Looking over the Larry Niven paperbacks at Wonder Book in Hagerstown, MD I didn't recognize any covers, but something in the back of my mind insisted the book I was looking for had a 'P' in the title, and so I purchased World of Ptaavs and Protector. A few days ago I became determined to figure out what novel featured these lasers and hydrophobic Martians and to read it. When I was a kid I read a Larry Niven novel from which by my forties I only remembered two things-lots of communications lasers and Martians who were killed by spraying them with water-the title was not one of those two things. A neat idea: it feels like the Man-Kzin Wars story that Ernest Hemingway would have written.I've been reading a lot about vampires, black magic, and icky sex lately, so maybe it's time to clamp on the ol' space helmet and blast off for the sterile environment of outer space.

The book closes out with a quick Larry Niven story, 'The Hunting Park,' which was decent. The stories are decent and do some interesting stuff (especially 'Teacher's Pet,' where the Pak Protector exploits a kzinti warrior), but they seem to assume I'm much more interested in the minutiae of Pak Protector continuity than I possibly could be. There are two stories by Matthew Joseph Harrington: 'Teacher's Pet' and 'War and Peace.' These are less standalone than Colebatch's stories, as they both deal with something called a 'Pak Protector,' which I dimly recall from when I read the Ringworld books in high school. Though these stories stood alone, these characters quite clearly had histories worth reading about. I would definitely read more Man-Kzin Wars stories by Colebatch. 'Catspaws' is more a short novel than a short story, taking up 40% of the book according to my Kindle, and I liked it quite a bit. There are a lot of characters across all the Colebatch tales here, and many of them are soldiers- from both sides of the war- trying to cope with peacetime life and new attitudes. Colebatch's next two stories, 'Grossgeister Swamp' and 'Catspaws,' are complicated depictions, not of a society at war, but of a society after war. Show More Colebatch's 'Three At Table,' substantiated that viewpoint: it was mostly about a guy on a hunting expedition dealing with dangerous Space Animals, with some weird sex thrown in.īut after that point, the book improved a lot, and made me think I'd probably read 'Three At Table' unkindly.

Ringworld pak protector