A Gift from Earth

This is a good minor novel from the 1960s, when Larry Niven was a bright and keen young sf writer, full of ideas, beginning to lay the foundations of his Known Space series. Back then, he was clearly making a conscious effort to Do Characterization, so here we get a variety of characters that differ from each other mentally and physically: well done, sir. As his career developed and he became successful, he apparently got complacent and stopped making the effort, so all his characters began to seem much the same.

Niven normally thinks large, but I call this a minor novel by comparison with his others, because it's entirely confined to a relatively small area of one planet, less than half the size of California (note: Great Britain is about half the size of California). This small and isolated human colony receives a gift of new technology from Earth, which is half-responsible for a local political upheaval. The other half of the responsibility goes to Matt Keller, an innocent young man with a very limited psychic power that can be quite useful in the right circumstances.

I probably first read this book in the early 1970s and I've come back to it from time to time since then. It's not one of my top favourites, but reading it just now I found that it became gripping and exciting. I remembered a vague outline of the story, but I'd forgotten the details of what happened, and I wanted to know! It really makes a pretty good story.

Of course it's a bit dated in some ways, but not too badly, because the changes that happened to our society in the last half-century are mostly irrelevant on that planet—which is not our society, after all. There is of course an absence of personal computers and the Internet, but I don't really miss them—except for one moment when we find someone using a typewriter, in the 24th century, which is a bit jarring.

Young readers who complain that the story is not politically correct in some way should bear in mind that it was written in the 1960s, when things were different: that is, it's probably the fault of the era, rather than the author. I grew up through the 1960s myself, so I have no such complaint about it. What is deemed normal and correct changes in 50 years; in another 50 years, it will change again, though we don't know what it will change into. By the 24th century, who knows what it will become.