But after four books where Louis Wu just happens to be kidnapped, tricked, or forced into being the savior, the mantle still doesn’t fit. I understand that culturally top-down speculative fiction like Star Wars exists for solid reasons: the most at stake, ease of worldbuilding, being in the action, etc. The same still cannot be said for the characters: these hyper-rationalist characters still come off flat and uninteresting. It wasn't there! The autodoc's nano machines had rebuilt his skull without a socket for the droud! Plug in the droud, let it trickle electric current down into the pleasure center. Louis's hand crept into the hair at the back of his head, under the queue. Bait for Louis Wu, the current addict, the wirehead. Then he saw his own droud sitting on a table. This mystery is the flipside of his sparse writing. And this fourth book scratches that itch-surprising as the third failed at that. Yet if I put the book down, I too can apply my mind to this logical puzzle of a story and world Niven has created. These jump cuts leave me no time to contemplate: I read, Niven solves the problem, I keep reading. It’s a believable world, for the most part but that doesn’t matter as much as the way Niven presents it. In other words, it’s these logical connections between the world building and the storyline that I appreciate.
And Niven builds on single words in ways that mystery authors would be proud to have done-though mysteries often obscure important facts through wordiness instead of sparseness. With this super-sparse, jump-cutting writing style, every word matters.
It’s an awareness of every little detail, and a building off of it. For instance, the deus ex machina of the floating building in the first book comes back to help define some of the world building in the second and third books, even the sensationalist sex is expanded upon in later books (but not in enough depth to mean that expansion escapes sensationalism). What keeps bringing me back to these Larry Niven books? I think it’s the connections I miss in his sparse writing style that he then spins into future stories.
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