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I just re-read Protector by Larry Niven in the Ballantine paperback edition.1 It’s a great example of classic science fiction. The reader is barraged with one cool idea after another. Just the thing for a nerdy teen-aged boy.
In one scene, set on the artificial moon Kobold,2 Brennan has constructed a Moebius strip that’s as wide as a sidewalk. Brennan has technology that can control gravity, which he has used to make it possible to walk on the strip and have gravity always pulling you towards the surface. A character named Alice gives it a try, and walks a lap around the strip. After that, on the bottom of Page 155, she’s referred to as “Sally”. In the next scene, she and Roy climb the stairs in a 3-D copy of M.C. Escher’s “Relativity”, after which she is called Alice again.
This put me on high alert. “Alice” and “Sally” are the same sounds, but the consonants are flipped from places 2 and 4 to places 3 and 1. Hypothesis: Niven is playing a word-game here, where a trip around an non-orientable surface scrambled her name, then another mind-bending walk straightened it out. Lewis Carroll loved playing pranks like that on his Alice.
Sadly, no. She’s “Sally” again once on page 166. And now that I’ve noticed that, the constellation “Saggitarius” is mentioned several times, and M.C. Escher is spelled “Esher”. It’s just a bad editing job. Oh, well. I guess close reading isn’t a universally-useful technique.
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