Hey, just so you know ... this post is now about 15 years and 3 months old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.

Phssthpok the Pak had been traveling for most of his thirty-two thousand years. His mission: save, develop, and protect the group of Pak breeders sent out into space some two and a half million years before …

Brennan was a Belter, the product of a fiercely independent, somewhat anarchic society living in, on, and around an outer asteroid belt. The Belters were rebels, one and all, and Brennan was a smuggler. The Belt worlds had been tracking the Pak ship for days – Brennan figured to meet that ship first …

He was never seen again — at least not by those alive at the time.

While flying to LA and back for Christmas, I finished Larry Niven’s “Protector.” This Known Space novel was a quick, easy, and enjoyable read at just over 200 pages.

“Protector” introduces us to the Pak, a long-lived species with three distinct phases: Child, Breeder, and Protector. The Tree-of-Life plant controls the transformation of Breeders into Protectors, whose sole purpose is to protect its descendants. If a Protector becomes childless, it loses the will to continue eating Tree-of-Life and eventually dies unless it can find a cause to keep it going.

In the first half of the book, Phssthpok, a childless Protector, has been travelling for some 33,000 years in search of a colony of Pak who set out on their own over 2.5 million years previously. He enters the Sol system and encounters Jack Brennan, a Belter who accidentally eats Tree-of-Life and turns into a Protector (as you can guess, humans are the descendants of the original Pak colony that settled on Earth millions of years ago).

The second half of the novel takes place some 220 years later. Brennan the Protector has learned of a Pak fleet on its way to Earth and is determined to protect his “descendants” (i.e., the human race) from possible extinction.

As with the other Niven novels I’ve read so far (i.e., the “Ringworld” series), the scale of time and distance takes some getting used to. I mean, we’re talking about events crossing millions of years (time) and light years (space). This book takes place a long time before the Ringworld books as well so there is no faster-than-light (i.e., hyperspace) travel … it takes a loooong time to get from place to place (like, years). The hard science is sometimes hard to follow as well, but that’s what I like about Niven’s stuff … it seems practical the way he describes it in such detail.

I’ve got one more Niven book on my schedule to read. For Christmas I got “The Gripping Hand” which is a sequel to “The Mote in God’s Eye” (written with Jerry Pournelle). First, though, I’ve got to brush up on my zombie war history. More on that later …