A Gift from Earth
No Place for Bleeding Hearts The world named Mount Lookitthat was never meant for humans—it was shrouded in lethal mists. Life only existed on the one plateau, unreachable except from space. But the disastrous decision to colonize the planet could not be reversed. So the settlers surved somehow under a ruthless dictatorship. Mount Lookitthat was rebellion-proof. Then fate dealt the colonists a wild card named Matthew Keller, who had a talent that neither he nor anybody else knew about. At last the colonists had a glimmer of hope!
Stats for nerds
1recommend
6mentions
6people
2017–2022years
17% recommend83% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Shades of A Gift From Earth there. Good novel.
- Not just a short, Niven wrote numerous books on the subject.
For example, "A Gift From Earth" was about a bloody revolution on a colony planet where the ruling class oppressed the working class via executions through organ harvesting.
- Or Larry Niven's "A Gift From Earth" where the protagonist can make their pupils to contract and thereby cause others to lose interest in them (psi invisibility) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Gift_from_Earth
- Has anyone here read Larry Niven's Gift From Earth?
This is literally the plot (but on another planet).
- The article mentions Larry Niven’s A Gift From Earth, but in fact Bussard Ramjets are tightly integrated into several of the stories in Niven's Known Space [0] sequence. Briefly, humanity sends colonists to several nearby stars in manned Bussard Ramjet ships. Eventually, humans encounter aliens who sell them the secret of an FTL drive, and the ramjet ships become obsolete. Several plot-points in the Known Space stories relate to the quirks of the planets colonised by the Ramjet crews, and in one short story (The Ethics of Madness), a significant part of the plot is a chase across spacetime of two men in separate Ramjet ships
- Where were you planning on getting all these organs, though? There's a shortage now, even though transplantation is an unpleasant last resort; unless xenotransplantation is sorted out or we go full Niven (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Gift_From_Earth), it doesn't seem interesting as a routine procedure, even if rejection isn't an issue.
