Flight of the Horse
Rainbow Mars
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This book contains a series of short stories about time traveller Hanville Svetz (plus two unrelated stories). Hanville Svetz lives in a future in which almost all animal life (other than humans) has become extinct. Svetz works for the Institute of Temporal Research, and travels back in time to collect animals or objects for the whim of the somewhat childish Secretary-General of the United Nations, whose postion has become a hereditary monarchy.
In the title story, Svetz is required to travel to the past to find a horse, a task in which he succeeds, but with the interesting result that the animal he finds has a horn on its forehead. The other stories have similar fantastic results, suggesting that time travel is a fantasy, and that Svetz is travelling to the world of fantasy without realising it.
Another story has Zeera, a female colleague of Svetz's, given the job of obtaining a duplicate of the first motor car - the Model T Ford - as a gift of the Secretary-General. However, she makes a mistake when using the duplicating device, and removes the car from existence. With the internal combustion engine having never been put into production, the people of Svet's time pass out, so used have they become to breathing polluted air. Svetz and Zeera must come up with a solution to return the timeline to normal.
I found this a fascinating series of stories.
In this sequel to "The Flight of the Horse", time traveller Hanville Svetz and his two female companions Miya Thorsven and Zeera Southworth travel in both time and space, as they travel to the Mars of the past, when intelligent beings still lived there. Their space probe has shown a giant tree - the Hangtree, or Beanstalk - extending from the surface of Mars to orbit, and the team are sent there to get its seeds, to enable Earth to grow a similar tree to use as an orbital tether - a cheap method of transfer to orbit. Hanville and Miyaz become separated from Zeera who is piloting the spacecraft, and undergo a number of difficulties, exploring the tree for seeds, coming into conflict with the various Martian species, difficulty finding food and travelling across country to rejoin Zeera at the spacecraft. There are more adventures when they eventually return to Earth.
Niven has borrowed ideas about Mars from various authors, most notably Edgar Rice Burroughs, and built on the idea of the canals on Mars as observed by early astronomers. He has also incorporated several myths of giant trees, such as the Norse Yggdrasil, as well as giving an explanation for the origin of the "Jack and the Beanstalk" story.
Like "Flight of the Horse", this story is not serious science fiction, but makes use of ideas from fantasy, myth and early science fiction, which adds to the enjoyment of the story.
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Last revised: 06 August 2004.
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