Larry Niven is one of the most accomplished science-fiction writers living today, and also one of the best. His novels are always well-crafted and full of compelling ideas, and they often feature entertaining characters. Unfortunately, Destiny's Road has only two out of these three important ingredients. Niven uses an old but evergreen premise, the colony in another solar system which has, over centuries, lost contact with Earth, to get his book moving. He populates his planet with an interesting society that has only a partial knowledge of its history, and an economy based on, of all things, the control of vital dietary supplements. But Niven, who should know better and has in the past, populates this novel, with characters who don't seem to act in ways a normal human might. Jemmy Bloocher, our hero, has to leave his town when he kills an influential foreigner in a drunken brawl. Bloocher runs, and spends the rest of his life looking for the answers to questions that supposedly burn deep inside of him—but not deep enough to keep him from getting married twice, having convenient sex with every third female character, and starting a couple of restaurants. Bloocher serves the purpose of having a central character, but that's all; Niven would have to do a lot of fleshing out before we could consider his hero properly two-dimensional. Destiny's Road is more about puzzle-solving than it is about people, and although they're entertaining puzzles, the book is the kind of overall disappointment which will probably always plague the genre. After all, how nifty can the future be if it's full of nobodies like this?