A World Out of Time

AWOoT was the first Niven book I have ever read (at age 15). My family owns a convenience store/newsstand in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and in 1977 my father received a batch of SF books in consignation for the store's book section. He brought home three of them for me, 'The Space Machine' by C. Priest--a very enjoyable pastiche of H.G.Wells' 'The Time Machine' and 'War of the Worlds', another one so bad I do not remember even its title, and 'A World Out of Time'. At the beginning I was skeptic. The blurbs on the back cover sounded kind of 'New Wavish' and even freakish. Being a hardcore-SF fan weaned on A.C.Clarke and I.Asimov, I was militantly anti 'New-Wave' SF (the fashion in Argentinian SF publishing at the time) or 'unscientific'. I did not want to waste my time on another 'character' story or fantasy tale. I wanted at least planetary size action and ideas...Man, I got them in spades and of Galactic size!!! To say it blew me away it is too little to express the impact of this book on me. It was like an intellectual sledge-hammer crashing on my brain. Only J.Varley's 'The Persistence of Vision' collection had a similar effect on me--and only because I was ten years older and wiser at the time. I read and reread the books more times than I remember. It was also humongously popular with my HS friends--but I suspect more due to the then 'titillating' sex scenes than the gigantic space and time range of the plot, action and ideas. After that, Niven entered the Pantheon of 'hunt for' SF authors, so 'Ringworld' and "Tales of Known Space' (plus everything he has written alone or in collaboration) followed, increasing my awe and admiration for his work. But AWOoT is still my most beloved Niven's book.

First, you should know where I'm coming from: I like my science fiction light on science, heavy on characterization and humanity. A tome that goes in depth on the physics of space travel and leaves the characters shallow and unrealized is not my cup of tea.
Now that you know what kind of reader I am: I keep reading A World Out of Time. I picked up a copy in 1983 when I was 13, enjoyed it, read it again a year or two later, and have probably read it seven times altogether. Since I rarely read a book more than once, this must mean something. As I grew up, I found that I got more out of this book each time I read it. I uncovered new layers of meaning, especially about the direction in which Niven shows human civilization going over a long span of time.
But something funny happened the last time I picked up the book: I didn't like it as much. I don't care for his portrayal of female characters. Mostly they're just there as accessories to have sex with -- except for the old, ugly one, who's there to run away from. What happens at the end of the book is an interesting statement on how a woman is judged on appearance alone. Unfortunately, I don't think Niven is trying to make this statement on this: I think he's inadvertently created an example of it.
Also, the main character is something of a cypher. We know he had a full life before the events in the book, and perhaps Niven intentionally leaves his past vague, to emphasize that it's not relevant to his present situation -- but as a result the reader is denied much insight into the character. He becomes a bundle of reflexes -- too generic to seem completely realized.
That said, there's something that keeps me reading this book, and I'll probably read it again when I'm having my midlife crisis sometime. The pace is quick, the plot easy to follow and suspenseful, and the landscape of a future Earth intriguing.
I'd like to see Niven return to this in a sequel. Perhaps he has grown as a writer since the 1970's and he'd do a more judicious job of character development of either sex.

Let me preface this review by saying that I am a very big fan of Larry Niven. The Mote in God's Eye is my favorite book of all time, and I also have fond memories of Lucifer's Hammer, Footfall, and the Legacy of Heorot.
There are several problems with this book. The first is the abundance of shallow content. This book is chock full of interesting ideas, but none are explored to a great extent, and the book is very short besides. JB Corbell's life in a new body could have made a fine novel, as could the rise of The State, the State's War with the colonies, or the New Earth. Any of these topics would have made a fine book on their own, but thrown together hastily in the course of 250 pages, they make for a disjointed and shallow novel.
Secondly is the writing style. Fans of Niven know he is not at all a good writer as far as paragraph structure, etc, but he is usually able to redeem himself with astounding ideas. This book presents no new concepts that I found very intersting, compared to say the Moties or the Grendels of Heorot. The future Earth Larry depicts would be suitable for perhaps 50,000 years in the future, but saying that humans have changed so little physically in 3 million years is just silly. Three million years ago from the present, our ancestors were just learning to use tools and walk upright. Heck, 50,000 years ago they hadnt made it much past that point.
As with many of Larry's books, this one gets bogged down in pages and pages of sex between the characters. A paragraph or two could serve to spice up the novel, but Niven here gets much too carried away with his descriptions, and it becomes tedious to read very quickly.
Finally, this book was edited VERY poorly. There are dozens of internal inconsitencies. For instance, something like "3 Boys joined the group", and then on the next page, "The 4 boys that had joined the group suddenly left", and things like that. I am an obsessively careful reader, and things like that vex me to no end.
This book presents some interesting ideas and is fantastic in its scope, but ultimately comes up short. People new to Niven should steer clear of this book, and pick up Ringworld or The Mote in God's eye, two fine novels that put this one to shame.

I first read the short story this novel is based on when I was 12. I loved it.
When I was 21 I found the novel I felt it couldn't be as good - but it was better.
Whilst Niven's strong point has never been dialogue or characterisation - what he does excellently is keep you interested. One plot twist follows another - whilst all the time adding more and more scientific ideas.
I liked the final plot twist and I only wish I could forget it so I could read it again with genuine surprise. But my absolute favourite part is still the first chapter which is virtually word-for-word of the original short story.
If you're looking for believable characters and witty dialogue - look elsewhere (sorry Larry!). But if you like a plot that keeps you guessing and a future world that's packed full of ideas - and above a story that'll entertain you - then this book is hard to beat.

This book is actually the first book in the "series" for The State.The following two books are Integral Trees and Smoke Ring, which only have to connection to this story (besides have The State as a government).

First three chapters were good (Niven's short story Rammer was the 1st, yet altered a bit to fit the format). This was very interesting as it dealt with space exploration, the State and exploration of earth +3 million years. Those three chapters alone I give 5-stars. Thereafter, storyline changed... it slowed, dragged and barely held my attention. Needed more twists, which is common for Niven novels and it comes now as an expectation. I didn't fancy Ringworld for the same reasons.

For better Niven reading, I suggest his short story collections of Neutron Star and Tales of Known Space. Of his novels, I recommend his novels which were in partnership with Jerry Pournelle- Mote in God's Eye, Footfall, Lucifer's Hammer and Oath of Fealty.

This was the first Niven work I had ever read, and then re-read. Wow. Absolutely breath-taking in its scope, prodigious in its use of hard sci-fi, you virtually feel like the protagonist Jaybee Corbell. Niven's descriptions of the far-future world are astounding, and you genuinely feel for (and root for) Corbell all the way. No previous knowledge of other Niven works is required to fully enjoy this (like Ringworld). If you only ever read one Niven novel, make it this one.

What a great book. This was one of the first sci-fi books I ever read, having borrowed it out of my older brother's bookshelf, and I was blown away. I've read it several times and each time I was amazed at how easily it read and how quickly I buzzed throught it. You won't want to put it down!

at the tender age of twelve i read this to kill an idle summer afternoon. i had never read for recreation, never even cracked a sci-fi novel. this single story slapped me about, showed my fragile little mind of the possibilities that just might exist. i was never quite the same after that. a wilder more imaginative speculative romp would be hard to come by, and i've read quite a bit since then. this, or very possibly protector, i consider to be his best.

Aside from the atrocious Kindle editing, I enjoyed this book very much. Larry Niven is at his best. Big engineering, solar-system-sized construction projects, like Ringworld, travel to the center of the galaxy and coming home three million years later, are all packed into A World out of Time.

Corbell has cancer. In 1970, rather than succumbing to certain death, he allows himself to be frozen in hope that a cure will be discovered in the future, sooner or later, so he can live. Thus starts the journey of a man whose life spans more than three million years on Earth.

When Corbell awakens, he discovers that he is in a different body, that of a convicted criminal, albeit young and healthy. Worse, the government and world he left is gone, and he is a ward of The State, a worldwide "big brother" autocratic government, reminiscent of Orwell, where there are no human rights. His assignment is to pilot a star ship, seeding other planets for humanity, a task that involves several hundred years of travel without a companion.

When he decides to hijack his star ship and set his own course, things get interesting.

While this is a classic Niven hard science fiction read, there are some things that make this book imperfect. For instance, the period before and on the star ship is drastically different from the period when he arrives back on earth. It's almost like two different books. Also, sometimes the motives of the characters just don't make sense. For example, Corbell hijacks a ship and takes it to the center of the galaxy. I could never quite figure out why he actually went there, other than to help out Niven's plot to catapult him three million years into the future - due to physics of a black hole. Cleary, Niven wanted to speculate what it was like to fly around a massive black hole, without getting ripped apart and fried, and live to tell about it. While I am interested in this, I'd rather read about it in a science book. In this novel, that segment was the boring part in the middle I had to get over.

I was reminded of Stephen Baxter's Evolution in the period where Corbell came back and landed on Earth.

Overall, I enjoyed reading this book and would definitely recommend it for hard science fiction buffs.

A man dying of cancer in the 1970s voluntarily submits to freezing his body (cryogenic sleep) in the hope that future advances in medicine will allow him to be revived and cured. He awakes several hundred years later in somebody else's body. The body is that of a condemned criminal whose punishment was to have his mind/personality wiped out and replaced by the memories of one of the cryo-sleepers. The new government doesn't value this new man very highly and wants to use him to pilot a ship that will visit several stars at relativistic velocities to begin terraforming projects. He decides instead to take the ship to the Galactic center and travels near the supermassive black hole at the Galactic core. The combination of the relativistic effects and the travel near the black hole hurl him almost 3 million years into Earth's future. When he returns to our Solar system, he finds that Earth (or a planet similar to Earth) is orbiting a gas giant similar to Jupiter. A survey from orbit shows that there are only a few small pockets of life. This is where the real fun begins as he (and we) learn what happen to planet Earth over the past 3 million years.

This is part mystery, part adventure story, and part hard sci-fi tale about time travel and immortality. It is not part of the Known Space tales, but definitely worth a look nonetheless. Niven combines some ideas well rooted in science (relativistic time dilation) with some speculative notions about black holes, geriatrics, and genetics to create a compelling and readable tale. If I had any complaint about the story, it would be that it was too short. There are several parts in which I thought Niven could have further developed ideas and/or the plot line, but that seemed oddly rushed. I believe that the first chapter of this book was originally a self-contained short story that Niven modified and fleshed out for this novel. In any case, this is a very good, if not uniquely spectacular, hard sci-fi novel, and I would strongly recommend it to anyone with an interest in this genre.