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from trope pages
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* RazorFloss: The whole plot of ''The Descent of Anansi'' revolves around this.
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* RazorFloss: The whole plot of ''The Descent of Anansi'' revolves around this.features a monofilament cable where, in effect, a space shuttle is lowered to Earth on a cable. At one point one of the baddies drifts into the cable and realises that it is already inside the faceplate of his spacesuit by the time he notices anything.
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* ReviveKillsZombie: In "Night on Mispec Moor", an alien plant reproduces by infecting newly killed corpses and rallying their bodies for one last lurch. On a battlefield an off-worlder is cornered by these plausible zombies. He's in deep trouble until, in desperation, he tries spritzing one with his [[AppliedPhlebotinum pan-spectrum cure spray]].
* RoyalInbreeding: In the Svetz stories, the world is ruled by a hereditary Secretary-General. Centuries of inbreeding have produced a feeble-minded and childish occupant of that office.
* SapientShip: The "State" future history has two separate instances of a sapient ship with an AI based on Peersa the Checker. First, in ''A World out of Time'' [[spoiler:an escaping corpsicle's ramship is taken over by beaming a recording of the mind of his jailer at the ship over and over again]]. Later, another ship carrying the mind of Peersa is a character in the ''Smoke Ring'' novels.
* ScoobyDooHoax: In "Night on Mispec Moor", a mercenary assumes the zombie-like creatures chasing him ''must'' be this trope. [[spoiler:They're TheVirus instead.]]
* SettlingTheFrontier: In ''The Legacy of Heorot'', human colonists on the planet Avalon have problems building their colony, partly due to damage taken on the journey there, and partly because Avalon has deadly predators with super speed.
* SexlessMarriage: One of the leading couples in ''The Legacy of Heorot'' becomes this after the husband is rendered paraplegic in a fight with an alien monster. He ends up giving her permission to seek "outside assistance" when it came to her physical needs, as long as she didn't sleep with the book's main character.
* ShamefulStrip: At the end of ''Oath of Fealty'', the captured ecofanatic saboteurs and some common criminals are stripped naked, painted, tattooed and left for the police to find.
* ShapeshiftingSeducer: In "The Meddler", the main antagonist, Sinclair, is a crime boss who has a tremendous reputation as a ladies' man, which the hero, private detective Bruce Cheeseborough, confirms after interviewing his exes. It turns out that Sinclair an alien shapeshifter who uses his size-altering abilities in bed. Cheeseborough comments that he "really had gone native" if he found that worth the trouble.
* SolarFlareDisaster:
** "Flare Time" is about one of these. It's about how regular solar flares force the Earth colonists to take shelter and cause Medusa's native life forms to come out of hiding.
** "Inconstant Moon": The protagonist initially believes that the sun has gone nova and the world is going to end, but realizes that that can't be the case or it would have finished ending already. Instead, the solar flare just killed everything on the side of the planet facing it.
* SpaceAmish: In ''A World Out Of Time'', the far-future immortal Boys spend the antarctic summer living as nomadic Stone Age hunters, but return to their high-tech cities during the unending darkness of the polar winter.
* SpacePeople: ''The Integral Trees'' and ''The Smoke Ring'' feature the descendants of stranded astronauts who live in a cloud surrounding a star. They are extremely tall (around 3m) and slim and have elongated toes, as well as a high infant mortality rate due to the lack of gravity.
* SpaceWhale: ''The Integral Trees'' has the Moby, a whalish giant creature that lives within the breatheable Smoke Ring gas torus orbiting a dead neutron star.
* SpontaneousCrowdFormation: In "Flash Crowd", this sort of thing is one of the unexpected side-effects of the development of easy teleportation technology.
* StarKilling: In "The Fourth Profession", the Monks are a species of alien traders who travel from star to star. Normally they travel using light sails pushed by launching lasers built by intelligent races in the systems they visit. If there's no intelligent race in a system or the race refuses to build a launching laser for them, they use a device on their ship to make the system's star go nova and use that for propulsion.
* RoyalInbreeding: In the Svetz stories, the world is ruled by a hereditary Secretary-General. Centuries of inbreeding have produced a feeble-minded and childish occupant of that office.
* SapientShip: The "State" future history has two separate instances of a sapient ship with an AI based on Peersa the Checker. First, in ''A World out of Time'' [[spoiler:an escaping corpsicle's ramship is taken over by beaming a recording of the mind of his jailer at the ship over and over again]]. Later, another ship carrying the mind of Peersa is a character in the ''Smoke Ring'' novels.
* ScoobyDooHoax: In "Night on Mispec Moor", a mercenary assumes the zombie-like creatures chasing him ''must'' be this trope. [[spoiler:They're TheVirus instead.]]
* SettlingTheFrontier: In ''The Legacy of Heorot'', human colonists on the planet Avalon have problems building their colony, partly due to damage taken on the journey there, and partly because Avalon has deadly predators with super speed.
* SexlessMarriage: One of the leading couples in ''The Legacy of Heorot'' becomes this after the husband is rendered paraplegic in a fight with an alien monster. He ends up giving her permission to seek "outside assistance" when it came to her physical needs, as long as she didn't sleep with the book's main character.
* ShamefulStrip: At the end of ''Oath of Fealty'', the captured ecofanatic saboteurs and some common criminals are stripped naked, painted, tattooed and left for the police to find.
* ShapeshiftingSeducer: In "The Meddler", the main antagonist, Sinclair, is a crime boss who has a tremendous reputation as a ladies' man, which the hero, private detective Bruce Cheeseborough, confirms after interviewing his exes. It turns out that Sinclair an alien shapeshifter who uses his size-altering abilities in bed. Cheeseborough comments that he "really had gone native" if he found that worth the trouble.
* SolarFlareDisaster:
** "Flare Time" is about one of these. It's about how regular solar flares force the Earth colonists to take shelter and cause Medusa's native life forms to come out of hiding.
** "Inconstant Moon": The protagonist initially believes that the sun has gone nova and the world is going to end, but realizes that that can't be the case or it would have finished ending already. Instead, the solar flare just killed everything on the side of the planet facing it.
* SpaceAmish: In ''A World Out Of Time'', the far-future immortal Boys spend the antarctic summer living as nomadic Stone Age hunters, but return to their high-tech cities during the unending darkness of the polar winter.
* SpacePeople: ''The Integral Trees'' and ''The Smoke Ring'' feature the descendants of stranded astronauts who live in a cloud surrounding a star. They are extremely tall (around 3m) and slim and have elongated toes, as well as a high infant mortality rate due to the lack of gravity.
* SpaceWhale: ''The Integral Trees'' has the Moby, a whalish giant creature that lives within the breatheable Smoke Ring gas torus orbiting a dead neutron star.
* SpontaneousCrowdFormation: In "Flash Crowd", this sort of thing is one of the unexpected side-effects of the development of easy teleportation technology.
* StarKilling: In "The Fourth Profession", the Monks are a species of alien traders who travel from star to star. Normally they travel using light sails pushed by launching lasers built by intelligent races in the systems they visit. If there's no intelligent race in a system or the race refuses to build a launching laser for them, they use a device on their ship to make the system's star go nova and use that for propulsion.
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* OhMyGods: ''The Flying Sorcerers'' is a comedy in which most of the names are shoutouts to creators in the science fiction world. The two suns are [[Creator/HGWells Ouells]] and [[Creator/JulesVeren Virn]], there's [[Literature/DragonridersOfPern Caff the goddess of dragons]], [[Franchise/StarTrek Rot'n'bair]] the God of Sheep and his arch-enemy [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_ratings Nilsn]], [[Film/TheBirds Hitch the god of birds]], and [[Creator/HarlanEllison Elcin]], the "great and tiny god of thunder, lightning and loud noises."
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* OhMyGods: ''The Flying Sorcerers'' is a comedy in which most of the names are shoutouts to creators in the science fiction world. The two suns are [[Creator/HGWells Ouells]] and [[Creator/JulesVeren [[Creator/JulesVerne Virn]], there's [[Literature/DragonridersOfPern Caff the goddess of dragons]], [[Franchise/StarTrek Rot'n'bair]] the God of Sheep and his arch-enemy [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_ratings Nilsn]], [[Film/TheBirds Hitch the god of birds]], and [[Creator/HarlanEllison Elcin]], the "great and tiny god of thunder, lightning and loud noises."
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from trope pages
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* MirrorChemistry: ''Destiny's Road'' is set on a planet whose indigenous life uses right-handed proteins. This is initially problematic as they need to entirely sterilize an area of the planet so as to have somewhere to grow edible food, but it proves to have some advantages; it means they're immune to native diseases, and they discover that the planet's sea life is the perfect diet food as their bodies are incapable of metabolizing it into fat.
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* MirrorChemistry: ''Destiny's Road'' is set on a planet whose indigenous life uses right-handed proteins. This is initially problematic as they the colonists need to entirely sterilize an area of the planet so as to have somewhere to grow edible food, but it proves to have some advantages; it means they're immune to native diseases, and they discover that the planet's sea life is the perfect diet food as their bodies are incapable of metabolizing it into fat.
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* NoControlGroup: Averted in ''Destiny's Road''. Colonists on a new planet lack genetic diversity and a nutritious diet. They set aside one village to receive neither dietary supplements nor breeding opportunities, effectively turning the population into their control group.
* NoOntologicalInertia: In one of the Svetz stories, Svetz's entire future has its past altered so that it never came about. This is caused by the ghost of the time traveler who changed it that way in the first place. Long story. However, Svetz returns to the future and finds it the same as always, due to the effects of "Temporal Inertia". There's still a new future, but his exists purely out of the fact that it did. It may be relevant that only part of the time machine (the "extension cage") actually goes anywhere/when; the other part remains in what Svetz thinks of as "the present" and serves as an anchor. (It may also be relevant that it's implied in places that the time machine never goes into the real past, but rather into a potential or alternate past.)
* NothingLeftToDoButDie: In the Draco Tavern story "The Schumann Computer", the title AI shuts itself down because it's solved every possible problem. The builders/investors are then told that this eventually happens to ''every'' AI.
* OhMyGods: ''The Flying Sorcerers'' is a comedy in which most of the names are shoutouts to creators in the science fiction world. The two suns are [[Creator/HGWells Ouells]] and [[Creator/JulesVeren Virn]], there's [[Literature/DragonridersOfPern Caff the goddess of dragons]], [[Franchise/StarTrek Rot'n'bair]] the God of Sheep and his arch-enemy [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_ratings Nilsn]], [[Film/TheBirds Hitch the god of birds]], and [[Creator/HarlanEllison Elcin]], the "great and tiny god of thunder, lightning and loud noises."
* OnceGreenMars: One of the Svetz stories, ''Rainbow Mars'', involves time travel to Mars' verdant past, and chronicles what happened to it.
* OneWorldOrder:
** In the stories of Svetz the time traveler. The "[=SecGen=]" is apparently the absolute monarch of humanity, but the current [=SecGen=] (the product of centuries of inbreeding) is a grown man with the mind of a small child. The actual control of the government rests with those who are most successful at bureaucratic infighting and at cajoling the [=SecGen=] into approving their decisions.
** The State in ''A World Out of Time''.
* OnlyElectricSheepAreCheap: In ''Saturn's Race'', the protagonist eats real meat in the insanely rich refuge of Xanadu and comments on how well-crafted this soymeat is. When she is informed that it is the real thing, she briefly considers whether she should be disgusted by the idea, but then decides to just treat it as a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
* OurWerewolvesAreDifferent: In "There's a Wolf in My Time Machine", Hanville Svetz gets sidetracked into a version of Earth where [[spoiler:man evolved from wolves instead of apes]].
* PeopleFarms: Played with in the Draco's Tavern short story "Assimilating Our Culture, That's What They're Doing". The alien race in that story enjoys eating humans and other sentient species, but is horrified at the very idea of taking sentient life. So they grow human bodies without functional brains in vats and then eat those.
* PlanetOfSteves: In ''The Flying Sorcerers'', the native women originally did not have names. When the wizard Purple started giving them names, this raised a furor among the men (because having names made the women vulnerable to sorcery), but the women did not want to go back to being nameless. The solution was to give all the women the same name: Missa.
* PopulationControl:
** In ''A World Out of Time'', the State has become a OneWorldOrder where IndividualityIsIllegal, and only massive fusion-powered desalinators on every shoreline can provide enough fresh water for the massive population. A few generations back, the State instituted compulsory sterilization for all those with harmful genes, both for eugenic reasons, to save money on heath care, and to slow the rapid population growth.
** In ''Saturn's Race'', the world discovered that a vaccine distributed throughout the third world nations twenty years prior had the deliberate side-effect of causing sterility in the children born to the inoculated.
* RagnarokProofing: ''A World Out Of Time'' has high-tech devices, including a network of [[TeleportersAndTransporters teleport booths]], {{Flying Car}}s, automated house-manufacturing units, and medical technology still functioning after ''three million'' years. The setting does have [[TimeStandsStill temporal stasis]] technology, so may be Justified.
* RaisingTheSteaks: In "Night on Mispec Moor" the zombifying organism originally evolved to dwell in corpses of native dog-like animals. Then it found human corpses make a good host too.
* RamScoop: The starship in "Rammer" and its novel expansion ''A World Out of Time''.
* RazorFloss: The whole plot of ''The Descent of Anansi'' revolves around this.
* NoOntologicalInertia: In one of the Svetz stories, Svetz's entire future has its past altered so that it never came about. This is caused by the ghost of the time traveler who changed it that way in the first place. Long story. However, Svetz returns to the future and finds it the same as always, due to the effects of "Temporal Inertia". There's still a new future, but his exists purely out of the fact that it did. It may be relevant that only part of the time machine (the "extension cage") actually goes anywhere/when; the other part remains in what Svetz thinks of as "the present" and serves as an anchor. (It may also be relevant that it's implied in places that the time machine never goes into the real past, but rather into a potential or alternate past.)
* NothingLeftToDoButDie: In the Draco Tavern story "The Schumann Computer", the title AI shuts itself down because it's solved every possible problem. The builders/investors are then told that this eventually happens to ''every'' AI.
* OhMyGods: ''The Flying Sorcerers'' is a comedy in which most of the names are shoutouts to creators in the science fiction world. The two suns are [[Creator/HGWells Ouells]] and [[Creator/JulesVeren Virn]], there's [[Literature/DragonridersOfPern Caff the goddess of dragons]], [[Franchise/StarTrek Rot'n'bair]] the God of Sheep and his arch-enemy [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_ratings Nilsn]], [[Film/TheBirds Hitch the god of birds]], and [[Creator/HarlanEllison Elcin]], the "great and tiny god of thunder, lightning and loud noises."
* OnceGreenMars: One of the Svetz stories, ''Rainbow Mars'', involves time travel to Mars' verdant past, and chronicles what happened to it.
* OneWorldOrder:
** In the stories of Svetz the time traveler. The "[=SecGen=]" is apparently the absolute monarch of humanity, but the current [=SecGen=] (the product of centuries of inbreeding) is a grown man with the mind of a small child. The actual control of the government rests with those who are most successful at bureaucratic infighting and at cajoling the [=SecGen=] into approving their decisions.
** The State in ''A World Out of Time''.
* OnlyElectricSheepAreCheap: In ''Saturn's Race'', the protagonist eats real meat in the insanely rich refuge of Xanadu and comments on how well-crafted this soymeat is. When she is informed that it is the real thing, she briefly considers whether she should be disgusted by the idea, but then decides to just treat it as a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
* OurWerewolvesAreDifferent: In "There's a Wolf in My Time Machine", Hanville Svetz gets sidetracked into a version of Earth where [[spoiler:man evolved from wolves instead of apes]].
* PeopleFarms: Played with in the Draco's Tavern short story "Assimilating Our Culture, That's What They're Doing". The alien race in that story enjoys eating humans and other sentient species, but is horrified at the very idea of taking sentient life. So they grow human bodies without functional brains in vats and then eat those.
* PlanetOfSteves: In ''The Flying Sorcerers'', the native women originally did not have names. When the wizard Purple started giving them names, this raised a furor among the men (because having names made the women vulnerable to sorcery), but the women did not want to go back to being nameless. The solution was to give all the women the same name: Missa.
* PopulationControl:
** In ''A World Out of Time'', the State has become a OneWorldOrder where IndividualityIsIllegal, and only massive fusion-powered desalinators on every shoreline can provide enough fresh water for the massive population. A few generations back, the State instituted compulsory sterilization for all those with harmful genes, both for eugenic reasons, to save money on heath care, and to slow the rapid population growth.
** In ''Saturn's Race'', the world discovered that a vaccine distributed throughout the third world nations twenty years prior had the deliberate side-effect of causing sterility in the children born to the inoculated.
* RagnarokProofing: ''A World Out Of Time'' has high-tech devices, including a network of [[TeleportersAndTransporters teleport booths]], {{Flying Car}}s, automated house-manufacturing units, and medical technology still functioning after ''three million'' years. The setting does have [[TimeStandsStill temporal stasis]] technology, so may be Justified.
* RaisingTheSteaks: In "Night on Mispec Moor" the zombifying organism originally evolved to dwell in corpses of native dog-like animals. Then it found human corpses make a good host too.
* RamScoop: The starship in "Rammer" and its novel expansion ''A World Out of Time''.
* RazorFloss: The whole plot of ''The Descent of Anansi'' revolves around this.
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from trope pages
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* LongevityTreatment: ''A World Out of Time'' has an immortality treatment for adults that involves removing impurities from the body.
* LostColony: ''The Integral Trees'' series has a lost colony without a planet.
* MamasBabyPapasMaybe: Becomes an issue for two characters in ''The Integral Trees'' and ''The Smoke Ring''. After one female character is used as a SexSlave, her husband can't accept her child as his [[spoiler:until learning that the child inherited a respiratory problem from Mom's husband/his true father]].
* MetalPoorPlanet: In ''The Integral Trees'', there is effectively no metal whatsoever in the Gas Torus where a LostColony of humanity is located; as such, all materials are made from local wood from the [[WorldInTheSky kilometer-long trees in the gas torus]] spinning around the neutron star. What little metal there is has been recycled endlessly from what the colonists brought with them.
* MirrorChemistry: ''Destiny's Road'' is set on a planet whose indigenous life uses right-handed proteins. This is initially problematic as they need to entirely sterilize an area of the planet so as to have somewhere to grow edible food, but it proves to have some advantages; it means they're immune to native diseases, and they discover that the planet's sea life is the perfect diet food as their bodies are incapable of metabolizing it into fat.
* MyGrandsonMyself: The main character in ''Saturn's Race'' undergoes a top secret rejuvenation process, and ends up assuming the identity of a grandson.
* LostColony: ''The Integral Trees'' series has a lost colony without a planet.
* MamasBabyPapasMaybe: Becomes an issue for two characters in ''The Integral Trees'' and ''The Smoke Ring''. After one female character is used as a SexSlave, her husband can't accept her child as his [[spoiler:until learning that the child inherited a respiratory problem from Mom's husband/his true father]].
* MetalPoorPlanet: In ''The Integral Trees'', there is effectively no metal whatsoever in the Gas Torus where a LostColony of humanity is located; as such, all materials are made from local wood from the [[WorldInTheSky kilometer-long trees in the gas torus]] spinning around the neutron star. What little metal there is has been recycled endlessly from what the colonists brought with them.
* MirrorChemistry: ''Destiny's Road'' is set on a planet whose indigenous life uses right-handed proteins. This is initially problematic as they need to entirely sterilize an area of the planet so as to have somewhere to grow edible food, but it proves to have some advantages; it means they're immune to native diseases, and they discover that the planet's sea life is the perfect diet food as their bodies are incapable of metabolizing it into fat.
* MyGrandsonMyself: The main character in ''Saturn's Race'' undergoes a top secret rejuvenation process, and ends up assuming the identity of a grandson.
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from trope pages
* AdamAndEvePlot: Discussed in "What Can You Say About Chocolate Coated Manhole Covers?" The main characters speculate on how the Adam and Eve legend could work in real life, purely as an intellectual exercise. They conclude, for the obvious reasons, that one pair could not populate an entire planet. They come up with an elaborate scheme based on stock breeding techniques, involving many pairs and small groups that are isolated from each other by geography. [[spoiler:Then an alien kidnaps the protagonists, strands them on a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri, and tells them that they've just figured out the aliens' secret plan for breeding an 'improved' form of human being.]]
* AIIsACrapshoot: Played with in "The Schumann Computer", one of the Draco Tavern stories. Schumann asks an alien if their (much older) species ever developed an AI. She returns the next day with the plans for the most sophisticated computer their species ever developed. Schumann gets some investors together and builds the computer on the Moon so it will be isolated, but the trope appears to be played straight as the MasterComputer manipulates them into granting it more and more power and sensors... [[spoiler:then one day it just shuts down. Schumann is commiserating over the loss of his investment with some aliens in his tavern; they say the alien who gave him the plans is a notorious practical joker. Apparently the reason AI doesn't work is that the computer advances so fast it solves every question in the universe and, having no further purpose, shuts down.]]
* BlueAndOrangeMorality: In the Draco Tavern story "Assimilating Our Culture, That's What They're Doing!", a crewman from the first embassy ship to an alien homeworld reveals that when the aliens took DNA samples it wasn't for pure scientific purposes: they grow brainless human clones as a food delicacy. The UN quietly accepts royalties, and some of the crew members later kill themselves.
* DealWithTheDevil: "Convergent Series" deconstructs the Deal With The Devil by not only giving a purported reason why demon-summoning rarely works (and why you wouldn't hear about the successful cases), but also by ruling out each of the usual ways out of the deal one by one. The protagonist eventually comes up with an unconventional solution.
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* DoomAsTestPrize: "What Can You Say About Chocolate Covered Manhole Covers?". At a party, a man proposes an idea: that the human race was created by aliens placing small groups of ''Homo habilis'' at various places around the Earth and letting them evolve separately. When the groups met up and mated, their descendants would have superior intelligence by virtue of hybrid vigor and would make good servants. Some of the people at the party deduce additional information about the aliens and thus pass the aliens' intelligence test. As a reward they're kidnapped and taken to a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri, to be the subjects of a new seeding experiment.
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* DoomAsTestPrize: "What Can You Say About Chocolate Covered Manhole Covers?". At [[spoiler:At a party, a man proposes an idea: that the human race was created by aliens placing small groups of ''Homo habilis'' at various places around the Earth and letting them evolve separately. When the groups met up and mated, their descendants would have superior intelligence by virtue of hybrid vigor and would make good servants. Some of the people at the party deduce additional information about the aliens and thus pass the aliens' intelligence test. As a reward they're kidnapped and taken to a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri, to be the subjects of a new seeding experiment.]]
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* GoneHorriblyRight: In ''Fallen Angels'', the US government attempts to stop global warming by outlawing all forms of technology that emit greenhouse gases. Unfortunately, the subsequent reduction in atmospheric particles causes the Earth's surface to lose heat much faster than normal, causing the planet to go into an ice age.
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* ImAHumanitarian: The Draco Tavern story "Assimilating Our Culture, That's What They're Doing!" plays with this idea differently: Instead of eating the original people, the brilliant alien bioengineers that asked them to visit grow cloned tissue in tanks (up to a whole, headless body), and give a small percentage of the sale price to the Earth government to pay for marvelous new technologies. Some of the people thus cultivated take it better than others.
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* InterspeciesRomance: The Draco Tavern series contributes to the subject in the short story "Breeding Maze". Another story from that setting, "Smut Talk", also counts, as it explores the possibility of a sexually transmitted AlienInvasion.
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* ReallySevenHundredYearsOld: Jerome Corbell, the hero of ''A World Out of Time'', starts the story waking up after spending 220 years in suspended animation. By the end of the novel, because of time-dilation caused by a close encounter with a black hole, he's at least five billion years old.
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* TooDumbToLive: In ''Oath of Fealty'', the plot is initiated by a group of teenagers who, as a prank, try to sneak into a heavily surveillance filled arcology while carrying a box labeled "bomb". They take ''just enough'' precautions to defeat all of the ''non''lethal methods of stopping them. The abject stupidity of this act is very heavily {{lampshade|Hanging}}d, and spawns the repeated phrase "Think of it as evolution in action." At one point they even break through a door which has a sign that warns, "If you enter here YOU WILL DIE!" Among other skull and crossbones-type warnings.
* XanatosGambit: In ''Beowulf's Children'' by Creator/LarryNiven, Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes, Aaron Tragon's theft of the transport ship ''Robo'' was a XanatosGambit. Aaron Tragon's primary goal is to force everyone to leave the island and colonize the mainland. If the theft was successful, good. If one of the adults died in the conflict, then it's hardball and Aaron gets a war -- also good. If one of Aaron's friends is killed, then he gets sympathy from the other colonists and he has the leverage he needs to start colonizing the mainland -- ''very'' good. Justin is horrified when he realizes this, because it meant Aaron took into account the possibility of a friend being killed and that he already planned how to take advantage of it. Even his "friends" are just pawns in Aaron's mind.
* XanatosGambit: In ''Beowulf's Children'' by Creator/LarryNiven, Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes, Aaron Tragon's theft of the transport ship ''Robo'' was a XanatosGambit. Aaron Tragon's primary goal is to force everyone to leave the island and colonize the mainland. If the theft was successful, good. If one of the adults died in the conflict, then it's hardball and Aaron gets a war -- also good. If one of Aaron's friends is killed, then he gets sympathy from the other colonists and he has the leverage he needs to start colonizing the mainland -- ''very'' good. Justin is horrified when he realizes this, because it meant Aaron took into account the possibility of a friend being killed and that he already planned how to take advantage of it. Even his "friends" are just pawns in Aaron's mind.
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from trope pages
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* HeroicSeductress: ''Oath of Fealty'': Tony Rand, the chief engineer of the Todos Santos arcology, needs to come up with a plan to rescue someone from police custody. He's talking over his plans with a woman named Delores Martine. Because of problems in his personal life, he can't concentrate and starts to lose control of himself, so Delores repeatedly seduces him to calm him down so he can think.
* HitSoHardTheCalendarFeltIt: The people of Svetz's time use the Atomic Era calendar, counting from the first successful artificial nuclear fission reaction in 1942 AD.
* HoldYourHippogriffs: In ''The Integral Trees'', several characters use the expression "feed the tree," which means, "The words you are saying are a commonly used form of natural fertilizer."
* HostileHitchhiker: In "The Deadlier Weapon", a hitchhiker pulls a knife on the driver who picked him up. The driver starts acting like he intends to kill them both by deliberately crashing the car, ramping up the psychological pressure by looking at the hitchhiker instead of the road until the hitchhiker gives up, drops the knife out the window, and allows himself to be dropped off in the median of a busy highway where he is trapped until the cops come for him.
* HumanPopsicle:
** ''World Out of Time'', and other short stories and novels in the same setting, involve "corpsicles" revived in an unfriendly future. Most of the time their legal rights are severely curtailed, since they usually have run out of the money that was paying to keep them frozen and lack any kind of relevant work skills.
** ''The Legacy of Heorot'' and ''Beowulf's Children'' features a crew of interstellar colonists who discover too late the drawbacks of the freezing process they used.
* HumansThroughAlienEyes: ''The Flying Sorcerers'' has a human on an alien planet. The story is told from an alien's point of view and the cultural differences are PlayedForLaughs.
* HitSoHardTheCalendarFeltIt: The people of Svetz's time use the Atomic Era calendar, counting from the first successful artificial nuclear fission reaction in 1942 AD.
* HoldYourHippogriffs: In ''The Integral Trees'', several characters use the expression "feed the tree," which means, "The words you are saying are a commonly used form of natural fertilizer."
* HostileHitchhiker: In "The Deadlier Weapon", a hitchhiker pulls a knife on the driver who picked him up. The driver starts acting like he intends to kill them both by deliberately crashing the car, ramping up the psychological pressure by looking at the hitchhiker instead of the road until the hitchhiker gives up, drops the knife out the window, and allows himself to be dropped off in the median of a busy highway where he is trapped until the cops come for him.
* HumanPopsicle:
** ''World Out of Time'', and other short stories and novels in the same setting, involve "corpsicles" revived in an unfriendly future. Most of the time their legal rights are severely curtailed, since they usually have run out of the money that was paying to keep them frozen and lack any kind of relevant work skills.
** ''The Legacy of Heorot'' and ''Beowulf's Children'' features a crew of interstellar colonists who discover too late the drawbacks of the freezing process they used.
* HumansThroughAlienEyes: ''The Flying Sorcerers'' has a human on an alien planet. The story is told from an alien's point of view and the cultural differences are PlayedForLaughs.
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* ImmortalitySeeker: In "Cautionary Tales", a human looking for a way to live forever goes to the center of the galaxy and runs into an alien looking for the same thing. Tales of living forever are in all cultures, but only humans have "[[WhoWantsToLiveForever cautionary tales]]". The alien has been looking for far longer than the human...
* ImmuneToBullets: In "The Meddler", the startled protagonist fires his gun at an alien intruder who solemnly replies "Thank you for the gift of metal." Turns out the alien really can "Eat lead".
* ImprovisedMicrogravityManeuvering: In ''The Integral Trees'', the tree-dwellers occasionally use high pressure "spitter" seedpods (that shoot seeds out once they are broken open on one end) as rocket motors.
* InnBetweenTheWorlds: The Draco Tavern is a pub in Earth's main spaceport, equipped for a very diverse range of customers.
* InnOfNoReturn: The hero of ''Destiny's Road'' hears a tale about an inn that was run by escaped prisoners who killed and ate travelers. This is a bit jarring, since he was one of the escaped prisoners, and while they didn't do anything illegal there except steal the power to run the place, it does mean the authorities might be aware he survived his escape from prison.
* InterplanetaryVoyage: "The Hole Man" concerns a trip to Mars.
* InYourNatureToDestroyYourselves: In the Draco Tavern story "War Stories", a ship full of alien explorers came across Earth and made recordings of several battles during UsefulNotes/WorldWarII. The recordings made them rich, so they came back to Earth to film more "war stories", knowing that such a warlike species as ours would eventually nuke ourselves back to the stone age. When we didn't, the alien film producers were forced into bankruptcy.
* ItRunsOnNonsensoleum: Regarding the Svetz stories, this was the WordOfGod explanation (and heavily implied in the stories -- although so much of history was lost to the characters that ''they'' never figured it out, there are clues for the reader that this is what is going on) for why TimeTravel took Svetz to a fantastic version of the past. They had managed to invent Time Travel... but since Time Travel was impossible and could only work in fiction, it took them to a fictionalized version of the past.
* KnockoutGas: In ''Oath of Fealty'', the Todos Santos arcology uses knockout gas as part of its internal security system.
* KrakenAndLeviathan: One of the Svetz stories is "Leviathan!", in which he is sent back in time to catch a whale, but the first "whale" he latches onto with his tractor beam is just too big to bring back -- as it's the Biblical Leviathan, not a whale at all.
* LadyLand: In ''A World Out of Time'', an immortality treatment that only worked on the prepubescent results in a population of immortals who, biologically arrested and not needing each other for the continuance of the species, split into Boys and Girls and form two entirely separate and occasionally warring societies (both implied to be screwed up equally, but in different ways).
* {{Lightworlder}}: In the setting of ''The Integral Trees'' and ''The Smoke Ring'', the inhabitants of Integral Trees are somewhat taller and slimmer than Earth people, but they are strong, tough Heavyworlders compared to people from the rest of the Smoke Ring. The tidal forces acting on the trees provides at least a little simulated gravity, but everyone else grows up in zero-G. One character, often referred to as a "dwarf", actually has an Earth-normal build; he's described as "monstrously strong" and is the only person who can wear one of the original spacesuits.
* ImmuneToBullets: In "The Meddler", the startled protagonist fires his gun at an alien intruder who solemnly replies "Thank you for the gift of metal." Turns out the alien really can "Eat lead".
* ImprovisedMicrogravityManeuvering: In ''The Integral Trees'', the tree-dwellers occasionally use high pressure "spitter" seedpods (that shoot seeds out once they are broken open on one end) as rocket motors.
* InnBetweenTheWorlds: The Draco Tavern is a pub in Earth's main spaceport, equipped for a very diverse range of customers.
* InnOfNoReturn: The hero of ''Destiny's Road'' hears a tale about an inn that was run by escaped prisoners who killed and ate travelers. This is a bit jarring, since he was one of the escaped prisoners, and while they didn't do anything illegal there except steal the power to run the place, it does mean the authorities might be aware he survived his escape from prison.
* InterplanetaryVoyage: "The Hole Man" concerns a trip to Mars.
* InYourNatureToDestroyYourselves: In the Draco Tavern story "War Stories", a ship full of alien explorers came across Earth and made recordings of several battles during UsefulNotes/WorldWarII. The recordings made them rich, so they came back to Earth to film more "war stories", knowing that such a warlike species as ours would eventually nuke ourselves back to the stone age. When we didn't, the alien film producers were forced into bankruptcy.
* ItRunsOnNonsensoleum: Regarding the Svetz stories, this was the WordOfGod explanation (and heavily implied in the stories -- although so much of history was lost to the characters that ''they'' never figured it out, there are clues for the reader that this is what is going on) for why TimeTravel took Svetz to a fantastic version of the past. They had managed to invent Time Travel... but since Time Travel was impossible and could only work in fiction, it took them to a fictionalized version of the past.
* KnockoutGas: In ''Oath of Fealty'', the Todos Santos arcology uses knockout gas as part of its internal security system.
* KrakenAndLeviathan: One of the Svetz stories is "Leviathan!", in which he is sent back in time to catch a whale, but the first "whale" he latches onto with his tractor beam is just too big to bring back -- as it's the Biblical Leviathan, not a whale at all.
* LadyLand: In ''A World Out of Time'', an immortality treatment that only worked on the prepubescent results in a population of immortals who, biologically arrested and not needing each other for the continuance of the species, split into Boys and Girls and form two entirely separate and occasionally warring societies (both implied to be screwed up equally, but in different ways).
* {{Lightworlder}}: In the setting of ''The Integral Trees'' and ''The Smoke Ring'', the inhabitants of Integral Trees are somewhat taller and slimmer than Earth people, but they are strong, tough Heavyworlders compared to people from the rest of the Smoke Ring. The tidal forces acting on the trees provides at least a little simulated gravity, but everyone else grows up in zero-G. One character, often referred to as a "dwarf", actually has an Earth-normal build; he's described as "monstrously strong" and is the only person who can wear one of the original spacesuits.
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None
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* EndlessDaylight: In the Draco Tavern series, the home planet of the alien Chirpscithra is tidally locked. The species evolved in the "twilight region" around the planet's terminator zone.
to:
* EndlessDaylight: EndlessDaytime: In the Draco Tavern series, the home planet of the alien Chirpscithra is tidally locked. The species evolved in the "twilight region" around the planet's terminator zone.
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from trope pages
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* EncyclopediaExposita: ''Destiny's Road'' is full of quotes from planetary science surveys, local lore regarding the colonization of an alien world and the ultimate fate of some colonists, and quotes regarding local customs. A very early chapter opens rather ominously quoting an excerpt of a military absentee court-martial.
* EndlessDaylight: In the Draco Tavern series, the home planet of the alien Chirpscithra is tidally locked. The species evolved in the "twilight region" around the planet's terminator zone.
* ExpendableAlternateUniverse: Explored in "All the Myriad Ways", where verification of the existence of alternate universes leads people to regard their ''own'' universe as expendable. Because billions of new alternate worlds are created every second (every time anyone makes a choice, even such a minor choice as what color socks to put on, or even to put on socks at all, a new universe is born; multiply that by the billions of people on the earth, and...), people no longer value their own lives, because they know alternate versions of themselves will do better if they die -- and why ''not'' commit murder, rape, robbery, or suicide, if you were always destined to do so in at least one timeline? The story ends by showing nine very different outcomes to the same story with only the last line changed on a whim of the protagonist.
* EndlessDaylight: In the Draco Tavern series, the home planet of the alien Chirpscithra is tidally locked. The species evolved in the "twilight region" around the planet's terminator zone.
* ExpendableAlternateUniverse: Explored in "All the Myriad Ways", where verification of the existence of alternate universes leads people to regard their ''own'' universe as expendable. Because billions of new alternate worlds are created every second (every time anyone makes a choice, even such a minor choice as what color socks to put on, or even to put on socks at all, a new universe is born; multiply that by the billions of people on the earth, and...), people no longer value their own lives, because they know alternate versions of themselves will do better if they die -- and why ''not'' commit murder, rape, robbery, or suicide, if you were always destined to do so in at least one timeline? The story ends by showing nine very different outcomes to the same story with only the last line changed on a whim of the protagonist.
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* FasterThanLightTravel: In ''The Flying Sorcerers'', the astronaut's attempt to explain to the stone age natives how he got to their planet implies some kind of warp drive: "I went around... the distance".
* FeedTheMole: In ''Oath of Fealty'', terrorists are trying to take down an arcology, and they have inside information about the defenses of the arcology's hydrogen pipelines. After a test attack (by unknowing dupes), the security chief makes several upgrades to the defenses -- and tells different people different things about the upgrades. When the terrorists arrive with countermeasures against some, but not all, of the new defenses, he knows who the mole is.
* FinancialAbuse: In ''Oath of Fealty'', Tony Rand, the architect who built the Todos Santos Arcology, is subjected to a ''nasty'' one that is implied to be the end result of his wife being a high-level {{Chessmaster}}. She supported him through architecture and engineering school, then divorced him. She then seduced him a week after the divorce was final in order to conceive their son Zach -- thus negating his paternal rights completely, as he was born out of wedlock. Final settlement; a sliding scale deal where she gets two-thirds of his income forever. And as he broke ground on the world's first self-sustaining arcology (which in Niven/Pournelle's world is basically a money machine), he's now the richest man on Earth, meaning she is the single richest woman and lives a white-collar life of leisure on the other side of the continent from him.
* FloatingWater: In ''The Integral Trees'' and ''The Smoke Ring'', "Ponds" are spheres of water floating in midair, due to the near-complete lack of gravity.
* FogOfDoom: In "For a Foggy Night", the mist isn't actually mist, but is rather times when the various alternate timelines intermesh. When you walk out into a fog, you're actually walking into an alternate world... it's just that most of the time the "alternate" is so close to your original world you never notice. But sometimes, just sometimes, you cross over into a world that's completely different...
* GeneticMemory: Before the "RNA memory" theory was discredited, Niven used it as a teaching device in his short story "Rammer" and its novel expansion, ''A World Out of Time''.
* GiantEnemyCrab: ''Beowulf's Children'' introduces the Scribe, which resembles a giant land-dwelling horseshoe crab. Fortunately, they're also {{Gentle Giant}}s...with defenses that deter all potential predators, even the grendels [[spoiler:and the huge flesh-eating "bees" with SuperSpeed]]. To get a feel for how big they are, note that the colonists name the first Scribe they meet "Asia".
* GoMadFromTheRevelation: In the Draco Tavern story "The Subject Is Closed", one of the tavern's visitors describes how one alien race claimed to have discovered the truth about the afterlife. This is the last that was heard from them, and visitors to their world discovered that they had systematically committed mass suicide. It was later decided to destroy the detailed records of what was found, because those who studied them too closely also committed suicide.
* FeedTheMole: In ''Oath of Fealty'', terrorists are trying to take down an arcology, and they have inside information about the defenses of the arcology's hydrogen pipelines. After a test attack (by unknowing dupes), the security chief makes several upgrades to the defenses -- and tells different people different things about the upgrades. When the terrorists arrive with countermeasures against some, but not all, of the new defenses, he knows who the mole is.
* FinancialAbuse: In ''Oath of Fealty'', Tony Rand, the architect who built the Todos Santos Arcology, is subjected to a ''nasty'' one that is implied to be the end result of his wife being a high-level {{Chessmaster}}. She supported him through architecture and engineering school, then divorced him. She then seduced him a week after the divorce was final in order to conceive their son Zach -- thus negating his paternal rights completely, as he was born out of wedlock. Final settlement; a sliding scale deal where she gets two-thirds of his income forever. And as he broke ground on the world's first self-sustaining arcology (which in Niven/Pournelle's world is basically a money machine), he's now the richest man on Earth, meaning she is the single richest woman and lives a white-collar life of leisure on the other side of the continent from him.
* FloatingWater: In ''The Integral Trees'' and ''The Smoke Ring'', "Ponds" are spheres of water floating in midair, due to the near-complete lack of gravity.
* FogOfDoom: In "For a Foggy Night", the mist isn't actually mist, but is rather times when the various alternate timelines intermesh. When you walk out into a fog, you're actually walking into an alternate world... it's just that most of the time the "alternate" is so close to your original world you never notice. But sometimes, just sometimes, you cross over into a world that's completely different...
* GeneticMemory: Before the "RNA memory" theory was discredited, Niven used it as a teaching device in his short story "Rammer" and its novel expansion, ''A World Out of Time''.
* GiantEnemyCrab: ''Beowulf's Children'' introduces the Scribe, which resembles a giant land-dwelling horseshoe crab. Fortunately, they're also {{Gentle Giant}}s...with defenses that deter all potential predators, even the grendels [[spoiler:and the huge flesh-eating "bees" with SuperSpeed]]. To get a feel for how big they are, note that the colonists name the first Scribe they meet "Asia".
* GoMadFromTheRevelation: In the Draco Tavern story "The Subject Is Closed", one of the tavern's visitors describes how one alien race claimed to have discovered the truth about the afterlife. This is the last that was heard from them, and visitors to their world discovered that they had systematically committed mass suicide. It was later decided to destroy the detailed records of what was found, because those who studied them too closely also committed suicide.
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from trope pages
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* DemocracyIsBad: The enviro-fundamentalist regime of ''Fallen Angels'' is entirely democratic; scientists and science fiction fen are a tiny percentage of the voting population, the majority of which believes that science is responsible for the world's woes -- specifically an ever-worsening ice age.
* DidntSeeThatComing: In ''Beowulf's Children'', Aaron Tragon's (the MagnificentBastard of the novel) schemes to colonize the mainland of the planet and become the new leader of the colonists is derailed by a rather spectacular Unknown Unknown. After [[spoiler:shooting Little Chaka and Cadmann to keep them from warning everyone of the imminent continent sweeping attack of the recently discovered huge flesh-eating "bees" with SuperSpeed]], all in order to keep everyone from leaving, he goes back to the colony and tells everyone a story of how they were devoured by grendels. He puts on a ''very'' convincing act of grief and shame, while preparing to take the reins of leadership left behind by [[spoiler:Cadmann]]. All of a sudden, [[spoiler:the intelligent ''grendel'' protagonist approaches the colony, having ''saved'' Little Chaka, who proceeds to blow the whole scheme out of the water by telling everyone of Aaron's betrayal]]. The only reason Aaron avoids execution on the spot is the untimely arrival of the aforementioned [[spoiler:flesh-eating "bees" with superspeed]].
* DidYouJustScamCthulhu: In "Convergent Series", a man deals with a demon he's semi-accidentally summoned by asking the demon to freeze time for a bit, then redrawing the summoning pentagram [[spoiler:on the demon's belly]], trapping the demon in a paradox. [[spoiler:The mechanics of the summoning requires that the demon has to fit inside the pentagram, and because it's drawn on his belly, when he shrinks himself down to fit in the pentagram, the pentagram shrinks as well.]]
* DoomAsTestPrize: "What Can You Say About Chocolate Covered Manhole Covers?". At a party, a man proposes an idea: that the human race was created by aliens placing small groups of ''Homo habilis'' at various places around the Earth and letting them evolve separately. When the groups met up and mated, their descendants would have superior intelligence by virtue of hybrid vigor and would make good servants. Some of the people at the party deduce additional information about the aliens and thus pass the aliens' intelligence test. As a reward they're kidnapped and taken to a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri, to be the subjects of a new seeding experiment.
* EarthAllAlong: In one of the Draco Tavern stories, the chirpsithtra remember a civilization they met millions of years ago, whose planet was undergoing geological upheaval, and a green blight was taking over the oceans, converting much of their atmosphere into oxygen. This killed them off in the end, but created the conditions necessary for us and (almost) everything else we know.
* EarthShatteringKaboom: "The Hole Man" involves a team of explorers uncovering an ancient alien device on Mars that is powered by a miniature black hole in a containment field. When the black hole is accidentally released, it falls through one of the explorers standing underneath (killing him) and through the surface of the planet, leaving a tiny pinhole. The explorers predict that the black hole will settle in the planet's core and slowly add the planet's material to its mass, with the whole of Mars eventually collapsing into it (but this supposed outcome doesn't occur within the timeframe of the story itself).
* DidntSeeThatComing: In ''Beowulf's Children'', Aaron Tragon's (the MagnificentBastard of the novel) schemes to colonize the mainland of the planet and become the new leader of the colonists is derailed by a rather spectacular Unknown Unknown. After [[spoiler:shooting Little Chaka and Cadmann to keep them from warning everyone of the imminent continent sweeping attack of the recently discovered huge flesh-eating "bees" with SuperSpeed]], all in order to keep everyone from leaving, he goes back to the colony and tells everyone a story of how they were devoured by grendels. He puts on a ''very'' convincing act of grief and shame, while preparing to take the reins of leadership left behind by [[spoiler:Cadmann]]. All of a sudden, [[spoiler:the intelligent ''grendel'' protagonist approaches the colony, having ''saved'' Little Chaka, who proceeds to blow the whole scheme out of the water by telling everyone of Aaron's betrayal]]. The only reason Aaron avoids execution on the spot is the untimely arrival of the aforementioned [[spoiler:flesh-eating "bees" with superspeed]].
* DidYouJustScamCthulhu: In "Convergent Series", a man deals with a demon he's semi-accidentally summoned by asking the demon to freeze time for a bit, then redrawing the summoning pentagram [[spoiler:on the demon's belly]], trapping the demon in a paradox. [[spoiler:The mechanics of the summoning requires that the demon has to fit inside the pentagram, and because it's drawn on his belly, when he shrinks himself down to fit in the pentagram, the pentagram shrinks as well.]]
* DoomAsTestPrize: "What Can You Say About Chocolate Covered Manhole Covers?". At a party, a man proposes an idea: that the human race was created by aliens placing small groups of ''Homo habilis'' at various places around the Earth and letting them evolve separately. When the groups met up and mated, their descendants would have superior intelligence by virtue of hybrid vigor and would make good servants. Some of the people at the party deduce additional information about the aliens and thus pass the aliens' intelligence test. As a reward they're kidnapped and taken to a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri, to be the subjects of a new seeding experiment.
* EarthAllAlong: In one of the Draco Tavern stories, the chirpsithtra remember a civilization they met millions of years ago, whose planet was undergoing geological upheaval, and a green blight was taking over the oceans, converting much of their atmosphere into oxygen. This killed them off in the end, but created the conditions necessary for us and (almost) everything else we know.
* EarthShatteringKaboom: "The Hole Man" involves a team of explorers uncovering an ancient alien device on Mars that is powered by a miniature black hole in a containment field. When the black hole is accidentally released, it falls through one of the explorers standing underneath (killing him) and through the surface of the planet, leaving a tiny pinhole. The explorers predict that the black hole will settle in the planet's core and slowly add the planet's material to its mass, with the whole of Mars eventually collapsing into it (but this supposed outcome doesn't occur within the timeframe of the story itself).
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from trope pages
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* CakeToppers: In "What Can You Say About Chocolate Covered Manhole Covers?", a couple mark their amicable separation with a divorce party, featuring a black frosted divorce cake that has the toppers facing away from each other.
* CallARabbitASmeerp: In ''The Legacy of Heorot'', fish-like creatures swimming in the stream of a colony planet are referred to as "samlon" (much to his chagrin, it took some folks half the book to notice it wasn't "salmon"). However, they turn out to be rather more than that.
* CallASmeerpARabbit: In the Hanville Svetz stories, Svetz is from a time where most animals are extinct, and he uses a TimeMachine to obtain animals for the global zoo. Unknown to him, however, his "time machine" drifts across parallel universes as it travels, and he consistently winds up bringing back mythological creatures. As even "real" (i.e., nonmagical) animals are only known from sources like poorly illustrated children's books, no-one thinks it unusual that the "horse" he brings back is actually a unicorn (but they persist in calling it a horse, cutting off the horn to make it look more like the one in the book), or that the "gila monster" is actually a ''fire-breathing dragon''.
* CarFu: In "The Deadlier Weapon", a hitchhiker pulls a knife on the protagonist driver, who makes it very clear how badly outgunned any hitchhiker trying this stunt is. The Driver buckles his seatbelt, accelerates to over a hundred miles an hour, and tells the would-be car-jacker that he's going to ram the right side of the car (where the car-jacker is sitting) into the nearest underpass support pylon unless the guy tosses the knife out the window.
* CigaretteBurns: In "The Deadlier Weapon", the narrator taunts a carjacker by threatening to crash the car and burns his nose with the cigarette lighter.
* ColdSleepColdFuture: In ''A World Out of Time'', the protagonist is revived into an authoritarian world. He's expected to earn his new lease on life by piloting a sublight interstellar mission. If he fails to qualify, they'll erase his brain pattern from the body (of a condemned criminal, executed by brainwipe) he's using and try again with the next HumanPopsicle.
* CallARabbitASmeerp: In ''The Legacy of Heorot'', fish-like creatures swimming in the stream of a colony planet are referred to as "samlon" (much to his chagrin, it took some folks half the book to notice it wasn't "salmon"). However, they turn out to be rather more than that.
* CallASmeerpARabbit: In the Hanville Svetz stories, Svetz is from a time where most animals are extinct, and he uses a TimeMachine to obtain animals for the global zoo. Unknown to him, however, his "time machine" drifts across parallel universes as it travels, and he consistently winds up bringing back mythological creatures. As even "real" (i.e., nonmagical) animals are only known from sources like poorly illustrated children's books, no-one thinks it unusual that the "horse" he brings back is actually a unicorn (but they persist in calling it a horse, cutting off the horn to make it look more like the one in the book), or that the "gila monster" is actually a ''fire-breathing dragon''.
* CarFu: In "The Deadlier Weapon", a hitchhiker pulls a knife on the protagonist driver, who makes it very clear how badly outgunned any hitchhiker trying this stunt is. The Driver buckles his seatbelt, accelerates to over a hundred miles an hour, and tells the would-be car-jacker that he's going to ram the right side of the car (where the car-jacker is sitting) into the nearest underpass support pylon unless the guy tosses the knife out the window.
* CigaretteBurns: In "The Deadlier Weapon", the narrator taunts a carjacker by threatening to crash the car and burns his nose with the cigarette lighter.
* ColdSleepColdFuture: In ''A World Out of Time'', the protagonist is revived into an authoritarian world. He's expected to earn his new lease on life by piloting a sublight interstellar mission. If he fails to qualify, they'll erase his brain pattern from the body (of a condemned criminal, executed by brainwipe) he's using and try again with the next HumanPopsicle.
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* CompoundInterestTimeTravelGambit: An unlucky HumanPopsicle in ''A World Out of Time'' attempts this but finds out the hard way that the courts of his time ruled those like him could not own property and thus the assets he set up for himself were long gone.
* CryonicsFailure: In ''The Legacy of Heorot'', the cryonics used to get the colony ship to the planet Avalon failed because while it had been tested, it hadn't been tested over durations as long as the voyage took. The colonists got brain damage, ranging from mild in some cases to severe in others, and a handful of the colonists couldn't be revived at all.
* CurseOfTheAncients: In ''The Flying Sorcerers'', we get to hear the traveller's translator-recorder's version of what he is really saying when he discovers the locals have sabotaged his spaceship.
* CryonicsFailure: In ''The Legacy of Heorot'', the cryonics used to get the colony ship to the planet Avalon failed because while it had been tested, it hadn't been tested over durations as long as the voyage took. The colonists got brain damage, ranging from mild in some cases to severe in others, and a handful of the colonists couldn't be revived at all.
* CurseOfTheAncients: In ''The Flying Sorcerers'', we get to hear the traveller's translator-recorder's version of what he is really saying when he discovers the locals have sabotaged his spaceship.
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* TimeMachine: In the Hanville Svetz stories, Svetz is from a time where most animals are extinct, and he uses a time machine to obtain animals for the global zoo. The gimmick of the series is that time travel is actually impossible, and instead of the real past the machine takes him into fictional or mythological pasts. When he tries to find a horse, he comes back with a unicorn, and his attempt to capture a gila monster nets a ''fire-breathing dragon''. He does manage to acquire a regular whale... except that it's Literature/MobyDick in the flesh -- complete with a dead Captain Ahab still in its jaws -- and he had to avoid the Leviathan to capture it.
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The Magic Goes Away, Known Space, The Mote In Gods Eye, Footfall, Lucifers Hammer, Ringworld have their own example lists. Examples of Homage go on the page for the work doing the homaging.
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* BackgroundMagicField: Niven's take on Creator/RobertEHoward's Literature/ConanTheBarbarian series, his 'The Magic Goes Away' stories treat magic as a non-renewable resource that drives civilizational advance, then causes collapse when it is consumed, as an {{anvilicious}} allegory for modern civilization's reliance on fixed resources. Later less [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_catastrophe Malthusian]] stories in the series have humans smoothly making the transition from mystical resources to biological and technological resources.
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* BorrowedBiometricBypass: In the ''Known Space'' universe, [[OrganTheft organleggers were known to harvest people for their organs]]. In one "Gil the ARM" story, it's noted that eyes are particularly in demand by criminals, to get past retina scanners with transplanted eyes taken from organlegger victims.
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* ColonyDrop: Niven appears to visualize celestial mechanics and has a taste for things going badly wrong.
** Literature/TheMoteInGodsEye: The Moties are cursed with eternally reoccurring war. After an ancient asteroid war nearly wiped out the planet, the race was motivated (terrified) into moving every single comet and meteor in the system into more stable circular orbits, making it too fuel-intensive for future war-makers to use them to bomb the planet again.
** Literature/{{Footfall}}: Elephant-mentality invading alients "stomp" the Earth with a handy meteor to force surrender.
** Literature/LucifersHammer: A disaster story about a comet hitting the Earth and all its consequences.
** Literature/TheMagicGoesAway: The last god tries to smash the Moon into the Earth to restore magic.
** {{Ringworld}}'s Fist of God: A moon-sized asteroid collides with the Ringworld, massively deforming it.
** [[Literature/KnownSpace World of Ptavvs]]: A stasis field moving at relativistic speed slams into Pluto, punching it into a new orbit.
** ''A World Out of Time'', Earth develops extra-solar colonies, and they eventually go to war. By throwing planets at each other. Earth's colonies drop a gas giant into the sun, which causes it to heat up and kill most life on Earth and eventually become a red giant star. Lots of moving planets around follows, with the Earth eventually ending up as a satellite of Jupiter.
** Literature/TheMoteInGodsEye: The Moties are cursed with eternally reoccurring war. After an ancient asteroid war nearly wiped out the planet, the race was motivated (terrified) into moving every single comet and meteor in the system into more stable circular orbits, making it too fuel-intensive for future war-makers to use them to bomb the planet again.
** Literature/{{Footfall}}: Elephant-mentality invading alients "stomp" the Earth with a handy meteor to force surrender.
** Literature/LucifersHammer: A disaster story about a comet hitting the Earth and all its consequences.
** Literature/TheMagicGoesAway: The last god tries to smash the Moon into the Earth to restore magic.
** {{Ringworld}}'s Fist of God: A moon-sized asteroid collides with the Ringworld, massively deforming it.
** [[Literature/KnownSpace World of Ptavvs]]: A stasis field moving at relativistic speed slams into Pluto, punching it into a new orbit.
** ''A World Out of Time'', Earth develops extra-solar colonies, and they eventually go to war. By throwing planets at each other. Earth's colonies drop a gas giant into the sun, which causes it to heat up and kill most life on Earth and eventually become a red giant star. Lots of moving planets around follows, with the Earth eventually ending up as a satellite of Jupiter.
to:
* ColonyDrop: Niven appears to visualize celestial mechanics and has a taste for things going badly wrong.
** Literature/TheMoteInGodsEye: The Moties are cursed with eternally reoccurring war. After an ancient asteroid war nearly wiped out the planet, the race was motivated (terrified) into moving every single comet and meteor in the system into more stable circular orbits, making it too fuel-intensive for future war-makers to use them to bomb the planet again.
** Literature/{{Footfall}}: Elephant-mentality invading alients "stomp" the Earth with a handy meteor to force surrender.
** Literature/LucifersHammer: A disaster story about a comet hitting the Earth and all its consequences.
** Literature/TheMagicGoesAway: The last god tries to smash the Moon into the Earth to restore magic.
** {{Ringworld}}'s Fist of God: A moon-sized asteroid collides with the Ringworld, massively deforming it.
** [[Literature/KnownSpace World of Ptavvs]]: A stasis field moving at relativistic speed slams into Pluto, punching it into a new orbit.
**In ''A World Out of Time'', Earth develops extra-solar colonies, and they eventually go to war. By throwing planets at each other. Earth's colonies drop a gas giant into the sun, which causes it to heat up and kill most life on Earth and eventually become a red giant star. Lots of moving planets around follows, with the Earth eventually ending up as a satellite of Jupiter.
** Literature/TheMoteInGodsEye: The Moties are cursed with eternally reoccurring war. After an ancient asteroid war nearly wiped out the planet, the race was motivated (terrified) into moving every single comet and meteor in the system into more stable circular orbits, making it too fuel-intensive for future war-makers to use them to bomb the planet again.
** Literature/{{Footfall}}: Elephant-mentality invading alients "stomp" the Earth with a handy meteor to force surrender.
** Literature/LucifersHammer: A disaster story about a comet hitting the Earth and all its consequences.
** Literature/TheMagicGoesAway: The last god tries to smash the Moon into the Earth to restore magic.
** {{Ringworld}}'s Fist of God: A moon-sized asteroid collides with the Ringworld, massively deforming it.
** [[Literature/KnownSpace World of Ptavvs]]: A stasis field moving at relativistic speed slams into Pluto, punching it into a new orbit.
**
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* ExploitedImmunity:
** In one ''Draco Tavern'' story, the bartender is infected with a PuppeteerParasite sentient virus. It warns his friends that there's no way to get rid of it without killing the bartender too, only to be [[ShuttingUpNow told that it's treatable with sulfa drugs]] (which would destroy the virus without harming the bartender).
** In "The Lion In His Attic", a sorceress infiltrates a partially submerged castle by using magic to make the water withdraw. A man breaks her concentration and causes her spell to lapse, resulting in the water flooding back in and drowning her. The man doesn't care because he's a were-sea lion - he just changes to sea lion form and swims back to the surface.
* {{Homage}}: Every ''TabletopGame/MagicTheGathering'' veteran [[SdrawkcabName knows]] [[http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=159266 Nevinyrral's Disk]].
* HyperspaceIsAScaryPlace: Unlike the friendly story-writing tool that most authors envision, Niven's hyperspace is a place of death where any ship too deep in a gravity well will vanish forever. As well, the mere unsight of hyperspace's unseeability tends to rattle incautious viewers and can leave many insane. The Outsiders, who sell access to the realm, refuse to use it themselves. The Puppeteers, a race of cowards, would rather face relativistic radiation threatening their worlds than use hyperspace.
** In one ''Draco Tavern'' story, the bartender is infected with a PuppeteerParasite sentient virus. It warns his friends that there's no way to get rid of it without killing the bartender too, only to be [[ShuttingUpNow told that it's treatable with sulfa drugs]] (which would destroy the virus without harming the bartender).
** In "The Lion In His Attic", a sorceress infiltrates a partially submerged castle by using magic to make the water withdraw. A man breaks her concentration and causes her spell to lapse, resulting in the water flooding back in and drowning her. The man doesn't care because he's a were-sea lion - he just changes to sea lion form and swims back to the surface.
* {{Homage}}: Every ''TabletopGame/MagicTheGathering'' veteran [[SdrawkcabName knows]] [[http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=159266 Nevinyrral's Disk]].
* HyperspaceIsAScaryPlace: Unlike the friendly story-writing tool that most authors envision, Niven's hyperspace is a place of death where any ship too deep in a gravity well will vanish forever. As well, the mere unsight of hyperspace's unseeability tends to rattle incautious viewers and can leave many insane. The Outsiders, who sell access to the realm, refuse to use it themselves. The Puppeteers, a race of cowards, would rather face relativistic radiation threatening their worlds than use hyperspace.
to:
* ExploitedImmunity:
**ExploitedImmunity: In one ''Draco Tavern'' story, the bartender is infected with a PuppeteerParasite sentient virus. It warns his friends that there's no way to get rid of it without killing the bartender too, only to be [[ShuttingUpNow told that it's treatable with sulfa drugs]] (which would destroy the virus without harming the bartender).
** In "The Lion In His Attic", a sorceress infiltrates a partially submerged castle by using magic to make the water withdraw. A man breaks her concentration and causes her spell to lapse, resulting in the water flooding back in and drowning her. The man doesn't care because he's a were-sea lion - he just changes to sea lion form and swims back to the surface.
* {{Homage}}: Every ''TabletopGame/MagicTheGathering'' veteran [[SdrawkcabName knows]] [[http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=159266 Nevinyrral's Disk]].
* HyperspaceIsAScaryPlace: Unlike the friendly story-writing tool that most authors envision, Niven's hyperspace is a place of death where any ship too deep in a gravity well will vanish forever. As well, the mere unsight of hyperspace's unseeability tends to rattle incautious viewers and can leave many insane. The Outsiders, who sell access to the realm, refuse to use it themselves. The Puppeteers, a race of cowards, would rather face relativistic radiation threatening their worlds than use hyperspace.bartender).
**
** In "The Lion In His Attic", a sorceress infiltrates a partially submerged castle by using magic to make the water withdraw. A man breaks her concentration and causes her spell to lapse, resulting in the water flooding back in and drowning her. The man doesn't care because he's a were-sea lion - he just changes to sea lion form and swims back to the surface.
* {{Homage}}: Every ''TabletopGame/MagicTheGathering'' veteran [[SdrawkcabName knows]] [[http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=159266 Nevinyrral's Disk]].
* HyperspaceIsAScaryPlace: Unlike the friendly story-writing tool that most authors envision, Niven's hyperspace is a place of death where any ship too deep in a gravity well will vanish forever. As well, the mere unsight of hyperspace's unseeability tends to rattle incautious viewers and can leave many insane. The Outsiders, who sell access to the realm, refuse to use it themselves. The Puppeteers, a race of cowards, would rather face relativistic radiation threatening their worlds than use hyperspace.
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* OrganTheft: Niven's early Literature/KnownSpace work ''thoroughly'' explored the dangers of transplant technology outstripping organ synthesis, to the point where lawmakers would obsessively change laws to make all crimes into death sentences just to keep up with the demand for organs. With the price of organs being so high due to demand, it's almost inevitable that illegal organ harvesting becomes a frequent concern, enough so that the process becomes known as "organlegging", a {{Portmanteau}} of "organ" and "bootlegging".
Deleted line(s) 75 (click to see context) :
* ZeroGSpot: The problems of low gravity sex are discussed in ''The Patchwork Girl''.
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from trope pages
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* BigDumbObject: ''Rainbow Mars'' features a tree large enough to conceivably be used as a space elevator. Turns out to be a very, very bad thing to have on your planet though, as it literally requires the entire planet's water supply to survive.
* BizarreAlienPsychology: Most of the alien races in the Draco Tavern stories are this, to varying degrees. The Chirps are either benign despots or monumental liars, and no-one has any real idea which; the Gligstithoptok breed human meat in hydroponic tanks for food, but have a strict taboo against actual killing; the Folk lease areas for hunting and are good company afterwards, but too dangerous to approach beforehand; Bazin either has a profound philosophy or is basically an inter-galactic stuntman; and so it goes on.
* BizarreSexualDimorphism: In the ''Draco Tavern'' stories, all the Chirpsithra were female. There are males, but the Chirpsithra won't talk about them. In one of the stories, the Chirp males are revealed. [[spoiler:They're the "red demons", essentially mindless beasts.]]
* BizarreAlienPsychology: Most of the alien races in the Draco Tavern stories are this, to varying degrees. The Chirps are either benign despots or monumental liars, and no-one has any real idea which; the Gligstithoptok breed human meat in hydroponic tanks for food, but have a strict taboo against actual killing; the Folk lease areas for hunting and are good company afterwards, but too dangerous to approach beforehand; Bazin either has a profound philosophy or is basically an inter-galactic stuntman; and so it goes on.
* BizarreSexualDimorphism: In the ''Draco Tavern'' stories, all the Chirpsithra were female. There are males, but the Chirpsithra won't talk about them. In one of the stories, the Chirp males are revealed. [[spoiler:They're the "red demons", essentially mindless beasts.]]
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* TimeAbyss: One Draco Tavern story features a Chirpsithra who's visited Earth before (and looks quite different to the modern Chirps, and it isn't just her extensive medical modifications, as she's a different height). Her last visit was in the ''Precambrian''.
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from trope pages
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* AfraidOfNeedles: The protagonist of ''A World out of Time'' died of cancer before the book begins ([[HumanPopsicle he got better]]). He reflects on how that experience cured him of any fear of needles.
* AlienSky:
** ''The Flying Sorcerers'' is set on a planet with two suns (a big red one and small blue one that orbits it) and no less than ''eleven'' moons ("...three body formation makes capture easy..."), as a plot point. The system also has no other planets and is inside a giant dust cloud, so there are no visible stars, although the formations of the moons are observed in a similar way to how we observe constellations.
** In ''A World Out of Time'', Niven gives us an Earth that has been moved to orbit Jupiter, because [[spoiler:a planet was dropped into the Sun during an interstellar war, making Earth's former orbit uninhabitably hot]].
** ''The Integral Trees'' is, if anything, more bizarre. The "planet" ''is'' the sky. The Ring is a (mostly) gas torus from a supermassive gas giant in close orbit around a neutron star, which is a binary with a yellow dwarf.
* AllMythsAreTrue: In the Hanville Svetz stories, time travel has an inherent tendency to get mixed up with mythology (you go looking for a horse, you find a unicorn). The series culminates in ''Rainbow Mars'', featuring a version of the Red Planet where every fictional account of Mars from ''Literature/TheWarOfTheWorlds'' on is true simultaneously.
* AmazonBrigade: In ''The Integral Trees'', the Triune Squads are made up of [[CelibateHero women who refuse to marry]], women who [[HideYourLesbians love women]], or those who are [[GenderBender "women" by courtesy only]]. They are sent to patrol the Trunk, a hazardous and seemingly pointless duty, to make up for not doing their "real" duty to the tribe [[StayInTheKitchen by providing children]].
* {{Arcology}}: In ''Oath of Fealty'', the arcology of Todos Santos is just outside Los Angeles and has a somewhat hostile relationship with the city.
* ArcWords: In ''Oath of Fealty'', "Think of it as evolution in action" is explicitly developed as this.
* ArtificialMeat: The Draco Tavern story "Assimilating Our Culture, That's What They're Doing!" not only features meat cultures grown from humans, but the aliens growing the human meat paid lavish royalties to the human cell donors -- who were ''still'' upset about it.
* AlienSky:
** ''The Flying Sorcerers'' is set on a planet with two suns (a big red one and small blue one that orbits it) and no less than ''eleven'' moons ("...three body formation makes capture easy..."), as a plot point. The system also has no other planets and is inside a giant dust cloud, so there are no visible stars, although the formations of the moons are observed in a similar way to how we observe constellations.
** In ''A World Out of Time'', Niven gives us an Earth that has been moved to orbit Jupiter, because [[spoiler:a planet was dropped into the Sun during an interstellar war, making Earth's former orbit uninhabitably hot]].
** ''The Integral Trees'' is, if anything, more bizarre. The "planet" ''is'' the sky. The Ring is a (mostly) gas torus from a supermassive gas giant in close orbit around a neutron star, which is a binary with a yellow dwarf.
* AllMythsAreTrue: In the Hanville Svetz stories, time travel has an inherent tendency to get mixed up with mythology (you go looking for a horse, you find a unicorn). The series culminates in ''Rainbow Mars'', featuring a version of the Red Planet where every fictional account of Mars from ''Literature/TheWarOfTheWorlds'' on is true simultaneously.
* AmazonBrigade: In ''The Integral Trees'', the Triune Squads are made up of [[CelibateHero women who refuse to marry]], women who [[HideYourLesbians love women]], or those who are [[GenderBender "women" by courtesy only]]. They are sent to patrol the Trunk, a hazardous and seemingly pointless duty, to make up for not doing their "real" duty to the tribe [[StayInTheKitchen by providing children]].
* {{Arcology}}: In ''Oath of Fealty'', the arcology of Todos Santos is just outside Los Angeles and has a somewhat hostile relationship with the city.
* ArcWords: In ''Oath of Fealty'', "Think of it as evolution in action" is explicitly developed as this.
* ArtificialMeat: The Draco Tavern story "Assimilating Our Culture, That's What They're Doing!" not only features meat cultures grown from humans, but the aliens growing the human meat paid lavish royalties to the human cell donors -- who were ''still'' upset about it.
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* BlackmailBackfire: In "$16,949", [[spoiler:a blackmail victim tries to blackmail his blackmailer, who goes to another one of his victims to resolve the problem permanently.]]
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* RemittanceMan: In ''The Legacy of Heorot'', Cadman Weyland describes another member of the first interstellar expedition as "the ultimate remittance man".
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* {{Homage}}: Every ''TabletopGame/MagicTheGathering'' veteran [[SdrawkcabName knows]] [[http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=159266 Nevinyrral's Disk]].
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credit where credit's due :)
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* ''Literature/{{Footfall}}''
* ''Literature/DreamPark''
* ''Literature/DreamPark''
to:
* ''Literature/{{Footfall}}''
''Literature/{{Footfall}}'' (with Creator/JerryPournelle)
*''Literature/DreamPark''''Literature/DreamPark'' (with Stephen Barnes)
*
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* ''Literature/LucifersHammer''
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* ''Literature/LucifersHammer''''Literature/LucifersHammer'' (with Creator/JerryPournelle)
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* ''Literature/TheMoteInGodsEye''
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* ''Literature/TheMoteInGodsEye''
''Literature/TheMoteInGodsEye'' (with Creator/JerryPournelle)
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* EcoTerrorist: The FROMATES ([=FRiends=] Of Man And The Earth) terrorist group in ''Oath of Fealty''. They totally oppose the arcology Todos Santos and commit kidnapping, attempted arson, murder and attempted mass murder in their campaign to destroy it (and everyone living in it).
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Changed line(s) 9,10 (click to see context) from:
Also responsible for numerous works with Jerry Pournelle, including ''Literature/TheMoteInGodsEye'' (from which the term for a third hand -- the "gripping hand" -- comes. The phrase is used in the context of there being three options from which to choose, the dominant concern being the gripping hand[[note]] the motie's strongest arm[[/note]]) and ''Literature/LucifersHammer''. He's also worked with Steven Barnes on the ''Literature/DreamPark'' series.
to:
Also responsible for numerous works with Jerry Pournelle, Creator/JerryPournelle, including ''Literature/TheMoteInGodsEye'' (from which the term for a third hand -- the "gripping hand" -- comes. The phrase is used in the context of there being three options from which to choose, the dominant concern being the gripping hand[[note]] the motie's strongest arm[[/note]]) and ''Literature/LucifersHammer''. He's also worked with Steven Barnes on the ''Literature/DreamPark'' series.
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None
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* BackgroundMagicField: Niven's take on RobertEHoward's ConanTheBarbarian series, his 'The Magic Goes Away' stories treat magic as a non-renewable resource that drives civilizational advance, then causes collapse when it is consumed, as an {{anvilicious}} allegory for modern civilization's reliance on fixed resources. Later less [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_catastrophe Malthusian]] stories in the series have humans smoothly making the transition from mystical resources to biological and technological resources.
to:
* BackgroundMagicField: Niven's take on RobertEHoward's ConanTheBarbarian Creator/RobertEHoward's Literature/ConanTheBarbarian series, his 'The Magic Goes Away' stories treat magic as a non-renewable resource that drives civilizational advance, then causes collapse when it is consumed, as an {{anvilicious}} allegory for modern civilization's reliance on fixed resources. Later less [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_catastrophe Malthusian]] stories in the series have humans smoothly making the transition from mystical resources to biological and technological resources.
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* NeverLand: ''A World Out of Time'' features an immortality treatment that only works on pre-pubescents. The far future Earth is ruled by the Boys, who exterminated the Girls, and then seem to enjoy living a tribal hunter-gatherer existence with stone-age technology, though they fully understand and routinely repair more complicated devices. Adults are basically slaves kept to breed more Boys.
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None
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** ''A World Out of Time'', Earth develops extra-solar colonies, and they eventually go to war. By throwing planets at each other. Earth's colonies drop a gas giant into the sun, which causes it to heat up and kill most life on Earth and eventually become a red giant star. Lots of moving planets around follows, with the Earth eventually ending up as a satellite of Jupiter.
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None
Changed line(s) 43 (click to see context) from:
** TheMoteInGodsEye: The Moties are cursed with eternally reoccurring war. After an ancient asteroid war nearly wiped out the planet, the race was motivated (terrified) into moving every single comet and meteor in the system into more stable circular orbits, making it too fuel-intensive for future war-makers to use them to bomb the planet again.
to:
** TheMoteInGodsEye: Literature/TheMoteInGodsEye: The Moties are cursed with eternally reoccurring war. After an ancient asteroid war nearly wiped out the planet, the race was motivated (terrified) into moving every single comet and meteor in the system into more stable circular orbits, making it too fuel-intensive for future war-makers to use them to bomb the planet again.
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None
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* OrganTheft: Niven's early Literature/KnownSpace work ''thoroughly'' explored the dangers of transplant technology outstripping organ synthesis, to the point where lawmakers would change to make all crimes into death sentences just to keep up with the demand for organs. With the price of organs being so high due to demand, it's almost inevitable that illegal organ harvesting becomes a frequent concern, enough so that the process becomes known as "organlegging", a {{Portmanteau}} of "organ" and "bootlegging".
to:
* OrganTheft: Niven's early Literature/KnownSpace work ''thoroughly'' explored the dangers of transplant technology outstripping organ synthesis, to the point where lawmakers would obsessively change laws to make all crimes into death sentences just to keep up with the demand for organs. With the price of organs being so high due to demand, it's almost inevitable that illegal organ harvesting becomes a frequent concern, enough so that the process becomes known as "organlegging", a {{Portmanteau}} of "organ" and "bootlegging".
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None
Changed line(s) 44,46 (click to see context) from:
** {{Footfall}}: Elephant-mentality invading alients "stomp" the Earth with a handy meteor to force surrender.
** LucifersHammer: A disaster story about a comet hitting the Earth and all its consequences.
** TheMagicGoesAway: The last god tries to smash the Moon into the Earth to restore magic.
** LucifersHammer: A disaster story about a comet hitting the Earth and all its consequences.
** TheMagicGoesAway: The last god tries to smash the Moon into the Earth to restore magic.
to:
** {{Footfall}}: Literature/{{Footfall}}: Elephant-mentality invading alients "stomp" the Earth with a handy meteor to force surrender.
**LucifersHammer: Literature/LucifersHammer: A disaster story about a comet hitting the Earth and all its consequences.
**TheMagicGoesAway: Literature/TheMagicGoesAway: The last god tries to smash the Moon into the Earth to restore magic.
**
**
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* BorrowedBiometricBypass: In the ''Known Space'' universe, [[OrganTheft organleggers were known to harvest people for their organs]]. In one "Gil the ARM" story, it's noted that eyes are particularly in demand by criminals, to get past retina scanners with transplanted eyes taken from organlegger victims.
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Reworked the entry to more reflect the actual trope. Also, don't hide trope titles under potholes.
Changed line(s) 52,53 (click to see context) from:
* IfJesusThenAliens: Also used in ''Fallen Angels'' - the novel's "ruling coalition of proxmires, falwells, rifkins and maclaines" is composed of groups currently regard each other, sometimes literally, as minions of the Devil. Niven(and [[Literature/StateOfFear later]], Creator/MichaelCrichton) noticed that if those four blocs ever realized that they are NotSoDifferent - that they all yearn for YeGoodeOldeDays - they could easily gain bipartisan support(Green liberals and fundie conservatives) and pretty much TakeOverTheWorld.
* [[Main/OrganTheft Organ Banks]]: Niven's early Literature/KnownSpace work ''thoroughly'' explored the dangers of transplant technology outstripping organ synthesis, to the point where lawmaker morality would change to make all crimes into death sentences just to keep up with the demand for organs. These cautionary tales are already affecting legal policy as modern medical science is catching up with Niven's fictional medical science.
* [[Main/OrganTheft Organ Banks]]: Niven's early Literature/KnownSpace work ''thoroughly'' explored the dangers of transplant technology outstripping organ synthesis, to the point where lawmaker morality would change to make all crimes into death sentences just to keep up with the demand for organs. These cautionary tales are already affecting legal policy as modern medical science is catching up with Niven's fictional medical science.
to:
* IfJesusThenAliens: Also used in ''Fallen Angels'' - the novel's "ruling coalition of proxmires, falwells, rifkins and maclaines" is composed of groups currently regard each other, sometimes literally, as minions of the Devil. Niven(and [[Literature/StateOfFear later]], Creator/MichaelCrichton) noticed that if those four blocs ever realized that they are NotSoDifferent - that they all yearn for YeGoodeOldeDays - they could easily gain bipartisan support(Green support (Green liberals and fundie conservatives) and pretty much TakeOverTheWorld.
*[[Main/OrganTheft Organ Banks]]: OrganTheft: Niven's early Literature/KnownSpace work ''thoroughly'' explored the dangers of transplant technology outstripping organ synthesis, to the point where lawmaker morality lawmakers would change to make all crimes into death sentences just to keep up with the demand for organs. These cautionary tales are already affecting legal policy With the price of organs being so high due to demand, it's almost inevitable that illegal organ harvesting becomes a frequent concern, enough so that the process becomes known as modern medical science is catching up with Niven's fictional medical science."organlegging", a {{Portmanteau}} of "organ" and "bootlegging".
*
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* [[Main/OrganTheft Organ Banks]]: Niven's early Literature/KnownSpace work ''thoroughly'' explored the dangers of transplant technology outstripping organ synthesis, to the point where lawmaker morality would change to make all crimes into death sentences just to keep up with the demand for organs. These cautionary tales are already affecting legal policy as modern medical science is catching up with Niven's fictional medical science.
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* {{Autodoc}}: A portable medical resource, these are virtually omnipresent, helping to drive stories with easily accessed health. They range in size from portable units to provide medicines or induce comas to coffin-sized units that can replace limbs. They also become more technologically advanced, starting with pill-pushing units and ending with {{Nanomachines}} that can rebuild anything given time, resources, and programming.
* BackgroundMagicField: Niven's take on RobertEHoward's ConanTheBarbarian series, his 'The Magic Goes Away' stories treat magic as a non-renewable resource that drives civilizational advance, then causes collapse when it is consumed, as an {{anvilicious}} allegory for modern civilization's reliance on fixed resources. Later less [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_catastrophe Malthusian]] stories in the series have humans smoothly making the transition from mystical resources to biological and technological resources.
* BackgroundMagicField: Niven's take on RobertEHoward's ConanTheBarbarian series, his 'The Magic Goes Away' stories treat magic as a non-renewable resource that drives civilizational advance, then causes collapse when it is consumed, as an {{anvilicious}} allegory for modern civilization's reliance on fixed resources. Later less [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_catastrophe Malthusian]] stories in the series have humans smoothly making the transition from mystical resources to biological and technological resources.
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* ColonyDrop: Niven appears to visualize celestial mechanics and has a taste for things going badly wrong.
** TheMoteInGodsEye: The Moties are cursed with eternally reoccurring war. After an ancient asteroid war nearly wiped out the planet, the race was motivated (terrified) into moving every single comet and meteor in the system into more stable circular orbits, making it too fuel-intensive for future war-makers to use them to bomb the planet again.
** {{Footfall}}: Elephant-mentality invading alients "stomp" the Earth with a handy meteor to force surrender.
** LucifersHammer: A disaster story about a comet hitting the Earth and all its consequences.
** TheMagicGoesAway: The last god tries to smash the Moon into the Earth to restore magic.
** {{Ringworld}}'s Fist of God: A moon-sized asteroid collides with the Ringworld, massively deforming it.
** [[Literature/KnownSpace World of Ptavvs]]: A stasis field moving at relativistic speed slams into Pluto, punching it into a new orbit.
** TheMoteInGodsEye: The Moties are cursed with eternally reoccurring war. After an ancient asteroid war nearly wiped out the planet, the race was motivated (terrified) into moving every single comet and meteor in the system into more stable circular orbits, making it too fuel-intensive for future war-makers to use them to bomb the planet again.
** {{Footfall}}: Elephant-mentality invading alients "stomp" the Earth with a handy meteor to force surrender.
** LucifersHammer: A disaster story about a comet hitting the Earth and all its consequences.
** TheMagicGoesAway: The last god tries to smash the Moon into the Earth to restore magic.
** {{Ringworld}}'s Fist of God: A moon-sized asteroid collides with the Ringworld, massively deforming it.
** [[Literature/KnownSpace World of Ptavvs]]: A stasis field moving at relativistic speed slams into Pluto, punching it into a new orbit.
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* HyperspaceIsAScaryPlace: Unlike the friendly story-writing tool that most authors envision, Niven's hyperspace is a place of death where any ship too deep in a gravity well will vanish forever. As well, the mere unsight of hyperspace's unseeability tends to rattle incautious viewers and can leave many insane. The Outsiders, who sell access to the realm, refuse to use it themselves. The Puppeteers, a race of cowards, would rather face relativistic radiation threatening their worlds than use hyperspace.
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None
Changed line(s) 11,12 (click to see context) from:
Niven's other notable work includes ''The Integral Trees'' and its sequels, ''A World Out Of Time'' which examines the implications of slower-than-light relativistic travel used as a form of TimeTravel, and the {{Fantasy}} series of ''Literature/TheMagicGoesAway'' ([[TropeNamer Namer]] of [[TheMagicGoesAway that trope]]). He also wrote the influential ''[[http://www.rawbw.com/~svw/superman.html Man Of Steel, Woman Of Kleenex]]'', referenced often in geek culture, and some of the backstory for the post-CrisisOnInfiniteEarths GreenLantern [[TheChosenMany Corps]] origins.
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Niven's other notable work includes ''The Integral Trees'' and its sequels, ''A World Out Of Time'' which examines the implications of slower-than-light relativistic travel used as a form of TimeTravel, and the {{Fantasy}} series of ''Literature/TheMagicGoesAway'' ([[TropeNamer Namer]] of [[TheMagicGoesAway that trope]]). He also wrote the influential ''[[http://www.rawbw.com/~svw/superman.html Man Of Steel, Woman Of Kleenex]]'', referenced often in geek culture, and some of the backstory for the post-CrisisOnInfiniteEarths post-ComicBook/CrisisOnInfiniteEarths GreenLantern [[TheChosenMany Corps]] origins.
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no page for it, the only FA on the wiki is for an unrelated movie with the same name.
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* ButWhatAboutTheAstronauts: Kind of used in ''Literature/FallenAngels'' - a radical environmentalist regime rules the Earth and the only people left with freedom and high technology are those living on a moon base or in an orbital habitat made by combining the Mir and (never actually built) Freedom space stations. However, as another ice age is fast descending upon the Earth, it looks like it could become a straight example.
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* ButWhatAboutTheAstronauts: Kind of used in ''Literature/FallenAngels'' ''Fallen Angels'' - a radical environmentalist regime rules the Earth and the only people left with freedom and high technology are those living on a moon base or in an orbital habitat made by combining the Mir and (never actually built) Freedom space stations. However, as another ice age is fast descending upon the Earth, it looks like it could become a straight example.
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* IfJesusThenAliens: Also used in ''Literature/FallenAngels'' - the novel's "ruling coalition of proxmires, falwells, rifkins and maclaines" is composed of groups currently regard each other, sometimes literally, as minions of the Devil. Niven(and [[Literature/StateOfFear later]], Creator/MichaelCrichton) noticed that if those four blocs ever realized that they are NotSoDifferent - that they all yearn for YeGoodeOldeDays - they could easily gain bipartisan support(Green liberals and fundie conservatives) and pretty much TakeOverTheWorld.
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* IfJesusThenAliens: Also used in ''Literature/FallenAngels'' ''Fallen Angels'' - the novel's "ruling coalition of proxmires, falwells, rifkins and maclaines" is composed of groups currently regard each other, sometimes literally, as minions of the Devil. Niven(and [[Literature/StateOfFear later]], Creator/MichaelCrichton) noticed that if those four blocs ever realized that they are NotSoDifferent - that they all yearn for YeGoodeOldeDays - they could easily gain bipartisan support(Green liberals and fundie conservatives) and pretty much TakeOverTheWorld.
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* ''Literature/{{Protector}}''
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** ''Literature/{{Protector}}''
