Larry Niven
Flatlander (C) (1995)
Reviewed: 1996-02-20

In Larry Niven's Known Space universe, "flatlander" is the colloquial term for an Earthman. This book collects all the stories centering around the adventures of one particular flatlander, Gil "The Arm" Hamilton, ARM by trade. Gil's nickname derives from his psychic powers: he has an imaginary arm, giving him well-defined powers of extrasensory perception and psychokinesis.

It's the 2120s. With eighteen billion people, Earth is a crowded place. Advances in medical technology have made organ transplants commonplace, leading to a sharp increase in the demand for donor organs. Reintroducing capital punishment and breaking up condemned criminals provided a new source, and over time the voting public, with their desire to seemingly live forever, have imposed the death penalty for more and more crimes, eventually making offenses like drunken driving and income tax evasion organ bank crimes. It's a brave new world.

Still, the ghoulish hunger for fresh organs often cannot be satisfied. New times breed new crimes: organleggers who trade in flesh, killing people and selling the organs. Along with enforcing the Fertility Laws and monitoring new developments that might disrupt the balance between the world's nations, hunting organleggers is a basic function of the UN's police force, the ARM.

In the five stories presented in this collection Gil Hamilton has to solve the murder case of an old friend, involving organleggers; escapes an assassination attempt and tracks down an organlegger of old; figures out the locked room murder of a scientific genius involving a new invention; has to reverse the murder conviction of a beautiful woman on Luna to save her from the organ banks; and unriddle the puzzle of a decades-old body found in the most radioactive place of the solar system.

Table of contents:

• "Death by Ecstasy"
• "The Defenseless Dead"
• "ARM"
• "Patchwork Girl"
• "The Woman in Del Rey Crater"

With the figure of Übersleuth Gil Hamilton, Larry Niven has created one of the most memorable detectives in SF. The mysteries are solid, internally consistent, and all the information required by Gil to solve the case is equally presented to the reader. These aren't classical murder mysteries transposed into the future, all plots centrally involve SF devices. Along the way, Nivens paints a convincing, faintly dystopian, painfully plausible image of the future.

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