This volume has been retitled/republished as "Rainbow Mars" ( )

Time travel is a bitch and this collection of loosely related stories attests to that fact as Niven's unlucky time traveler trips his way across timelines and alternate realities. Then he switches gears for one story that is pure fantasy (reminiscent of his novel "The Magic Goes Away") and another dealing with the pros and cons of teleportation. Intelligent and definitely tongue-in-cheek, but ultimately forgettable. ( )

Niven writes fantasy! And it's good. Flag Crowd is an interesting exploration of the effects of teleportation on a society and looks like the basis for stepping disks in the later Ringworld novels. ( )

The Svetz stories are fun, but if you were expecting them to make up the whole book you'd be disappointed. ( )

As a rule, I'm not a big fan of Niven's attempts at humor, and the first several stories in this collection, including the title story, confirm my opinion. Those tales of Svetz, a civil service time traveller, tasked at bringing extinct animals from the past, manage to combine weak satire and a good amount of silliness with an underlying grimness and pessimism into what I found an unpleasant mix.

On the other hand, the last two pieces are unrelated novellas, and they are significantly better. The last story, "What Good is a Glass Dagger?" is pure fantasy, not what usually comes to mind when thinking of Niven, although it revolves around what is essentially a technological development, a device that can permanently drain mana (magical energy) from a region. But it features two interesting characters, a bit of a mystery, and 30 year-long wizard's duel.

However, the next-to-last piece, the novella "Flash Crowd", is worth whatever it costs you to find or buy this book. This tale is Niven at his best, doing pure science fiction: he posits a technological development - in this case the development of "displacement booths" (essentially Star Trek transporters), and explores how their existence changes society, and how it continues to change as the devices are perfected. He does this by following the life of a freelance reporter, blamed by the general public for causing a riot, who must race the clock to get enough data to clear his name in time for an interview with a prominent news anchor.

So by way of rating this; I'd give "Flash Crowd" 5 stars, "Glass Dagger" 4, and 2 stars to each of the other five stories. ( )