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Three Trips in Time and Space
Three original novellas about teleportation, all of which were written for this volume, which is part of Dell's Laurel-Leaf Library that was targeted at high school students and libraries.
Flash Crowd by Larry Niven
You'll Take the High Road by John Brunner
Rumfuddle by Jack Vance
Silverberg writes a 2-page forward.
The series editors were Professor M. Jerry Weiss of Jersey City State College and Professor Charles F. Reasoner of NYU.
Flash Crowd by Larry Niven
You'll Take the High Road by John Brunner
Rumfuddle by Jack Vance
Silverberg writes a 2-page forward.
The series editors were Professor M. Jerry Weiss of Jersey City State College and Professor Charles F. Reasoner of NYU.
234 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1973
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About the author
Larry Niven
685 books3,271 followersLaurence van Cott Niven's best known work is Ringworld (Ringworld, #1) (1970), which received the Hugo, Locus, Ditmar, and Nebula awards. His work is primarily hard science fiction, using big science concepts and theoretical physics. The creation of thoroughly worked-out alien species, which are very different from humans both physically and mentally, is recognized as one of Niven's main strengths.
Niven also often includes elements of detective fiction and adventure stories. His fantasy includes The Magic Goes Away series, which utilizes an exhaustible resource, called Mana, to make the magic a non-renewable resource.
Niven created an alien species, the Kzin, which were featured in a series of twelve collection books, the Man-Kzin Wars. He co-authored a number of novels with Jerry Pournelle. In fact, much of his writing since the 1970s has been in collaboration, particularly with Pournelle, Steven Barnes, Brenda Cooper, or Edward M. Lerner.
He briefly attended the California Institute of Technology and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics (with a minor in psychology) from Washburn University, Topeka, Kansas, in 1962. He did a year of graduate work in mathematics at the University of California at Los Angeles. He has since lived in Los Angeles suburbs, including Chatsworth and Tarzana, as a full-time writer. He married Marilyn Joyce "Fuzzy Pink" Wisowaty, herself a well-known science fiction and Regency literature fan, on September 6, 1969.
Niven won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story for Neutron Star in 1967. In 1972, for Inconstant Moon, and in 1975 for The Hole Man. In 1976, he won the Hugo Award for Best Novelette for The Borderland of Sol.
Niven has written scripts for various science fiction television shows, including the original Land of the Lost series and Star Trek: The Animated Series, for which he adapted his early Kzin story The Soft Weapon. He adapted his story Inconstant Moon for an episode of the television series The Outer Limits in 1996.
He has also written for the DC Comics character Green Lantern including in his stories hard science fiction concepts such as universal entropy and the redshift effect, which are unusual in comic books.
http://us.macmillan.com/author/larryn...
Niven also often includes elements of detective fiction and adventure stories. His fantasy includes The Magic Goes Away series, which utilizes an exhaustible resource, called Mana, to make the magic a non-renewable resource.
Niven created an alien species, the Kzin, which were featured in a series of twelve collection books, the Man-Kzin Wars. He co-authored a number of novels with Jerry Pournelle. In fact, much of his writing since the 1970s has been in collaboration, particularly with Pournelle, Steven Barnes, Brenda Cooper, or Edward M. Lerner.
He briefly attended the California Institute of Technology and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics (with a minor in psychology) from Washburn University, Topeka, Kansas, in 1962. He did a year of graduate work in mathematics at the University of California at Los Angeles. He has since lived in Los Angeles suburbs, including Chatsworth and Tarzana, as a full-time writer. He married Marilyn Joyce "Fuzzy Pink" Wisowaty, herself a well-known science fiction and Regency literature fan, on September 6, 1969.
Niven won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story for Neutron Star in 1967. In 1972, for Inconstant Moon, and in 1975 for The Hole Man. In 1976, he won the Hugo Award for Best Novelette for The Borderland of Sol.
Niven has written scripts for various science fiction television shows, including the original Land of the Lost series and Star Trek: The Animated Series, for which he adapted his early Kzin story The Soft Weapon. He adapted his story Inconstant Moon for an episode of the television series The Outer Limits in 1996.
He has also written for the DC Comics character Green Lantern including in his stories hard science fiction concepts such as universal entropy and the redshift effect, which are unusual in comic books.
http://us.macmillan.com/author/larryn...
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
July 28, 2020
This is a nice anthology of three novellas, each by one of the three leading science fiction writers of the time (the early 1970s), inspired by a foreword by Robert Silverberg. Jack Vance's Rumfuddle is the most ambitious and literary of the three, but takes more license with the concept. Larry Niven's Flash Crowd is the best science fiction, with speculation on the societal effect of teleportation. John Brunner's You'll Take the High Road is an amusing take on the same teleportation idea Niven used, but his focus is silly adventure and social satire. They're all fun; Flash Crowd was my favorite.
July 22, 2021
• Anticipating ‘flash mobs’ by about 40 years, Larry Niven gives us a future of teleportation booths where people are only ever three jumps from anywhere on Earth. When a confrontation between a police officer and a female shoplifter is filmed by Jerryberry, a newstaper, it triggers a riot from the incoming “Flash Crowd”. • Joel Crane gets tied into a trip by transmatter to an impoverished England at an exorbitant price, and which he cannot get out of. His troubles get compounded by dodgy bookings, mixed-up destinations and open return tickets. John Brunner has written a tongue-in-cheek satire of bureaucracy gone mad in “You’ll Take The High Road” and an England rife with food protests and daily riots. • After the invention of the passway, a matter transmitter that can give each human access to entire parallel worlds and times, humanity scatters into isolation, but when Duray finds all his passway doors closed and his wife and daughters missing he starts searching for them. His mischievous uncle Bob has been holding a “Rumfuddle” each year where various amusements are outlined and only after intervention by the legendary Alan Robertson does the reason for these events become plain. Jack Vance has given us an outrageously. bold conceit and then plotted a fabulous reveal at the end. Best of the three tales for mine.
June 1, 2019
One of many Robert Silverberg-edited three-story collections, this one features a story prompt given to each author. Basically, what are the consequences of instantaneous travel? Niven and Brunner took it to be some kind of teleportation. Vance took it to be travel across time and timelines.
Larry Niven theorized flash mobs and called them “flash crowds”, while describing their behavior as “mobbing”.
John Brunner theorized that the same problems we had then dealing with air travel and border crossings for vacations would be amplified by instantaneous travel. All the officiousness and bureaucratic bumbling in a tiny fraction of the time!
Vance theorized (I don’t think there’s any doubt) that with instantaneous travel to an infinite worlds, every man’s castle would be in every man’s empty kingdom. And that the malicious would find all new and more malicious ways to mess with the world.
Niven and Vance’s stories were problem-solving stories; the main characters had a problem with the instant transport mechanism they needed solving for everyone, really. Brunner’s was a satire of travel problems in general, using instant travel to exaggerate them for humor. They are all very nice stories.
Larry Niven theorized flash mobs and called them “flash crowds”, while describing their behavior as “mobbing”.
John Brunner theorized that the same problems we had then dealing with air travel and border crossings for vacations would be amplified by instantaneous travel. All the officiousness and bureaucratic bumbling in a tiny fraction of the time!
Vance theorized (I don’t think there’s any doubt) that with instantaneous travel to an infinite worlds, every man’s castle would be in every man’s empty kingdom. And that the malicious would find all new and more malicious ways to mess with the world.
Niven and Vance’s stories were problem-solving stories; the main characters had a problem with the instant transport mechanism they needed solving for everyone, really. Brunner’s was a satire of travel problems in general, using instant travel to exaggerate them for humor. They are all very nice stories.
June 26, 2022
Nifty collection of short stories. I was actually less taken with Niven's which is what I bought it for, but it was alright. The middle story was... so-so. Competently written but ultimately dull. But Vance's 'Rumfuddle' was excellent. As a philosopher of time travel, I thought it was rich with great ideas.
September 13, 2012
This is a book of 3 novellas that are vaguely related in terms of the subject matter being travel by magic conveyance. When I say magic, I mean Clarke's 3rd law magic, not Harry Potter's wand magic.
The first is the reason I bought the book - Flash Crowd. I read all things Niven, and the fact that once I started it, and realized I had already read it in a different collection, did not keep me from enjoying it again. Niven makes it seem easy, drawing only what he wants you to see, and letting you fill in the rest. I often (I am thinking of Ringworld books, as well as this novella) do not agree with the conclusions his characters reach, but the journey is still a good time.
In this one, a reporter is walking his beat - which involves zooming around town in booths that sound very much like his more commonly known stepping discs - when he encounters a minor disturbance that turns very major because of the fast travel booths. On its own, this is a 5 star story for me.
The second novella is John Brunner's You'll Take the High Road.
This is the story of a bit of a whiner who get forced into a bad vacation, through a series of events, all his fault, that he wants to blame on other people. Once the bad times are rolling, most of the bad things that happen are someone else's fault, but still, if he just wasn't such a whiner, he would never have ended up there.
I couldn't get into this, I give it 3 stars.
The last one was Jack Vance's Rumfuddle. I was mixed on this one. It is written a bit like...
Have you ever seen the movie Memento? You are thrust into the middle of a story, thinking you are at the start, and by the end, you are a little interested, a little satisfied, and mostly just glad its over.
It is well written, the story flows nicely, but I felt like the chunks of enlightenment came a little slow for my taste. I had to look up who Elizabeth and Gil were at the end, I cant recall having heard of their original names, though once I did, they did ring a bell, they still were not names I would know off the top of my head, but the stories behind them will always sound vaguely familiar. Still, the curiosity to see where the hell this was going, kept me flipping pages.
I had a technical problem with the foundation for this story, namely that Alan couldn't make another doorway into HOME. In the story he posits that he can get to an analogous world, but it would be infinitely unlikely to be the same one. If that is the case, it occurs to me, the same would be true of 3 of the 4 total entrances they had to HOME. So if you think about it, Gil had probably spent most of his trips back and forth already interchanging with "OTHER" Elizabeths, and their daughters.
Anyway, I liked it overall 4 stars here, for an overall average of 4 for the whole book.
The first is the reason I bought the book - Flash Crowd. I read all things Niven, and the fact that once I started it, and realized I had already read it in a different collection, did not keep me from enjoying it again. Niven makes it seem easy, drawing only what he wants you to see, and letting you fill in the rest. I often (I am thinking of Ringworld books, as well as this novella) do not agree with the conclusions his characters reach, but the journey is still a good time.
In this one, a reporter is walking his beat - which involves zooming around town in booths that sound very much like his more commonly known stepping discs - when he encounters a minor disturbance that turns very major because of the fast travel booths. On its own, this is a 5 star story for me.
The second novella is John Brunner's You'll Take the High Road.
This is the story of a bit of a whiner who get forced into a bad vacation, through a series of events, all his fault, that he wants to blame on other people. Once the bad times are rolling, most of the bad things that happen are someone else's fault, but still, if he just wasn't such a whiner, he would never have ended up there.
I couldn't get into this, I give it 3 stars.
The last one was Jack Vance's Rumfuddle. I was mixed on this one. It is written a bit like...
Have you ever seen the movie Memento? You are thrust into the middle of a story, thinking you are at the start, and by the end, you are a little interested, a little satisfied, and mostly just glad its over.
It is well written, the story flows nicely, but I felt like the chunks of enlightenment came a little slow for my taste. I had to look up who Elizabeth and Gil were at the end, I cant recall having heard of their original names, though once I did, they did ring a bell, they still were not names I would know off the top of my head, but the stories behind them will always sound vaguely familiar. Still, the curiosity to see where the hell this was going, kept me flipping pages.
I had a technical problem with the foundation for this story, namely that Alan couldn't make another doorway into HOME. In the story he posits that he can get to an analogous world, but it would be infinitely unlikely to be the same one. If that is the case, it occurs to me, the same would be true of 3 of the 4 total entrances they had to HOME. So if you think about it, Gil had probably spent most of his trips back and forth already interchanging with "OTHER" Elizabeths, and their daughters.
Anyway, I liked it overall 4 stars here, for an overall average of 4 for the whole book.
January 20, 2020
Unfortunately reading this book is like traveling in time to when science fiction was dominated by writers with a one-dimensional view of reality and everyone in it. ‘Outdated’ is a kind way of putting it, but really these stories were written at a time (early 70s) when the writers should have known better. Just enough bright flashes of insight into the future to keep it from falling into the one-star black hole, but it’s still trapped orbiting a dead kind of literature.
November 12, 2019
Not counting the Brunner story which I skipped due to an irritating character and uninteresting direction, the book is worth a read. The Niven is enjoyable for his development of the idea of instantaneous travel, and the Vance story is tricky but builds to a delightful end.
August 6, 2014
“Three Trips in Time and Space” is three novellas of wildly disparate quality by three different sci-fi stalwarts, commissioned on the idea of instantaneous, economical travel.
Robert Silverberg commissions the three novellas, stories, from three different authors. He sends them the book’s foreword.
(Them are: Larry Niven with ‘Flash Crowd, John Brunner with ‘You’ll Take the High Road’ and Jack Vance with ‘Rumfuddle.’)
The Premise and the Challenge:
The jist of Silverberg’s foreword, his challenge to the authors is instantaneous, economical travel. His words:
There one has it. Instantaneous, economical travel.
The Quick Run Down
1. The first novella, ‘Flash Crowd’ by Larry Niven sets a very good tone. While it lacks in a denouement, it certainly hustles the plot along for most of the story. From a technology standpoint, both it and Brunner’s novella share a conceit of a form of teleportation.
2. The second novella, ‘You’ll Take the High Road’ by John Brunner neither hustles along nor is standable, most notable with its whiney narrator/main character.
3. The third novella, and the strongest by far, is ‘Rumfuddle’ by Jack Vance. Although it’s confusing for the first few pages, it quickly hits its stride and the strong-headed narrator is evened out by a strong plot, strong pacing, a great twist and a great technological concept that propels it far beyond the environs and implications of its two brother novellas.
’Flash Crowd’ by Larry Niven
Although it has a character after my own heart doing the thing my own heart craves (news reporting!) Flash Crowd fails to deliver after its middle.
It’s a world of teleportation, but a recent world of teleportation, and a “newstaper” (a television reporter) inadvertently causes a flash crowd. I’m not giving anything away here; it’s the name of the story.
Once he’s blamed for an especially bad flash crowd (once a crowd starts throwing bricks in an effort to loot, it’s a riot, although no one knows against what), he must go be a reporter and find out what the root causes of the crowd are, of the riot are, to clear his own name.
Fair enough and it would have worked better as a short story, not blown up into a full novella at 85 pages.
’You’ll Take the High Road’ by John Brunner
Once again, teleportation, but with lots of added robots. And class issues, sort of. And travel issues. And law run amuck. And an annoying narrator who can’t stop whining, or say no.
There. You have it. Not worth a long short story, much less a novella.
'Rumfuddle' by Jack Vance
Despite a confusing beginning (read the first 20 pages in one sitting, as I did not) ‘Rumfuddle’ brings the goods home.
Plot twists! Confusion! Angry, somewhat annoying narrator (in his intransigence.)
Cognates! People have cognates. Alternative, nay, infinite worlds, and the problems this can create.
Although more issues could have been dealt with (messing with the timeline, yo), it’s a delicious novella none-the-less, delivering some great fat to chew long past the time it’s been read.
I’m not going to go on and on because, likely, you haven’t read it yet. Read it.
Robert Silverberg commissions the three novellas, stories, from three different authors. He sends them the book’s foreword.
(Them are: Larry Niven with ‘Flash Crowd, John Brunner with ‘You’ll Take the High Road’ and Jack Vance with ‘Rumfuddle.’)
The Premise and the Challenge:
The jist of Silverberg’s foreword, his challenge to the authors is instantaneous, economical travel. His words:
”Suppose it were possible, technologically and economically, to transport oneself to any point on the earth’s surface in virtually instantaneous travel? What sort of society would develop where Arabia is an eye blink away from Brooklyn, where one can step from Calcutta to the Grand Canyon between two heartbeats? Let the author, if he can, visualize for us how such a transport system might work – but let him concern himself, primarily, with the effects it would have on the texture on quality of human life. (emphasis added)
There one has it. Instantaneous, economical travel.
The Quick Run Down
1. The first novella, ‘Flash Crowd’ by Larry Niven sets a very good tone. While it lacks in a denouement, it certainly hustles the plot along for most of the story. From a technology standpoint, both it and Brunner’s novella share a conceit of a form of teleportation.
2. The second novella, ‘You’ll Take the High Road’ by John Brunner neither hustles along nor is standable, most notable with its whiney narrator/main character.
3. The third novella, and the strongest by far, is ‘Rumfuddle’ by Jack Vance. Although it’s confusing for the first few pages, it quickly hits its stride and the strong-headed narrator is evened out by a strong plot, strong pacing, a great twist and a great technological concept that propels it far beyond the environs and implications of its two brother novellas.
’Flash Crowd’ by Larry Niven
Although it has a character after my own heart doing the thing my own heart craves (news reporting!) Flash Crowd fails to deliver after its middle.
It’s a world of teleportation, but a recent world of teleportation, and a “newstaper” (a television reporter) inadvertently causes a flash crowd. I’m not giving anything away here; it’s the name of the story.
Once he’s blamed for an especially bad flash crowd (once a crowd starts throwing bricks in an effort to loot, it’s a riot, although no one knows against what), he must go be a reporter and find out what the root causes of the crowd are, of the riot are, to clear his own name.
Fair enough and it would have worked better as a short story, not blown up into a full novella at 85 pages.
’You’ll Take the High Road’ by John Brunner
Once again, teleportation, but with lots of added robots. And class issues, sort of. And travel issues. And law run amuck. And an annoying narrator who can’t stop whining, or say no.
There. You have it. Not worth a long short story, much less a novella.
'Rumfuddle' by Jack Vance
Despite a confusing beginning (read the first 20 pages in one sitting, as I did not) ‘Rumfuddle’ brings the goods home.
Plot twists! Confusion! Angry, somewhat annoying narrator (in his intransigence.)
Cognates! People have cognates. Alternative, nay, infinite worlds, and the problems this can create.
Although more issues could have been dealt with (messing with the timeline, yo), it’s a delicious novella none-the-less, delivering some great fat to chew long past the time it’s been read.
I’m not going to go on and on because, likely, you haven’t read it yet. Read it.
February 25, 2017
Three original novellas written for this book in particular about teleportation including two by favorite authors Larry Niven and Jack Vance. All three stories are good. I'd read the Niven story at least twice in anthologies. The Vance story was new to me, and it's good. The third author, Brunner, is one I'm less familiar with. I believe his contribution is only the second thing I have read by him, and it is excellent.
It was interesting to me that Niven predicts flash crowds, which we get today via cell phones and Facebook. Niven also predicts in this story large, lightweight, thin televisions with perfect accuracy.
The Jack Vance story has a lot in common with a recent Gaiman book. I can't make a direct connection without also spoiling the plot twist.
It was interesting to me that Niven predicts flash crowds, which we get today via cell phones and Facebook. Niven also predicts in this story large, lightweight, thin televisions with perfect accuracy.
The Jack Vance story has a lot in common with a recent Gaiman book. I can't make a direct connection without also spoiling the plot twist.
October 19, 2023
3 sf novellas from 1973:
* Flash Crowd • Larry Niven
* You'll Take the High Road • John Brunner
**** Rumfuddle • Jack Vance
feel sorry for Silverberg - he commissions three teleportation related novellas from three professional sf authors and two of them totally mail it in ... so skip the two stories from Niven and Brunner, at best they're innocuous and at worst they're quite bad, and go right to the Vance ... to be fair, perhaps Vance was just mailing it in as well but he can't help but produce something of quality - yet to read something from Vance that wasn't worth reading ...
* Flash Crowd • Larry Niven
* You'll Take the High Road • John Brunner
**** Rumfuddle • Jack Vance
feel sorry for Silverberg - he commissions three teleportation related novellas from three professional sf authors and two of them totally mail it in ... so skip the two stories from Niven and Brunner, at best they're innocuous and at worst they're quite bad, and go right to the Vance ... to be fair, perhaps Vance was just mailing it in as well but he can't help but produce something of quality - yet to read something from Vance that wasn't worth reading ...
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews