Resolved

(Slow news day here at the ranch ...)


Well, I settled on A Hole In Space, a collection of ten short stories by Larry Niven, published in 1974. It’s been sitting on my shelf for over two years, so it’s due to be read. It’s classic SF, written by a classic SF writer, and it should be good reading. I need to take a brief vacation from serious, thick stuff – but don’t think that Niven’s stories are light fluff. They’re light-hearted, I suppose, and that’s what I’m looking for right now.



In the spring of 2000, freshly transplanted to the suburbs of Washington DC, after just starting a radically new job, I bought a Niven book, Ringworld. It was probably the first SF book I read in at least six or seven years, and something pulled me toward it. It took a surprisingly long time to read, but it was … epic, in a way, to me. It opened up a whole new world, one that I guarantee you’ve never conceptualized before, and populated it with fresh characters. I was hooked, I was willingly drawn in. I savored it, and really looked forward to the small stretches of time here and there that I could find to drop into it. That whole summer the book was my constant companion: in my car for lunch-time reading, at my night-table for a few pages before bed, out with me on errands as my fiancé dragged me all over the north-eastern seaboard preparing for our wedding, in my luggage when we drove up north to visit our folks.

Though eventually I wound up slightly disappointed by the book – I felt this lush, lavish creation of Niven’s was only superficially explored and delved into, and went off on a couple of tangents of lesser interest. I know he wrote sequels to the book, but this odd discontent I had kinda scared me off from exploring further works of his. Well, seven years passed and I found this anthology in my used book store, and now I decided to commit to it.

Oh, and the Dedication Page is quite striking and unique:


I started writing ten years ago. I wrote for a solid year and collected nothing but rejection slips.

Most beginning writers can’t afford to do that. They take an honest job and write in their spare time, and it takes them five years to make their mistakes, instead of one. Me, I lived off a trust fund.

The trust fund was there because my great-grandfather once made a lot of money in oil. He left behind him a large family of nice people, and we all owe him.

TO EDWARD LAWRENCE DOHENY



How interesting! And how inspirational, in a way. I’m very much excited about beginning this book, later tonight, after all the children are in bed and I have an hour to myself beneath the soft light of the lamp above my favorite reading chair. A review in a week or so, and – who knows? – maybe I’ll go up into the attic, open up some of the boxes I have there and find Ringworld, and bring it down for another reading …