Flatlander: The Collected Tales of Gil "The Arm" Hamilton

By Larry Niven

Gil “The Arm” Hamilton was one of the top operatives of ARM, the elite UN police force. His intuition was unfailingly accurate; his detective skills second to none; and his psychic powers—esper sense and telekinesis—were awesome.

Tough and deadly, Gil Hamilton could reach right into a person's brain for the truth . . . or for the kill!

Read all the stories of the legendary ARM operative, collected here in one volume for the very first time:

• Organleggers aren't stopping at robbing body parts from the corpses of the frozen dead. Now they're stealing from the living . . . and Gil is a prime target!
• The most beautiful woman on Luna has been falsely accused of murder. Unless Gil can prove her innocence, she's doomed to end up as a sack of spare parts in the organ banks. . . .
• And more . . . Plus an all-new, never-before-published Gil Hamilton adventure!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Feb 25, 2009
• ISBN: 9780307556196

Larry Niven

Larry Niven (left) is the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author of such classics as Ringworld, The Integral Trees, and Destiny's Road. He has also collaborated with both Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes on The Legacy of Heorot, Beowulf's Children, and the bestselling Dream Park series. He lives in Chatsworth, California. Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle were the joint winners of the 2005 Robert A. Heinlein Award.

Reviews for Flatlander

[antao-3 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

(Original Review, 1980-09-04)Niven has linked many of the Known Space stories with genealogy.In "World of Ptavvs" and some other stories focused on the Belt, we meet Martin Schaeffer, nicknamed "Little" or "Lit" because he is around seven feet tall. He has some marital problems: his wife doesn't get to Confinement Asteroid in time and the baby she is carrying hypertrophies and has to be aborted. Lit promises her that she can stay in Confinement until she gets pregnant again.Beowulf Schaeffer belongs to a later era. I don't know whether he is Lit's son: perhaps more intervening generations are involved. Bey is a seven-foot-tall albino, a native of We Made It (or "Crashlander"). He is the hero of several short stories but to my continuing disappointment does not have his own novel.In "Flatlander", Bey meets Sharrol Janss and they fall in love. In "Grendel", we learn that Sharrol cannot tolerate space travel. Bey is willing to relocate to Earth for her sake, but the Fertility Board refuses to grant him a Birthright because he is an albino. He and Sharrol both want children, so they "impose" on a mutual friend, a mathematical genius named Carlos Wu. Carlos lives with Sharrol for two years, fathering two children, Louis and Tanya. For those two years, Bey stays away from Earth, having an affair with a starship pilot named Margo something. Then he returns to Earth and presumably lives happily ever after with Sharrol and his two foster-children. No stories come from this period of his life. It has always struck me as peculiar that Louis Wu had never heard of the Long Shot, nor of Bey's odyssey to the galactic core in "At the Core". As a matter of fact, Louis only remembers that the galaxy is exploding as a vague fact from college. You would think that he would be more familiar with his foster father's exploits. Oh, well: I don't know in what order the stories were written, but I do appreciate how hard it is to hold a universe together. (One look at modern particle physics is enough to convince you that God is having a hard time with this one. "Oh, no, what am I going to do about THAT cludge? Maybe another meson...")[2018 EDIT: This review was written at the time as I was running my own personal BBS server. Much of the language of this and other reviews written in 1980 reflect a very particular kind of language: what I call now in retrospect a “BBS language”.]

[ikeman100 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Interesting mystery stories around a central character. Niven does a good job of showing us a creepy but logical world where human body part transplants are huge industry and social issue. His characters are likable or despicable as needed. Definitely for adult reading.

[wyvernfriend · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Many years ago I played cyberpunk, we had a motto that ran something like "parts is money, dead people is parts, dead friends are parts". This is a book about what happens when criminals become parts, and the definition of criminal reflects how much people want new parts. If you can't get the parts there are people "Organleggers" willing to provide. Gil "The Arm" Hamilton works for ARM the elite UN police force. He lost his arm years ago and found that he could manifest a psychic arm, even after getting back an arm. This is a series of interlocking stories that are all about him doing his job and how he manages to get himself out of fixes using his brains and his arm.A fun read, light and interesting. Although some of it is a little dated, it does sometimes read like a 50's detective novel in space, it's still a good engaging read.

[ds_61_12 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Gil "The Arm" Hamilton has a telekinetic third arm due to an accident in his past. He is one of the agent of ARM, comparable with present day FBI, but a great deal bigger. One of the most important tasks of the ARM is to combat organlegging, the illegal organ transplants and the resultant kidnapping of "transplantmaterial". Niven writes a series of stories featuring this character that sketch a very unsettling glimpse of the future. A fututre where people will literally do anything to become older. Criminals that get the death penalty go to the organ banks and you can go there for taxevasion. But even with this there are not enough organs...Frightening realistic. Read it twice and hope the future will not result in this.