Man-Kzin Wars XIV by Larry Niven, editor
Cover art by Steve Hickman
Published by Baen Books
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
The Man-Kzin Wars series was one of Jim Baen's first big breakthroughs in innovative publication ideas. Fans had been begging Larry Niven for stories set in that period of his Known Space universe's history, but Niven had demurred on the grounds that he had never served in the military and thus had none of the relevant experience to tell a good war story. Seeing an opportunity, Jim Baen suggested inviting some successful military-sf writers to create stories for an anthology centered around the Man-Kzin Wars. Thus writers with the necessary experience could spin the stories while Niven's copyrights to Known Space as a whole would be protected.
The original Man-Kzin Wars anthology proved such a success that subsequent volumes have followed in rapid succession. The accepted submissions to the original were both so long that several other excellent stories by well-known professionals had to be turned down, so the next several volumes were easy to fill.
The first several were published only in mass-market paperback, but as the series became more successful, a number were first published in hardcover. This is often a mark of significant success for a series. However, with Man-Kzin Wars XIII, Been switched to releasing it in trade paperback rather than hardcover before being printed in mass-market paperback. Was this a sign that the series had fallen out of favor, but couldn't be killed off entirely?
Now this volume comes out at about half the thickness of previous volumes, leaving me wondering even more whether someone really is trying to kill off this series, as opposed to there simply being a lack of adequate stories submitted. I've heard some other things that make me wonder if Baen's parent company has become subject to political interests of the very sort that Jim Baen tried so hard to resist in favor of just telling a doggone good story that people would like well enough to spend their beer money to get the next one.
Without insider information, it's all just speculation. However, I can say most definitely that I find the actual stories in this volume disappointing compared to previous ones. There is only one really long one, whereas many previous volumes have contained two or even three novella-length stories, sometimes approaching a novel in their own right. Worse, several of the short works feel more like vignettes or sketches than actual short stories. Quite honestly, I think several of them could have benefitted from an editor insisting that they be fleshed out into complete stories, because they're just interesting enough that they're frustrating because They End Too Soon.
The first story, "A Man Named Saul" by Hal Colebatch and Jessica Q Fox, is the one and only story of substantial length, a novella at least, if not a short novel. Taking place on Wunderland some time after the human reconquista at the end of the First Man-Kzin War, it starts with an isolated human settlement being approached by a kzin. He comes not as a haughty conqueror, lording it over the humans, but as a humble supplicant, begging medicine for his kzinrett and kits. The mysterious man known as the Judge, who functions as a leader to the settlement, instead teaches him the concept of trade -- and in the process creates a community in which humans and kzinti cooperate in a complementary fashion, each species bringing their special strengths to the partnership.
Meanwhile, a couple of explorers in Wunderland's southern continent discover a wrecked spaceship that doesn't look like a typical Wunderlander or kzinti design. At first they think that it's probably a previously unknown Terran design, since there are so many more of them. Most likely a blockade runner from the last years of the War, one that didn't make it through. But there's something strange enough about it that they decide to go to Vaemar, sole surviving son of Chuut Riit and effective leader of the Wunderkzin, for his insights.
However, his researches attract the attentions of Senator von Hohenheim, a man with a shadowed past. To be sure, he's done his best to put some polish on his reputation in the years since humanity liberated Wunderland from kzin rule, but he knows that all it would take is a few awkward questions and that carefully-erected facade would come crashing down. And the consequences of that would be ruinous, in a world where quislings and collaborators are apt to be lynched if they escape the normal legal processes.
Once the first questions are asked, it becomes impossible to get the subject closed and buried. Senator von Hohenheim tries to play to the lingering bitterness of many human Wunderlanders for the terrible years of kzinti occupation, but it ends up rebounding in his face. And it finally leads to a desperate flight into the hinterland, and a revelation that the Judge from the beginning of the story has his own dark secrets, his own reasons to have sought the isolation of a distant village.
And it turns out the title does not refer to the name of any of the characters. Instead it is a Biblical reference, to a man who started as one of the fiercest persecutors of the Church when it first began, but would become one of its greatest early leaders, writing a large number of the books of the New Testament.
The second story, Matthew Joseph Harrington's "Heritage," is the story of the Yorktown, an ambitious new design of ship built when it became obvious the kzinti wanted a second go at humanity. It was supposed to attack the kzinti homeworld with a fleet of singleships (hence the name, which honors the memory of one of the aircraft carriers of the early part of World War II), but the plans proved overly ambitious. The ship had hardly gotten up to relativistic speed before being detected and attacked by the kzinti.
However, the crew refused to allow this to keep them from fulfilling their mission. To be true, the specifics of it would have to change, since they no longer had the wherewithal to make the particular attack they were supposed to perform. But more broadly, they were sent out to stick it to the kzinti, and they were going to do it. Even when they became stranded on an uncharted planet far out in the great beyond of Known Space.
But when they discover the lost colony, they find something more than they'd bargained for. Just sorting out these people's society takes some rethinking of how social roles are allocated among a community. And then they learn the story of its founding, and its heroes. Quite honestly, this is a story that feels like the beginning of something much larger. I'd love to see more stories of that lost colony and its people. Yet it is one that is satisfactory as it stands, and feels like a complete story.
The next, "The Marmalade Problem" by Hal Colebatch, is very short, yet technically it is a complete story, even if I feel almost like it would work better as a bit scene in a much larger story that explores the wider ramifications of the climactic situation. Marmalade is an orphaned kit who's grown up to be a coward -- which for the kzinti is a shameful thing indeed. There is evidence that he was once taken into Telepath training, but not given enough to make any meaningful use of his telepathy. Efforts to teach him to be brave, to act in a matter suitable for a Hero, have been miserable failures.
Mathew Joseph Harrington's "Leftovers" brings back Buford Early, who was a major character in Jerry Pournelle and S. M Stirling's novellas "The Children's Hour" and "The Asteroid Queen," from the second and third volumes of the Man-Kzin Wars anthology series. In those stories he was manipulating and controlling the protagonists, but in this one he's the one on the receiving end. He wakes up in his autodoc to discover he's now the captive of two Protectors, humans who've eaten Pak Tree of Life. And they're telling him that humans are doing too well in their wars against the kzinti, and thus disrupting some grand plan that involves the Puppeteers and some other alien species.
It's a lot of cat-and-mouse and wheels-within-wheels stuff that seems to be trying to pull together disparate parts of the Known Space universe into a coherent schema. And it has a lot of the problems I have with prequels that try too hard to pull together too many of an author's creations that were developed in that early burst of creativity when there was a vague notion of a common setting for stories, but little or nothing in the way of a systematic approach to consistency. I particularly disliked it in Marion Zimmer Bradley's Rediscovery, written in collaboration with Mercedes Lackey, which just happened to have several characters from later books, or their parents, showing up in a book that logically should belong too early in the fictional world's history for them to be appearing in the later novel.
And then there's Hal Colebatch's "The White Column," which is about precognition and is in many ways a setup for a joke on the characters, since the reader's knowledge makes it possible to know what the characters cannot. I know some people like this sort of a flash fiction piece, but they always leave me feeling uncomfortable.
However, Hal Colebatch has a far more successful story for me in the next one, "Deadly Knowledge." It is a mystery set during the kzinti occupation of Wunderland, and the protagonist is a human who walks a delicate and potentially deadly line serving the kzinti while trying to retain some fragment of independence as a scholar at the University. He and two others were drafted as teachers in Chuut-Riit's determination that the kzinti learn about humanity. And then one of those two men killed the other, and then himself.
Suddenly our protagonist is very much under the attention of the kzinti, being questioned by a Telepath who is trying to understand not just the particulars of the crime (destruction of the property of the Patriarch, since as slaves the humans are not regarded as persons with a right to life that can be transgressed), but the whys and wherefores of human motivations. One wrong step, one unguarded word, and our protagonist could very easily end up on the dinner table, since their masters are obligate carnivores who need a great deal of high-quality protein.
And then the ramscoop raid of "The Children's Hour" strikes, spreading chaos and devastation all throughout occupied Wunderland, but particularly among the areas where the kzinti occupiers are set up. In it, our protagonist ends up saving the life of the Telepath who was their team's political officer, and gains himself a little pocket of breathing room amidst the beginning of the end of the kzinti occupation.
And then begins the reconstruction, the rebuilding of a shattered world and its society in a new form that will somehow integrate at least some of the enormous number of kzinti left behind in the sudden and total collapse of the occupation forces. And finally the motive of the murder is revealed -- yet it almost feels like an afterthought, a bit of happenstance rather than something the protagonist worked to uncover.
The final story, "Lions on the Beach" by Alex Hernandez, is another of the stronger ones. It features Daniel Guthlac of the Sheathclaws Guthlacs, along with a young kzinti kitten determined to prove himself by catching the biggest, meanest game to be had. For that, they must recruit an old kzintosh and his boat, and go out to sea to hunt a creature that resembles some of the beasts that swam the seas of the Age of Dinosaurs.
Except something else is intruding into this fight. Something with a powerful telepathic ability, so powerful it can completely overwhelm and overshadow the mind of human or kzinti. Suddenly they are dealing with a wrecked boat and a very troubling situation -- should they focus on the known danger of the sea, or the unknown danger of the mysterious dominating mind?
It's hard to discuss the problem I have with it without spoiling the ending. However, it bothers me as a reader when the authors of stories in these anthologies want to reuse alien species that were originally presented as unique to a particular planet, and have them popping up conveniently on a completely different planet at a considerable distance. At least for me, it diminishes them to have them being so common, that they might be scattered over dozens of planets.
Overall, this is a slender volume in several senses of the word, which I find problematical in a number of areas. Much as I hope that this is not the end of the line for a series I've enjoyed for years, I do not want to watch it dwindle away to ever more pathetic efforts that no longer do justice to the excellent stories of those first several volumes.
Table of Contents
- "A Man Named Saul" by Hal Colebatch and Jessica Q Fox
- "Heritage" by Matthew Joseph Harrington
- "The Marmalade Problem" by Hal Colebatch
- "Leftovers" by Matthew Joseph Harrington
- "The White Column" by Hal Colebatch
- "Deadly Knowledge: A story of the Man-Kzin Wars" by Hal Colebatch
- "Lions on the Beach" by Alex Hernandez
Review posted June 18, 2019.
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