World of Ptavvs

© 1966 by Larry Niven


Okay! Don’t beat me up!

I bought Larry Niven’s first novel, The World of Ptavvs, this time last year and finally got to open it last week.

I didn’t like it.

Now, I’m a moderate fan of Mr. Niven’s. I am, really. Read Ringworld ’round the turn of the century and loved it, read a whole bunch of his short stories three years ago and loved most of ’em. Have his second novel, A Gift from Earth, and his award-winner, The Mote in God’s Eye on the shelf behind me and plan to read them at some point.

But Ptavvs just kicked my butt. It was a gargantuan effort of will to finish it.

Why?

The story set-up’s good. Frozen, two-billion-year-old space alien found at the bottom of the ocean, thawed out and introduced to a human telepath. Turns out alien has superior mind-control powers and is used to dominating whole societies and planetary systems. Soon the race is on between this creature, the human telepath who thinks he’s the creature he mind-melded with, and a scattering of humans to get to Neptune to find the alien’s “amplifier” which will for all intents and purposes destroy mankind’s free will forever.

Normally I enjoy this kinda thing. But for some reason I couldn’t settle into it. The human characters seemed a bit uni-dimensional. Then I had a hard time differentiating the alien, “Kzanol,” from the human telepath who thought he was the alien, “Kzanol / Greenberg,” a vagueness I think Niven intentionally cultivates. The alien jargon – thrints, tnuctips, ptavvs, kpitlithtulm oaths, whitefoods (aka bandersnatchi) – didn’t quite assimilate as easy as other jargon from other stories had. Nor did the geopolitics of the 22nd century (or should I say exo-geo-politics, as the solar system has been populated, and there is historical friction between Earth and the Asteroid Belt).

Now, I understand Niven expands and expounds upon these terms and relationships and whatnot in subsequent novels. But as a stand-alone, I found World of Ptavvs a little unfocused and forced. It’s one of those rare books I felt should have been longer, more fleshed out, at least double its too-compact size. More character development, more exposition, more history.

Or it could just be the circumstances of my life at this point in time. Had I read it thirty years ago, it may have been a shining nova of my adolescence. Who knows?

So, regretfully, I give World of Ptavvs a C. There are good ideas in the book (I liked the under-developed – at least in this novel – plot point of intelligent dolphins trying to come up with ways to muscle mankind for a ride into space). And I’ll still get to those other two Niven novels on the shelf behind me, eventually.