Product Description

250 years ago, the starcruiser "Argos" brought the first settlers to Destiny - and abandoned them there. As the craft departed, it hovered above the planet and seared a wide Road into the rock. No settler has ever returned from the Road, but accused of murder, Jemmy Bloocher has no other escape.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1327379 in Books
• Published on: 1998-05-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 448 pages

TIME OUT
'Niven has ideas the size of planets.'

TOM CLANCY
'A writer of supreme talent.'

GREGORY BENFORD
'The paradigm SF personality of the last several decades.'

Customer Reviews

How can people not like this
This is one of Larry Niven's best novels, if not THE best.
Humanity is colonising an alien world, but they seem unlike your 'normal' humans, lack of adventure, no questions, don't rock the boat. Jemmy is of a different mold and wants to explore - how he does it and what he meets on the road are the stuff of the old-style Niven.
Well-described, thoughtfully worked-out, this book had me gripped.

The book begs for a sequel - please, Larry!

Not Niven's best, but there's enough here to satisfy
This is an odd book. It's as if Larry Niven had deliberately set out to do something different from what he has done before. In this he succeeds, but also leaves his strengths behind.

Destiny is an attractive world, with a potentially fatal drawback for its human settlers - the local biology, while not especially antagonistic to human life, won't sustain it either. Humans need to eat something called "speckles" in order to survive. Niven makes a big deal over this - perhaps too much. He uses it to revive the idea of the water empire, which he did to death twenty years ago in A WORLD OUT OF TIME/CHILDREN OF THE STATE.

The structure of the book is odd, too. At one point, and for no very good reason, there is an hiatus of twenty-seven years. Our hero, who changes his name regularly depending upon whom he wishes to avoid, dosesn't seem to have changed much over this period, so why...?

Niven has done his homework on the sociology and geography, the biochemistry and the cuisine (it's a nice touch to make his hero a cook) of his creation but it all seems a bit mechanistic. There's very little wonder in this world, which is a shame. Wonder is in plentiful supply in Niven's best work.

A Niven Classic
Destiny's Road is arguably one of Niven's finest and most thought-provoking works. It follows the life of Jemmy Bloocher as he explores the Road, a flat track seared into the planet's surface between colony planet Destiny's two main settlements, Spiral Town and Destiny Town. Along the way he learns far more than he should about Destiny's secrets.

Highly recommended.