For a Foggy Night

by Larry Niven, Bronson Pinchot (Narrator)

In one of Niven's rare stories of cross-dimensional travel, an unnamed protagonist discovers the real reason that things seem so foggy on a foggy night.

Genres: Science Fiction, Short Stories, Fiction

1 pages, Audiobook

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

Laurence van Cott Niven's best known work is Ringworld (Ringworld, #1) (1970), which received the Hugo, Locus, Ditmar, and Nebula awards. His work is primarily hard science fiction, using big science concepts and theoretical physics. The creation of thoroughly worked-out alien species, which are very different from humans both physically and mentally, is recognized as one of Niven's main strengths.

Niven also often includes elements of detective fiction and adventure stories. His fantasy includes The Magic Goes Away series, which utilizes an exhaustible resource, called Mana, to make the magic a non-renewable resource.

Niven created an alien species, the Kzin, which were featured in a series of twelve collection books, the Man-Kzin Wars. He co-authored a number of novels with Jerry Pournelle. In fact, much of his writing since the 1970s has been in collaboration, particularly with Pournelle, Steven Barnes, Brenda Cooper, or Edward M. Lerner.

He briefly attended the California Institute of Technology and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics (with a minor in psychology) from Washburn University, Topeka, Kansas, in 1962. He did a year of graduate work in mathematics at the University of California at Los Angeles. He has since lived in Los Angeles suburbs, including Chatsworth and Tarzana, as a full-time writer. He married Marilyn Joyce "Fuzzy Pink" Wisowaty, herself a well-known science fiction and Regency literature fan, on September 6, 1969.

Niven won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story for Neutron Star in 1967. In 1972, for Inconstant Moon, and in 1975 for The Hole Man. In 1976, he won the Hugo Award for Best Novelette for The Borderland of Sol.

Niven has written scripts for various science fiction television shows, including the original Land of the Lost series and Star Trek: The Animated Series, for which he adapted his early Kzin story The Soft Weapon. He adapted his story Inconstant Moon for an episode of the television series The Outer Limits in 1996.

He has also written for the DC Comics character Green Lantern including in his stories hard science fiction concepts such as universal entropy and the redshift effect, which are unusual in comic books.

http://us.macmillan.com/author/larryn...

Reviews

[Peter Tillman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read on paper, in Niven's classic collection, "All the Myriad Ways" (which I own). Title story is another in the same vein, and was itself multi-award nominated. But "Foggy Night" (1971) is even better!

The Niven collection is online at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/allmyriad...
You will need a free account to borrow their copy to read online.
More reprints (many): https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.c...
Times reread: many, but not in awhile.

2024 reread: not quite as good as I recalled. 4+ stars, dropped from favorites. Still a first-rate story, in a great collection.

[Alex Shrugged · Rating 3 out of 5]

This seems to be a story about travel between universes in the multiverse, but it only happens on a foggy night. This reminds me of "The Void Trilogy 3-Book Bundle: The Dreaming Void, The Temporal Void, The Evolutionary Void" by Peter F. Hamilton. In that series the main character is able to travel between planets almost accidentally.

I might read this story again.

[Jim Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Next time somebody asks about a SF story concerning the multi-verse concept of QM you can mention this.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A quantum-mechanical many worlds story, but written well and concisely.

[JoeK · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty good little story. I really enjoyed it, even though I would have liked to know the logic for the ‘merging’ of divergent realities. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a fog thick enough to hide the other side of the street completely, but I have walked into situations where I was certain that I was on a planet that was similar to mine, but off in some small way… Call it Déjà vu.

Many of Larry Niven's early stories have diverged from where reality is now, but this one still works as if it was written about a man in a bar today, and not 50 years ago.

[Gilbert Stack · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a short story for daydreamers. Have you ever sat looking out the window into the fog? In For a Foggy Night, Niven takes this harmless pastime and turns it into something sinister, postulating that the fog appears where multiple universes intersect making it possible to cross over between them.

[Nick Landry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not sure what to think of this one. It was well written and kept me going since I was curious to see where things would end up. I'm just not sure I was satisfied with the ending. Too much of a loose end, no explanation. This could very well be a weird dream you have when traveling on business, or a script originally written for the Twilight Zone.

[Fil Garrison · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fun short story that would honestly make a killer short film. Moody, fringe science fiction.

[Aazain Khan · Rating 3 out of 5]

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[Lee Belbin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Brief, to the point, sort of. Parallel worlds.

[Vani]

Curiouser and curiouser...