A World Out of Time

By: Larry Niven

Narrated by: Tom Weiner

Length: 7 hrs and 54 mins

Publisher's summary

After more than two hundred years as a corpsicle, Jaybee Corbell awoke in someone else’s body and under threat of instant annihilation if he made a wrong move while they were training him for a one-way mission to the stars.

But Corbell bided his time and made his own move. Once he was outbound, where the society that ruled Earth could not reach him, he headed his starship toward the galactic core, where the unimaginable energies of the universe wrenched the fabric of time and space and promised final escape from his captors.

Then he returned to an Earth eons older than the one he’d left, a planet that had had three million years to develop perils he had never dreamed of - perils that became nightmares that he had to escape... somehow.

Larry Niven is the multiple Hugo and Nebula award–winning author of the Ringworld series, as well as many other science fiction masterpieces. His Beowulf’s Children, coauthored with Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes, was a New York Times best seller. He lives in Chatsworth, California.

©1976 Larry Niven (P)2012 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Critic reviews

“This fantastic novel is a mix of Niven hard science and a time-travel concept to boggle the mind.…Even after the last line the feeling remains of the story still rushing on into the magic distance of the universe.” (A. E. van Vogt, winner of the SFWA Grand Master Award)

“Niven rams this fantastic tale at the reader with taut authority, mixing hard science with mind-boggling concepts of time and space to give us a whole new kind of trip.” ( Publishers Weekly)

“Niven’s intoxicating concepts, ideas, scientific extrapolations, and exotic hardware bubble up from every page. Rich in imagination and astonishing in breadth…Will challenge the most sophisticated readers.” ( Booklist)

Great story, very strange but good.

The journey of several lives, an implausible situation, ridiculous over the top characters, but I still really enjoyed it. The state has all the makings of a catastrophic future.

like teller the story a little hard to follow

I will listen to it again. maybe better the second round. because I believe the story is engaging.

Don't drink while listening to this one

If you could sum up A World Out of Time in three words, what would they be?

Love and Hate

What did you like best about this story?

I loved the narration and the sense of wit of the main character. Some very cool concepts for sci fi fans

Which scene was your favorite?

anytime the main character interacted with his computer on the shace ship

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

out of body out of world experience

Any additional comments?

Do not drink while listening to this book as you will have no idea what is happening!

Relocating planets is just one of the cool topics!

This is my third Niven book and I just can't get enough. My favorite book so far as been Ringworld but I also found this one to be very interesting. It involves plenty of space travel, some AI, and plenty of dystopia. I loved how the novel technically takes place over a huge time period because the main character goes into cryo so often. This book encompasses so many theories of how the world could go in the future: What if girls ruled the sky and boys ruled the earth? What if adults were just used to make children? What if there was immortality? What if you could move planets? Plus there's a whole Les Mis kinda part where a government official is obsessed with bringing to justice the main character. Lots of action and plenty of interesting science.

Not bad, but not the first book I'd recommend.

What did you like best about A World Out of Time? What did you like least?

I enjoyed the ideas of what the future may hold. I felt that it lagged in the middle.

How would you have changed the story to make it more enjoyable?

I don't know if it's the sort of book you could change much.

Which character – as performed by Tom Weiner – was your favorite?

Jaybee Corbell

Did A World Out of Time inspire you to do anything?

Ummm nope.

It's an older book, but hey I liked it.

it was well thought out and written story. The narrator spoke and played the characters in a very believable manner. Overall I enjoyed this story.

the best

this is one of the best books I have ever read. I reccomend it to any science fan

1970s hard science-fiction exemplified

Larry Niven‘s approach is exemplary for hard science fiction of the 1970s. Smart and clever, the science is impeccable (for 1976), imaginative, and indisputably original. Although the characters are a little flat, they remain interesting enough to compel the story.

Tom Weiner reads this story in a fast-paced, clipped manner that matches Niven’s style quite well. His deep and dulcet voice adds a richness to the story that you can’t get just from reading the text.

Somewhat disjointed and dated

Larry Niven's A World Out of Time is a rather hodge-podge tale attempting to integrate several sci-fi concepts that only results in a poorly strung together series of vignettes. The story opens with the reanimating of a cryogenically stored human, Corbell, who had inoperable cancer in the 1970's, but after 220 years has been transferred to another body (apparently, cancer has not been licked in 200 years). The current 'state' is an oppressive totalitarian entity that decides Corbel is perfect for a ramject pilot to explore new worlds. He sets off but elects to go AWOL and heads for the galactic center along with an AI entity of the state that disagrees with him, but cannot disobey. He manages to skirt the edge of a black hole and heads back to Earth, but now three million years in the future. At this point, the tale becomes hard to follow. The solar system has been rearranged (the backstory for this slowly emerges), Corbel is aging and looking for a fountain of youth. Earth's climate has changed. He is continually captured and escapes from a female counterpart who is an aging pilot for a previously settled human world and the 'boys' (who possess immortality) who at some point defeated the 'girls' and have enslaved the 'dikta's' (regular humans) to replenish their stock. Eventually he finds immortality by accident and uses that to engage his only peer to order his ship to readjust Earth's orbit for more favorable conditions.

Niven sorta pulls out the kitchen sink of sci-fi elements including cryogenic freezing, a black hole at the galactic core, relativistic time effects, planetary engineering, immortality, future societal fragmentation, etc. While the individual vignettes are intriguing, the whole story is badly welded together. At the same time, it's hard to envision a totalitarian state focused on population control to be much interested in space exploration since if there's too many people, they can be eliminated simply by making up crimes. There's inadequate backstory or rationale to adequately explain the current state of affairs after three million years, especially with technology sufficient to move planets. Any sense of continuity would have been lost during that time.

The narration is good with reasonable character distinction and moderately quick pacing.

decent story, iffy narration that slowly improved

Narrator was initially extremely monotone. perhaps that's the wrong word, it was binary. "soft soft hard soft hard". no emotion though, no intonation of the sentence being spoken. the narration improved over the course of the book, but it was still a stark contrast to the narration of ringworld and ringworld engineer.