Peerssa, the rather nasty bureaucrat who manages Corbell during his training, has a copy of his mind beamed out to Corbell's hijacked starship in an attempt to salvage the terraforming mission. The thing is
the brain scanning process is explicitly said to be destructive: once it's done, you're left with a brain smoothy. For there to be a ship-Peerssa, the meat-Peerssa has to have died. I don't meat-Peerssa's death is even actually mentioned during the book but it's implied by the technology.
Do you think Peersa volunteered or was this his punishment for losing a starship?
- A very, very belated realization about A World Out of Time
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james_nicoll- November 17th, 2009
Re: spin a good yarn
2009-11-17 10:06 pm (UTC)
Niven wrote some good yarns once-upon-a-time, and we need not be ashamed that we enjoyed or enjoy those stories. They were good stories, and reading them as products of their time, they are still good stories. So, Niven's ratio of good to bad stories isn't some arbitrary number; nobody's perfect and if they ever are it doesn't last.