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A citation of Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex, by Larry Niven.

Assume a mating between Superman and a human woman designated LL for convenience.

Either Superman has gone completely schizo and believes himself to be Clark Kent; or he knows what he's doing, but no longer gives a damn. Thirty-one [now 68+] years is a long time. For Superman it has been even longer. He has X-ray vision; he knows just what he's missing. ...

The problem is this. Electroencephalograms taken of men and women during sexual intercourse show that orgasm resembles "a kind of pleasurable epileptic attack." One loses control over one's muscles.

Superman has been known to leave his fingerprints in steel and in hardened concrete, accidentally. What would he to to the woman in his arms during what amounts to an epileptic fit?

...

Superman would literally crush LL's body in his arms, while simultaneously ripping her open from crotch to sternum, gutting her like a trout.

Lastly, he'd blow off the top of her head.

Ejaculation of semen is entirely involuntary in the human male, and in all other forms of terrestrial life. It would be unreasonable to assume otherwise for a kryptonian. But with kryptonian muscles behind it, Kal-El's semen would emerge with the muzzle velocity of a machine gun bullet. (*One can imagine that the Kent home in Smallville was riddled with holes during Superboy's puberty. And why did Lana Lang never notice that?*)

Star Trek? Bussard Ramjets were popularized by Larry Niven.

I'm not aware of a Niven-in-film series/work that needs re-booting.

Hmm, if a project is frozen, one might reboot it?

CC.

That's the "Kzinti Lesson."

http://www.larryniven.org/kzin/worlds.shtml

Early interstellar ramships employed fusion-powered photon drives. The ships were launched by photon sails and the laser cannon batteries on the asteroids. The cannons were fired into the sails, providing the ramships with initial motive power before their huge scoops could pick up enough interstellar hydrogen to begin the fusion process. When the Kzinti ships moved within range of the cannons, the human crews fired and tore the enemy apart.

The Kzinti lesson is, "a reaction drive's efficiency as a weapon is in direct proportion to its efficiency as a drive."

Larry Niven begs to differ, Pedantic Coward:

History and Politics

It is theorised by Known Space scientists that the greatest problem faced by any advancing civilisation is not economics, health, or safety, but heat. Heat is produced by any suffienciently industrialised race in great amounts, and eventually the heat threatens the ecology of the planet, which in turn threatens the lives of everything on the world. Expansion to other systems is not a solution since the heat problems are merely carried from world to world.

The Puppeteers faced this dilemma early in their star-faring history. A Conservative faction ruled at the time, and they were forced to hear insane proposals from the Experimentalists. The Conservatives relinquished control of the seat of government to the other party. The Puppeteer homeworld was moved away from its sun to dissipate the heat, and four farming worlds were terraformed, seeded, and placed in convenient orbits.

The Fleet of Worlds was formed to readjust the heat balance of their homeworld. The only living space the Puppeteers have is their one world. The agricultural worlds weren't living space. If I recall, they were populated solely by machines. (Who would be crazy enough to migrate there? And live there practically alone? A sane Puppeteer needs Puppeteer company. An entire extended herd of it. A population density sufficient to content a sane Puppeteer would turn an agricultural world into another world-wide Puppeteer city.)

That's the thing though, the fact that it was out of everyone else's backyard is what made it reasonably safe. Put it in a far removed location and you minimize the risk of a) it interfering with the current population and b) a future population stumbling across it by accident.

I'm sure that Larry Niven would probably agree with you.

I would love to see a game made of http://www.larryniven.org/stories/Man_of_Steel_Woman_of_Kleenex.shtml/

>When he wrote "Unsafe At Any Speed" people were still getting impaled by their steering wheels which didn't collapse and crumple out of the drivers way.

At first I read that as "Safe At Any Speed", and got really confused.

Well in the olden days many people were named after their occupation. Maybe this guys forefathers were masters of papers?

Larry Niven had an early short story (a precursor of his Known Space series) in which a future society had resurrected this practice. Along with Farmer, there were people with surnames like Accountant. Sadly, there was no one named Temporary Part-time Libraries North-West Inter-library Loan Business Unit Administration Assistant.

Larry Niven,

Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex.
http://www.larryniven.org/stories/Man_of_Steel_Woman_of_Kleenex.shtml

"The Jigsaw Man", 1967.

According to http://www.larryniven.org/biblio/, this was his 22nd published story and the first organ transplant story.

The first Gil Hamilton story was "The Organleggers" in 1969.

According to the lead researcher, 'YouTube is increasingly a resource people consult for health information, including vaccination.

For the hard-of-thinking out there in SlashdotLand (you don't know who you are, and if you could figure out how to use a mirror, you'd still not recognise yourself by that description), that means : the parents and or guardians who are so gullible as to base child-care decisions on TV programme snippets on youTube (edited out of context by people whose sole knowledge of the topic in question is most likely to be the whole programme they've edited), are the caregivers who are most likely to kill their charges through their stupidity. This will have the beneficial (if unintentional) side effect of raising the average intelligence of the population, through culling the bottom end of the population. This is the same effect that makes the average rabbit somewhat faster at running than the average fox.

Some might contend that this is terribly unfair on those who are too poor to afford proper health advice. To such a charge, I respond "So what?"

I have yet to see league-high letters of fire in the dawn light spelling out "the world is a fair place", or any other evidence to support an assertion that the world is a fair, or even nice, place. There were no guarantees given on conception, and the systems that run the world (quantum chromodymamics, gravity) don't necessarily cause the development of fairness. Worse - I find it hard to believe that people can afford the computing power and bandwidth to view a YouTube video, but be unable to afford some sort of access to quality health advice or education. So there is a serious problem of prioritisation of expenditures there too.

[I'm assuming that TFA was written for an American audience who expect 40% of their population to have no healthcare provision, and who expect half of bankruptcies to involve medical bills. Again, this is tough - being born in the uncivilized world, or being born poor, has always been bad for your life expectancy. So being born poor, in America, to stupid parents who value entertainment more highly than the value investing in health information, is likely to be detrimental to your health. "Film" as the saying goes, "at eleven."

(BTW, I'm not saying that it's impossible for there to be significant problems with vaccinations, or other complex medical technologies ; but there are much better places to get information about these things. If you know enough about the internet to know of YouTube, then one would hope that you'd already committed "www.cdc.gov" to memory as a starting place for health-related enquiries. It took 14 characters typing and two clicks to get to some useful information.)

... "On the ground, Engineers drive at breakneck speed on crowded roads without fear of collision, and upon reaching destination, will dismantle their cars so they won't take too much parking space."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mote_in_God's_Eye#Motie_technology

Next thing that it should have an integrated autodoc with the proper spare parts.

CC.

For an all-girls school? Pfft, I can't believe no one has yet mentioned Larry Niven's classic boy meets girl, boy can't impregnate girl story, "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex":

          http://www.larryniven.org/stories/Man_of_Steel_Wom an_of_Kleenex.shtml

How about Del Rey Crater?

Or, another humble suggestion from Larry Niven.

How about Del Rey Crater?

Or, another humble suggestion from Larry Niven.

If it made more "sense" to have the brain in the chest, we would have brains in our chests.

Click Features, then the Exclusives tab at the top (they need to fix the link on the actual page...)

Or just click here

By Larry Niven. Same idea, but with superheroes.

The text of the story was on http://www.larryniven.org/ , but I can't find it now.

I remember reading his analysis about Superman and reproduction. Delving into the possiblity of reproducing with Supergirl (ruled out; Krypotonian incest bad) and killing Lois accidentally during sex (sperm that's more powerful than a locomotive, faster than a speeding bullet, etc...). http://www.larryniven.org/

I might have to go dig that book back up and see if I can warp some minds...

Larry Niven's famous Ringworld civilization (SPOILER ALERT) collapsed when they became infested with rampant superconductor-eating bacteria.

What happens when these bacteria inevitably escape into the "wild"? Powerplants and conduits, whose designers never anticipated that hot styrofoam would rot within a few weeks, could suddenly fail, causing disasters worldwide. Nuclear plants, including nuclear submaries and aircraft carriers, could literally explode once their insulation (both heat and electric charge) disappears. Less sensational, but probably more destructive overall, bacterial infestations of general consumer products would destroy vast amounts of property with styrofoam components. Much of it critical, some of it valuable, but all of it gone, likely in large quantities.

The bacteria engineers would be much more responsible to include a critical factor required by the bacteria for digesting styrofoam, other than just heat. Like a cheap, biodegradable, nontoxic fluid "tagged" with a specific set of functional groups. That "synthetic enzyme" would allow the bacteria to eat the styrofoam when applied. When not applied, the bacteria couldn't eat, couldn't reproduce. We could control the amount of styrofoam consumed by controlling the cheap enzyme, mixing it into landfills and water purification.

>It seems infinitely sad to me that the primary motivation
>for most technological advance in the world is to come up
>with a better means of killing others.

I'm sure I'll burn some karma on this, but I would beg to differ.

There is an interesting premise to Larry Niven's sci fi writing about the Kzin war - the Kzin telepaths reported to their masters that the humans had no military weaponry, and were sure to be an easy conquest. Yet when they first attacked, humanity threw them back in short order, because the civilian technology we DID have was so powerful it cut thru their military systems like butter.
http://www.larryniven.org/kzin/empire.htm
Hmmm.

I see things a little differently, however. I work for the US military as a civilian, directly involved in the procurement of weapons of war. Anyone in our organization will immediately tell you that the goal is not to wage war, but to avoid it. Ronald Reagan knew this when he emphasized his "peace thru superior firepower" mantra. If we allow ourselves to become weaker than our foes, we will find war waged upon us, simply because it's possible. Granted, the only way to stay ahead is to work hard at it, and stay atop the technological king-of-the-hill game. To many (and apparently to this person) it looks as if we want the weapons so we can use them - but I assure you that the vast majority of soldiers, airmen and marines in this country want nothing to do with going to war. I have great respect for the armed services in America, because they are willing to put themselves in death's way to free others. But nobody that I've ever talked with had any interest in conquering another county for the sake of expanding our territory, or taking something that was not already ours.

In the end, I find it fortunate that our military research ends up providing such dramatic benefits for the civilian world.

Looks like someone over there has been reading Larry Niven and Steven Barnes' book: Saturn's Race! Hopefully they got to the end and realized it didn't end well...

I would also expect a comprehensive library featuring an ABC of the genre. Asimov, Bester, Clarke!

The concept of illicitly harvesting and selling organs for profit -- called 'organlegging' -- was put forth in Larry Niven's 'Gil the ARM' stories (a collection of which was published in 1976). This was long before Mr. Cook published any of his popular novels.
Reference: http://www.larryniven.org/nivenisms_in_the_news.ht m

Anarchy is an unsustainable state. Nature abhors a vacume. This is nicely detailed in Larry Niven's Cloak of Anarchy http://www.larryniven.org/stories/cloak_of_anarchy .htm

Not sure where you're quoting from, but Larry Niven does the same idea much better here.

do we start stringing the nanotubes between these Earth-trailing orbit satelites and begin the Ring World construction?

http://www.larryniven.org/reviews/58.htm

First attempt failed at: General Products Corporation

Second attempt SCORE: Pierson's Puppeteer Technology

Mallrats was just rehashing Larry Niven's Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex.

The developer also expressed disappointment over the lack of community participation in developing the software, despite its open-source license.

I have to disagree. I'm a CISA (certified information security auditor) and have used Nessus in audits. About a year ago, I provided feedback regarding Nessus's tendency to damage production services, even in safe mode. These occurances were not Nessus's fault, but rather the consequence of very poor coding in various network devices. Often Nessus would cause old HP printers (HP Laserjet III was notoriously vulnerable), cheap network fax appliances, and in a couple of cases, Sonicwall firewalls to completely lose their configurations and reset to defaults. 10+ year old printers have a bit of an excuse in my book, but Sonicwall, which advertises as a security product, had no legitimate justification for this behavior. We were able to confirm this from outside Nessus scans as well.

I began reporting this behavior to the Nessus group and suggested a database of vulnerable devices to prevent analysts from getting in repeated hot water. The Tenable folks were not responsive at all and indicated their fear of civil liability due to potential disparagement of network equipment vendors products. Although I referenced numerous other sites, as well as the alternate "compatible device" approach which countless operating systems take, the idea was ignored. I did receive numerous emails from other analysts who had the same concerns.

Teneble has done a good job pushing away its user base and unfortunately moves into a hypercompetitive world of better proprietary tools. I wonder if there's an impatient VC pulling their strings.

I'll definitely support any open source effort that continues with the GPL code. How about calling it Hindmost (for all the Ringworld fanatics out there).

*scoove*

Robert Lull Forward and some of Larry Niven's stuff.

I somehow managed during my childhood to see one episode. It just happned to be the one that was written by Larry Niven and based on his story, "The Soft Weapon". Pretty cool actually, and probably the only time a Kzin was on TV.

Strangely, I also had a set of ViewMaster discs that showed the episode about Spock's youth (albeit in slide form). I have no idea how I got that one.

Time to start working on that superconductor plague

If that's how we end our time on Earth, then emmigration to space is a good way of protecting the species. But:

A disaster or climate change that destroys 99% of the population still leaves 70,000,000 people. Even with a disaster that wipes out Damned Near Everything, like an asteroid, the human species will survive: If you can dig a hole big enough for a thousand peole, a library and a hydroponics farm, humanity can survive anything short of the elimination of oxygen from the atmosphere---and we could probably survive that, too if we spring for the good duct tape.

But there's something space colonization might not protect us from: a highly contagious, high-mortality disease with a long incubation period. It's entirely possible that just about everybody is now carrying a disease that incubates for fifteen years, then goes Ebola on your ass. If one person on a colonization ship is carrying the disease, everybody on the ship dies.

Even in the case of a catastrophic disease, humanity will almost certainly survive on Earth. There is simply too large a gene pool for our species for all of us to be vulnerable.

The only things I can think of that would destroy humanity are:

• God throws a big enough rock at us that we can't deflect it in time.
• God turns the Sun up from simmer to broil.
• The universe ends.

This is the text of a Larry Niven story. Read it (mebbe a 15-45 minute very quick read) and all about "Blank Sign Man" (I think he's called that). Basically, ****SPOILER****

****they're inside an anarchy park (no rules at all) and a dude walks around wearing a blank sign in a significant side story. *****END SPOILER

Very cool story and it reminded me immediately of a psychiatry experiment on free association.

Kzin are fast, powerful, honorable, intelligent... and a little paranoid. Not a bad match for an Apple fanboy...

Human activities masked another Ice Age. Kind of like the novel, Fallen Angels by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Michael Flynn.

Haven't you read Larry Niven's "Ringworld" and related works? The http://www.larryniven.org/images/rc/ss65.jpgautodo c is a device that would be conceivabley fit in a large ambulance, and as long as you can crawl inside, or someone place you there, it can automatically diagnois and treat any injury or sickness. Exotic alien species? No problem. Multiple organ transplants and limb amputations? It's got plenty of spare parts available!

But I'm unsure who to blame; the director, or Le Guin? Because it sure did feel a lot like her books, which bore me to tears. I know there are a lot of Le Guin fans out there; to each their own.

Now, when is someone going to make a movie from a Stephenson book? Or Niven? C'mon, finding great SF to make movies from is easy, and getting easier. I submit that CGI recently got to the point where you could make a really good Kzin movie.

Crispin

As people got older, their physical appearance didn't change, but they became sharper-witted and had better hand-eye coordination.
And probably better lovers, too, knowing Niven...

A la Larry Niven, that second black hole at the center of the galaxy is just a sequel.

If it is, I wonder if it would have any use in creating an ultralight spaceship?

Ah, you mean a hull made from one single molecule which is transparent? linky

What really needs to be turned into a film is Cloak Of Anarchy.

Anyone looked at N-Space? There's a great story in there by Niven about how to blow up the whole storyline!

That would be Down in Flames.

Tm

I'd like to place my order for a Number 3 hull, please...

One of the errors I often see is people confusing "anarchy" with "chaos". They two do not equate. There is no assumption of disorder or destruction with anarchy, unlike chaos. Anarchy is simply the individual choosing rather than having those choices made for them.

In the real world, there's little difference. Sooner or later, someone will make a choice that relieves you of a choice-- robbery, rape, murder, etc.

Larry Niven wrote an excellent short story on this, called Cloak of Anarchy (http://www.larryniven.org/stories/cloak_of_anarch y.htm).

One could argue what point Mr. Niven was trying to make, but when I read it, I was well into being an anarchist, and that story started me on the road out.

In one of the early paperback printings of the Known Space books, the inside front and back covers had wonderfully detailed illustrations by Bonnie Dalzell, including skeletons of Known Space aliens, including Kzinti and Puppeteers. The Kzinti skeleton is particularly interesting. . .

http://www.larryniven.org/images/ringworldart/dang erous_creatures.htm

"You never met my kzin, Kchula-Rrit? I keep it as a pet."

Louis' tequila tried to go down the wrong way. [...]

The nearest kzin stood up.

Rich orange fur, with black markings over the eyes, covered what might have been a very fat tabby cat eight feet tall. The fat was muscle, smooth and powerful and oddly arranged over an equally odd skeleton. On hands like black leather gloves, sharpened and polished claws slid out of their sheaths.

A quarter of a ton of sentient carnivore stooped over the puppeteer and said, "Tell me now, why do you think that you can insult the Patriarch of Kzin and live?"

The puppeteer answered immediately, and without a tremor in its voice. "It was I who, on a world which circles Beta Lyrae, kicked a kzin called Chuft-Captain in the belly with my hind hoof, breaking three struts of his endoskeletal structure. I have need of a kzin of courage."

In an animated Star Trek episode. It's years since I saw that epsiode but I vaguely remember it being quite good and I think Niven was involved with writing the script.