Although only about 150 years have passed on the ship, three million years have elapsed on Earth, due to relativistic time dilation.
Though the Peerssa AI opposes the detour, it cannot disobey Corbell's direct orders.Īfter a lengthy journey (including a close approach to the super-massive black hole at the galactic axis), possible only due to the suspended animation devices on board, Corbell returns to the solar system. Peerssa and The State resort to subterfuge an artificial intelligence program based on Peerssa's personality is secretly transferred into the ship's computer using the link with Earth. (It was at this point that the original short story ended.) Discovering it is a one-way trip and disgusted with the State's treatment of him as an expendable commodity, Corbell hijacks the ship and takes it to the center of the galaxy. Peerssa decides that Corbell is a loner and born tourist, making him an ideal candidate to pilot a one-man Bussard ramjet, finding and seeding suitable planets as the first step to terraforming them. With the threat of his own mindwiping looming, Corbell works hard to pass the various tests. After awakening, he is continually evaluated by Peerssa, a "checker", who has to decide whether he is worth keeping. His personality and memories are extracted (destroying his body in the process) and transferred into the body of a mindwiped criminal. His body is revived in 2190 by an oppressive, totalitarian global government called " The State". Jerome Branch Corbell has incurable cancer and is cryogenically frozen in the year 1970 in the faint hope of a future cure. A World Out of Time placed fifth in the annual Locus Poll in 1977. The main part of the novel was originally serialized in Galaxy magazine as "Children of the State" another part was originally published as the short story "Rammer". It is set outside the Known Space universe of many of Niven's stories, but is otherwise fairly representative of his 1970s hard science fiction novels. A World Out of Time is a science fiction novel by Larry Niven and published in 1976.
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