Phssthpok, an alien traveling through space, is on a mission. Very patiently searching for a lost group of Pak breeders who left his home planet some two and a half million years previous, Phssthpok is driven by a cultural and biological need to save and develop this lost tribe. When he enters the Sol solar system he believes his quest is almost finished. Earth in the early twenty second century burgeons with eighteen billion people and some humans lives as Belters. The Belter society live on various asteroids in the inner solar system. A society of self sufficient, independent and anarchic rebels, life is lived with a certain double edged freedom. For a part time smuggler named Brennan the life he knows is about to come to an abrupt end. He foolishly allows the alien Phssthpok to dock with his ship and in turn is kidnapped. It sounds like Protector should be an interesting novel but it disappoints on so many levels. We are told that Homo Sapiens are in fact an evolutionary line derived from the Pak homeworld and whose DNA was allowed to mutate accidentally. This was caused because a certain food source kept our alien precedents on a very narrow and well structured timeline consisting of three stages. A novel so full of potholes such as allowing a starfaring race making the jump from the densely populated galactic core to a planet where the soil did not allow for the growth of the Fruit Of Life is sheer nonsense. The reasons and the logic reasoning provided for the reasons why the Pak breeders failed to evolve as they were meant to irritated me immensely. The Protector's home planet was another reason why this novel failed to impress. Niven recounts how the Pak people with their selfish need for preserving their own bloodline's developed into a very aggressive and warlike species where through many generations of constant genocide knowledge both stored and lost by the planet's warring factions only brings about short term benefits. No one sect on the Pak homeworld dominates but yet when they decide to seek out and populate new worlds they act as a cohesive unit. Niven's writing and narrative is very ordinary and just plain uninteresting. His character's are human enough to be accepted but they possesses no qualities of any great worth. Looking for an insipid read which you can finish in a day or two? If so, I recommend Protector from Larry Niven.
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