book, presented as a series of essays, is an attempt to provide rational arguments for impossible things……
“Actually, there is a DAMN good reason why not.” Essays on the impossible or highly improbable
Presented in three essays, Larry Niven here discusses the impossibility of teleportation, time travel and Superman. In each case Niven writes as the rational scientist, the debunker of supposed possibilities, this of course the direct opposite of his day job!
1) Time travel is a load of dingo’s kidneys
Niven examines the many possible permutations of a working theory of time travel and rejects them all. Through this perspective, he points up the inevitable faults on all the common devices of and for time travel used in science fiction. Chief amongst these is always the so-called “Grandfather paradox.” In this argument time travel (at least backwards) must be impossible, because otherwise one would be able to travel back in time, kill one’s own grandfather, and thereby fail to come into existence in the first place. Niven wrestles this argument to the ground, systematically refuting any possible argument that would permit it.
One argument that Niven does not use, but which has always seemed to me fundamental is that the Earth is moving very rapidly through the heavens. I have no doubt that Larry Niven has followed with interest the work of Dr R.L. Mallett, who has recently been building a machine he hopes will function to transport simple elementary particles into the past. I wrote to Dr Mallett and asked him how he had resolved the problem posed by the fact that the Earth’s movement through space would mean that even if his particle moved one microsecond into the past it would emerge only in outer space, not in his lab enclosed in the time travel apparatus. He has not replied to me at the time of this writing. No doubt Dr Mallett is of the opinion he has all the time in the world to solve this problem. Read about what he is doing and thinking here:
The Time Travel work of Dr R.L. Mallett
http://www.usatoday.com/news/science/wonderquest/2001-06-20-time-travel.htm
2) Teleportation: A crime punishable by bafflement
Niven was of course writing in 1971 before the successful achievement of teleportation in 2002 (see this article for discussion and links:
Teleportation: Q A
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2050210.stm
His essay is no less valid because of this, the essay being based here not simply on the likelihood of teleportation becoming achievable, but more on the effects that this would have on society. The teleportation of people has massive consequences for every manner in which one may conceive of its eventual achievement. Consider the rise in criminal activity enabled by teleportation! This was a major theme in Alfred Bester’s book "The Stars My Destination" and Niven uses Bester’s book and others to illustrate the havoc teleportation would bring. Further, the very mechanics that may be involved in teleportation are discussed at length…..if one breaks down the original person before transport, have they not been murdered? If one stores their molecular pattern before reconstitution, why not make yourself a copy in case of accidents, a ready-made organ bank and homologous transfusion source? Is this kidnapping? And why not make an army of copies of yourself, so you can stay home all day while they go to work? Is this slavery? You get the picture.
The author uses a number of diagrams in this essay. When he originally produced the essay it was to be spoken to a group of science fiction addicts at MIT. The diagrams, and parts of the discussion itself are rather technical from a physics point of view, and I found the diagrams actually made things more confusing, not clearer, to myself a layman in this field.
3) Superman and his gametes………..Apropos nothing at all?
If you are fortunate enough to be a nerd who knows plenty of other nerds, you may have already discussed this subject. If you are a nerd alone, you may take solace from this essay discussing the improbability of Superman’s sex life..... proof positive that nerd-dom is alive and kicking in literature of the late twentieth century. Here Larry Niven takes it upon himself to get down to the absolute nitty gritty of this issue. What would be the speed and ferocity of a super-ejaculation? Can super-sperm be stopped? Would the teenage Superboy, firing off a few surreptitious warning shots in the privacy of his bedroom leave Smallville riddled with apparent bullet holes? You get the picture. If this amuses you, you will be amused. If it doesn’t, you probably aren’t quite as nerdy as you thought you were, and indeed, you probably consider this in turn a good thing.
The essays are food for thought, in the realms of the improbable. This is beautiful thinking territory, and one of the few frontiers left for us all to explore without the aid of spacesuits or diving bells. The remaining third of the book is not really categorizable, it is a ……….
A Mish-Mash of Other Thinking……..The Rest of the Stories
The rest of the stories in this book, varying in length from half a page to fifteen pages cover a wide range of topics from science fiction to fantasy. In “Wait it Out” we see a macabre description of what might go on in the consciousness of a person who is cryogenically frozen near death. This question raises the question of what we experience, regardless of what we remember. In “The Jigsaw Man” we view a society where crime has become punishable by harvesting of one’s organs to give the crime-free citizens an immensely prolonged life. The legal consequences of such a society are explored.
The short story “Not long before the end” is a fantasy piece, a simple battle between a sorcerer and a warrior. Since fantasy except where truly exceptional is not really to my tastes, I took very little away from this story. It is not in my view exceptional.
This book also includes the Hugo Award-winning story “Inconstant Moon.” In this story we follow the activities of a couple waiting out what they expect to be the last night of their lives. Seeing the moon grow exceptionally bright, they believe that the sun has gone nova, and with the sunrise will come their deaths. Nice little story, but if the sun goes nova nobody is going to be doing much waiting for the final oblivion, be it day or night.
All in all this collection of stories has a lot to offer…..Larry Niven offers plenty of food for thought, if some of it a little off-color for some tastes, or too plausibility-sparse for others. I suspect Larry Niven makes great conversation; his mind is more fecund than a queen ant.
Some of my other science fiction book reviews:
Rama Revealed
Prelude to Space
Stand on Zanzibar
The Demolished Man
The Stars my Destination
Cat's Cradle
The Gods Themselves
Watchmen
A Canticle for Leibowitz
The Hammer of God
The Left Hand of Darkness
Flowers for Algernon
Lord of Light
Rendevous with Rama
The Tombs of Atuan
The Dispossessed
I am Legend
The Einstein Intersection
Earth Abides
Peace on Earth
The Farthest Shore
Methuselah's Children
A Call to Arms
To your Scattered Bodies Go
The Lion of Comarre / Against the Fall of Night
To Say Nothing of the Dog
The Doomsday Book
Frankenstein Unbound
Batman - The Dark Knight Returns
Imperial Earth
A Case of Conscience
Solaris
The Sands of Mars
The Land of Laughs
Eden
His Masters Voice
Citizen of the Galaxy
King David's Spaceship
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Double Star
The Fabulous Riverboat
Songs of Distant Earth
Way Station
The Fountains of Paradise
The Long Tomorrow
Lincolns Dreams
Alas Babylon
More Than Human
1984
The Forever War
All the Myriad Ways
I Sing the Body Electric
Gateway
Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said
This Immortal
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Recommended:
Yes
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