Another quick read I had a chance to scarf down on a train ride to Quebec city. “Rainbow Mars” is Larry Niven’s very clever take on why 19th century observations of the cities and canals on Mars didn’t hold up under later scrutiny – in his version of events a canal-digging civilization ( composed of aliens ripped directly from a long list of other Mars sci-fi classics, from War of the Worlds to The Martian Chronicles) manages to wipe themselves out over the course of our advances in astronomy.

Hanville Svetz, the time-traveling extinct-animal rescuer from the far-future Institute for Temporal Research travels back and forth through time & space (and fiction) in an increasingly elaborate series of jumps to save both planets. I think what I appreciated most was Larry Niven’s wanton disregard for the standard sci-fi time paradox rules, which allows Hanville and his friends to take liberties with laser blasters and mess up the timelines of various Spanish conquistadors and Martian saucer pilots. This is all explained away by a rectifying force that ensures the timeline comes together (mostly) the way it had been planned. Fun stuff.

The style of the novel is weirdly nondescript – Niven half-describes locations and then sets scenes in them without any context. Prepare your imagination to do a lot of filling in because he doesn’t do any of the footwork for you. I found this frustrating in parts, in particular a standoff against some kind of beast in a crystalline Martian home that made no sense whatsoever the way I’d envisioned it.