Some playwright, as named above, seems to think that Larry Niven’s success is due to the fact that he was heir to an oil fortune.
Now, I will confess that I have found Niven’s prose to be journey-level compared to some other writers. And sometimes certain aspects of his work trouble me.
But the man’s creativity and imagination are worthy of praise. The story of Teela Brown, for one, is breathtaking in how it plays out. Niven could have been a happy rich playboy, but he decided instead to throw his head into his work, and he deserves respect for his accomplishments.
So, go sit in a corner, Max. Niven did not become an accomplished author by dint of having an easy life. He earned it.
I don’t see how you get any of that from the content of your link. The tweets you linked to say:
None of that is in any way denying Niven’s creativity, imagination, dedication, or accomplishment as a writer. (In fact, Sparber notes in that tweet series that he likes Niven’s work.) It’s just pointing out that it’s a lot easier to devote yourself to achieving success in a creative field if you don’t also have to worry about earning a living.
Yes - the argument isn’t that Niven wasn’t creative, it’s that Niven was afforded the opportunity to be creative.
I think it’s a dumb argument, BTW, as lots of Niven’s contemporaries, with no more creativity than himself, were not oil heirs and became successful authors too.
Not quite. It’s not that Niven was afforded the opportunity - it’s that he was afforded greater opportunity than average by virtue of money and that on average it would be to the common good if people were afforded increased opportunities.
It’s not entirely a dumb argument and it’s a bit of a fallacy to point at other successful authors of the era - the same kind of fallacy that points at a rich person who was born poor and saying that inherited wealth has only a minor effect on wealth later in life.
Larry himself will freely admit that he had more leisure time and more emotional and mental resources available to him by virtue of not being poor. I have no direct citation for that, because all of the conversations I’ve had with him have been late at night under the influence of ethanol.
But yeah, his success as an author was unquestionably aided by his background.
The ‘accomplished’ part was him, but Niven himself admits that becoming an author was made much easier by his lack of need for a day job. It boggles my mind that people will argue that being rich enough that you can do whatever you want without worrying about rent or food money doesn’t help someone in a creative or entrepreneurial field. Yes, you still need to make a good creative work or useful product, but being able to devote time and energy to the pursuit instead of ‘calculating whether eating ramen for the next two weeks will keep the power from being shut off this month’ or ‘I need to catch up on sleep after working 60 hours at my two not-full-time jobs’ is a HUGE advantage.
I think his point is: How much more great art would there be in the world if every talented aspiring artist had the financial freedom to devote time to their arts?
OK, how did he earn the ability to be able to learn how to read and write? Not the education itself, but the mental ability to be able to absorb it and put it to use.
Something like that is an obvious one: If he hadn’t been born with the ability, he would never have been an author. He didn’t earn it, he got it through chance, and had the odds fell the other way, had he been unlucky at birth, he wouldn’t have earned his disability, either. So some things do come down to chance, and some of those random events do have a large impact on how successful someone can ever become.
Some things cannot be overcome. Some things can be overcome, but only just, and with no allowance for any further bad luck, let alone errors; those kinds of things also don’t leave time for pass-times, like being able to read enough fiction to be taken seriously as an author. Therefore, saying that someone’s success is only and ever due to hard work is a form of blindness to the full scope of possibility, a narrowness of vision which denies the role of chance in human life.
Nobody said Niven didn’t earn it. We’re just saying he was allowed to earn it.
You can have all the talent in the world and do nothing with it. Niven used the talent that he was born with. Used it quite well. That is how I say he earned it.
You can also have all the talent in the world and be unable to exercise it because you’re working 3 part time jobs to put food on the table for your family.
I don’t know who Max Sparber or Larry Niven even are, but being born as an heir does not guarantee success, in the sense of achieving excellence at something (as opposed to just sitting on a pile of money.)
Howard Hughes and Donald Trump both inherited a lot of money. One of them used the money to invent innovative and useful technology, the other one used it to buy a lot of property and leverage it against other investments and shift money from one pile to the next just enough to enable himself and his family to live a lavish lifestyle and put his name on shit.
FDR and George W. Bush were both born into great wealth. One of those guys was a LITTLE better at being President than the other.
There are heirs to vast fortunes who use that fortune to do something productive, there are those who use it only to enrich themselves, there are also those who don’t use it for anything and languish in obscurity until death. There are also people born with no money who are able to amass great fortunes doing something productive and useful; there are those born with no money who wind up being rich just for the sake of being rich; and there are those who never achieve anything.
Creative artists are judged on their talents alone. You cannot buy creativity. You can’t pay people to like your writing.
Wealth is a very poor analogue for creative talent.
What you’re both indirectly saying is that time spent writing (which is all Niven gained by being freed from material concerns) is somehow proportional to quality of output. I’m sure that’s not the case - case in point: those writers whose output measurably worsened when their early material success freed them up to be full-time writers.
And it’s a mistake, I think, to treat it as a binary - he would have had to be a non-writing wage slave if he wasn’t an heir. That’s the argument I was trying to avert by pointing to other writers - especially someone like Niven, who was right in the same wheelhouse (maths-physics-science grad) as many other SciFi authors. He was never going to be “working three jobs just to feed his family”
I’m not saying Niven didn’t have a *load *of privileges - A white, college-grad American male in the 60s? I’m saying specifically the oil fortune doesn’t seem like it made that much ongoing difference to whether Niven was successful or not. Depends on whether it was the oil fortune that got him into uni in the first place.
I think that it is the case for beginning writers, less so for published/successful writers. If you’re passionate about something and you have time for it, it’s even better than if you’re passionate about it but don’t have time to write, and so all those stories you’ve been saving up your whole life never get onto a page. Whereas if you manage to become a writer anyway, it doesn’t matter as much because you will continue to have or not have passionate interesting stories whether or not you have the time.
Nobody is saying it is. But there are probably many people with creative talent who never get to develop and practice their talent because they are working 3 jobs to support themselves.
I have no reason to believe that talent provides motivation. So there are probably immensely talented people who don’t have the time to hone their skills or even to simply create. Not every genius is motivated enough to put in several hours a week or more on top of their 40+ hours of working.
But Niven, specifically, was never going to be one of them. Not unless you push the hypothetical and make him a poor Appalachian or, I dunno, a black man in Louisiana. But as-is only minus the oil fortune? Naah.