ON NIVEN

The first time I met Larry Niven I accused him, in a jocular way, of stealing some of my best ideas and publishing them before I had even had them. For instance, I read PROTECTOR about a year after I’d had the idea about why immortality in an individual would never make sense. There happen to be powerful Darwinistic reasons for people to die and get out of the way and stop breeding. However, Larry had already taken this notion, explored it so thoroughly that, in effect, no one could ever explore that territory again without tipping his hat to Larry. This is actually a fairly rapacious thing to do. If you think that the territory of notions is limited, then the hard sf writer is like a wildcat miner drilling out resources that are shrinking. For whatever it’s worth, some people think that way. A lot of sf writers aren’t writing hard science fiction because they think most of it has been written. If their reasoning is true—and I don’t think it is—one of the reasons is that you have writers like Larry Niven out there mining out whole veins and leaving nothing left for the rest of us to explore.

In hard science fiction originality is especially prized. If you’re the first to explore a certain idea, a new technology—black holes, neutron stars—you get a fair amount of acclaim. But for Niven it’s not enough to be the first. He has to also be last. That is his attitude, and in a sense it is a very aggressive attitude.

So in the end we writers revere Larry Niven, even though he makes our jobs harder. He not only mines all these marvelous veins of ideas, he mines them to exhaustion.

—David Brin