Saturday, 6 September 2014 04:48 pm
Book Review: Ringworld
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deckardcanineTo think there was once a time I could confuse this title with Discworld. They have little in common besides fantasy (in a broad sense that includes sci-fi) and an author whose first name rhymes with "airy." Larry Niven feels less like Terry Pratchett than a combination of Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, for better and worse.
Set at least tens of thousands of years from now, the story begins on an Earth that hosts sapients ancestrally from other worlds. We get few details on most of the species, but it's clear enough that, like in The Left Hand of Darkness, the human space program didn't really take off until aliens reached us first. For most humans, life is so luxurious that they can live for 200+ years, retain the health of a common 20-year-old, and almost never feel pain. Granted, most prefer not to stick around that long, but protagonist Louis Wu has been keeping his personal oath to live forever in spite of ennui (it doesn't help that the cities all look very alike across the globe).
The book wastes little time getting the plot underway when Louis meets Nessus, from a seemingly long gone race called Pierson's puppeteers. His race has discovered a planet that got artificially converted into a thin ring around a sun -- something of a compromised Dyson sphere. They hope to learn secrets to maximize survival. The trouble is, puppeteers are fully convinced for some reason that there is no life after death for them, so they avoid danger so much that everyone else sees them as wimps. Only an allegedly insane puppeteer like Nessus would head an expedition to the Ringworld, so he needs non-puppeteer teammates. An adventurous survivor like Louis makes a good choice.
The two of them soon enlist the other two crew members. For offensive-defensive purposes, Nessus picks one from among the kzinti, probably the best-known alien race from the series, who strike me as a cross between Klingons and tigers. The kzin in question, an ambassador, goes by Speaker-To-Animals, an implicit insult to all sapient non-kzinti. He's not so fond of the designation either, and the promise of awesome puppeteer ship blueprints with which he could buy himself a proper name brings him on board.
Finally, there's 20-year-old human Teela Brown. She has no special expertise and, unlike Louis and Speaker, not the right temperament for the mission. What Nessus believes she does have are genes for luck, in a species that already stands out mainly for a history of barely missing great disasters (hey, Niven was writing in the Cold War). Louis doubts it, but he persuades her to come anyway because in the short time they've known each other, they've hit it off.
Don't expect the rest of the story to move this quickly. After all, when dealing with such huge distances, even with distant-future technology, characters have to spend a lot of time in transit. It must be especially hard on Teela, who'd never wanted to leave Earth before and must have even less of an attention span than today's youth. What they find is amazing, but clearly well past the Ringworld's golden age. Only one more character ever shows up long enough to feel as fleshed out as one of the main four; I guess Niven stuck to his strengths. There are no real villains in the story, because nature alone is harsh enough.
It's tempting to think of Louis as the face of the future, but we can only wonder how common his attitudes are. Supposedly speaking interworld rather than English, his usual version of swearing is "Tanj," sometimes written the long way as "There ain't no justice," which might be a tribute to Heinlein's "Tanstaafl," but he uses it for swears in all parts of speech ("What the tanj? Tanj this tanj thing!"). He also uses colorful expressions involving Finagle, such as "Finagle's red claws!" Man, it's one thing not to believe in God; it's another thing to appear to worship the guy with the pessimistic law much like people in Brave New World worship Henry Ford. (Funny how it feels more offensive than taking the Lord's name in vain.) Well, faith aside, Louis's ethics are fairly spotty, as evidenced by his coarseness, coffee addiction, and casual sexual relationship with the great great granddaughter of a former girlfriend. Nothing angers him more than an affront to the dignity of a sapient race, especially his own. I'd have a hard time befriending him, but I didn't mind him being the constant focal character.
The puppeteers are the most physically alien of the detailed aliens and thus most intrinsically interesting to me. I rather like the detail of two heads that use articulated lips in place of fingers. At times they sound pretty cute, but just because they're herbivores who never even use right-angled furniture doesn't mean they're sweet, harmless, or not living up to their name. They could probably commit genocide on anyone else if they thought it necessary for self-preservation. In a bind, Nessus can get violent the old-fashioned way, but he more often uses a tasp, a device that utterly elates the target. (If you think you'd like that method, just imagine the withdrawal.) Somewhat ironically, the character who never gets angry is the one most likely to anger others. I still felt sorry for him during his depressive episodes, which come more often or at least more obviously than his manic ones -- basically the only way he seems insane by human standards.
Speaker is my personal favorite of the bunch. I think it has less to do with his pseudo-felinity and more with the fact that when you start out seeing someone as a monster, everything he does either proves you right or pleasantly surprises you. The kzinti had been enslaving and/or eating everyone they could find until they lost six wars to humanity, upon which they learned discretion. Speaker actually acts quite civil, intelligent, and honorable most of the time; but like Jayne on "Firefly," he keeps us expecting treachery the moment it becomes convenient.
Teela, alas, is hard to like. While she doesn't always feel happy, her lifelong streak of luck has left her highly naive, making her seem low on both EQ and IQ. Her behavior makes a certain kind of sense, and nobody else got chosen for unique skills exactly; but when she's the only female around for the most part, it smacks of unfortunate implications. Indeed, potential sexism pervades the book: Kzinti and puppeteers reportedly have non-sapient females for no plot-important reason, and the main other female is smart only in prostitution. Having also read Niven's essay explaining Superman's virginity, I have to conclude he's at least perverted if not sexist -- another commonality with Heinlein. (I do like to imagine that kzinti and puppeteers view humans the way many humans view fantasies where every animal is sapient: often intriguing, sometimes disturbing, and ultimately more complicated.)
Are the premises credible to my lay mind? Well, to a point. I appreciate that Niven remains vague on matters like power sources while emphasizing astronomic proportions and geological phenomena writ large. The one piece of technology that I could never accept as realistic is a translator that can figure out an entire previously undocumented language after hearing a few sentences. I give it a pass for the sake of plot advancement. Anyway, they do lose the use of translators later.
If any premise is more absurd, it's the genetic luck. Sure, Teela and others like her could be mere statistical anomalies, and the whole crew vacillates in the strength of their convictions regarding her luck; but we're left to decide between increasingly numerous severely contrived coincidences and the idea of passive psychic powers either affecting or being affected by events far across space and time, setting you up to get what you "need" before you know it. Again, my advice is to view it as an exploratory what-if, not a super-soft sci-fi misfire. At its extreme, luck doesn't look so lucky: Not only do you remain embarrassingly babyish in some ways, but you may cause trouble for others, you have little if any free will, a plethora of such lucky people will turn the world upside down, and you might never die even if you want to.
As best I can tell, there are two overarching morals in Ringworld. One is that we'll have to do something about overpopulation eventually. Humans in the story deal with it by legally restricting procreation and allowing extra kids only via lottery (Teela descends from six generations of winners, hence the attention of Nessus). Puppeteers tried abstinence, but it worked as well for them as it would for us. The kzinti just kill each other out of stress if they start to get crowded. And the Ringworld engineers apparently wouldn't have bothered if not for population issues.
The other moral, almost counteracting the former, is that playing God is dangerous. Everyone does it in a way, even Louis. More often than not, the effort comes back to bite them. Well, I agree with the sentiment in general, but try not to read it as "Don't ever play God," because then you have to figure out where to draw the line.
Thanks,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sleepyjohn00, for recommending the book. I don't find it life-changing the way you did, and I doubt I'll read another in the series, but it kept me entertained.
I'm all sci-fied out in the literary realm. I'll take a break with Matthew Pearl's The Dante Club, a murder mystery featuring real 19th-century figures like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow as detectives. The time seems ripe, since I also recently read "The Courtship of Miles Standish" just to see what my mom had to read in school (flowery but hard to absorb).
Set at least tens of thousands of years from now, the story begins on an Earth that hosts sapients ancestrally from other worlds. We get few details on most of the species, but it's clear enough that, like in The Left Hand of Darkness, the human space program didn't really take off until aliens reached us first. For most humans, life is so luxurious that they can live for 200+ years, retain the health of a common 20-year-old, and almost never feel pain. Granted, most prefer not to stick around that long, but protagonist Louis Wu has been keeping his personal oath to live forever in spite of ennui (it doesn't help that the cities all look very alike across the globe).
The book wastes little time getting the plot underway when Louis meets Nessus, from a seemingly long gone race called Pierson's puppeteers. His race has discovered a planet that got artificially converted into a thin ring around a sun -- something of a compromised Dyson sphere. They hope to learn secrets to maximize survival. The trouble is, puppeteers are fully convinced for some reason that there is no life after death for them, so they avoid danger so much that everyone else sees them as wimps. Only an allegedly insane puppeteer like Nessus would head an expedition to the Ringworld, so he needs non-puppeteer teammates. An adventurous survivor like Louis makes a good choice.
The two of them soon enlist the other two crew members. For offensive-defensive purposes, Nessus picks one from among the kzinti, probably the best-known alien race from the series, who strike me as a cross between Klingons and tigers. The kzin in question, an ambassador, goes by Speaker-To-Animals, an implicit insult to all sapient non-kzinti. He's not so fond of the designation either, and the promise of awesome puppeteer ship blueprints with which he could buy himself a proper name brings him on board.
Finally, there's 20-year-old human Teela Brown. She has no special expertise and, unlike Louis and Speaker, not the right temperament for the mission. What Nessus believes she does have are genes for luck, in a species that already stands out mainly for a history of barely missing great disasters (hey, Niven was writing in the Cold War). Louis doubts it, but he persuades her to come anyway because in the short time they've known each other, they've hit it off.
Don't expect the rest of the story to move this quickly. After all, when dealing with such huge distances, even with distant-future technology, characters have to spend a lot of time in transit. It must be especially hard on Teela, who'd never wanted to leave Earth before and must have even less of an attention span than today's youth. What they find is amazing, but clearly well past the Ringworld's golden age. Only one more character ever shows up long enough to feel as fleshed out as one of the main four; I guess Niven stuck to his strengths. There are no real villains in the story, because nature alone is harsh enough.
It's tempting to think of Louis as the face of the future, but we can only wonder how common his attitudes are. Supposedly speaking interworld rather than English, his usual version of swearing is "Tanj," sometimes written the long way as "There ain't no justice," which might be a tribute to Heinlein's "Tanstaafl," but he uses it for swears in all parts of speech ("What the tanj? Tanj this tanj thing!"). He also uses colorful expressions involving Finagle, such as "Finagle's red claws!" Man, it's one thing not to believe in God; it's another thing to appear to worship the guy with the pessimistic law much like people in Brave New World worship Henry Ford. (Funny how it feels more offensive than taking the Lord's name in vain.) Well, faith aside, Louis's ethics are fairly spotty, as evidenced by his coarseness, coffee addiction, and casual sexual relationship with the great great granddaughter of a former girlfriend. Nothing angers him more than an affront to the dignity of a sapient race, especially his own. I'd have a hard time befriending him, but I didn't mind him being the constant focal character.
The puppeteers are the most physically alien of the detailed aliens and thus most intrinsically interesting to me. I rather like the detail of two heads that use articulated lips in place of fingers. At times they sound pretty cute, but just because they're herbivores who never even use right-angled furniture doesn't mean they're sweet, harmless, or not living up to their name. They could probably commit genocide on anyone else if they thought it necessary for self-preservation. In a bind, Nessus can get violent the old-fashioned way, but he more often uses a tasp, a device that utterly elates the target. (If you think you'd like that method, just imagine the withdrawal.) Somewhat ironically, the character who never gets angry is the one most likely to anger others. I still felt sorry for him during his depressive episodes, which come more often or at least more obviously than his manic ones -- basically the only way he seems insane by human standards.
Speaker is my personal favorite of the bunch. I think it has less to do with his pseudo-felinity and more with the fact that when you start out seeing someone as a monster, everything he does either proves you right or pleasantly surprises you. The kzinti had been enslaving and/or eating everyone they could find until they lost six wars to humanity, upon which they learned discretion. Speaker actually acts quite civil, intelligent, and honorable most of the time; but like Jayne on "Firefly," he keeps us expecting treachery the moment it becomes convenient.
Teela, alas, is hard to like. While she doesn't always feel happy, her lifelong streak of luck has left her highly naive, making her seem low on both EQ and IQ. Her behavior makes a certain kind of sense, and nobody else got chosen for unique skills exactly; but when she's the only female around for the most part, it smacks of unfortunate implications. Indeed, potential sexism pervades the book: Kzinti and puppeteers reportedly have non-sapient females for no plot-important reason, and the main other female is smart only in prostitution. Having also read Niven's essay explaining Superman's virginity, I have to conclude he's at least perverted if not sexist -- another commonality with Heinlein. (I do like to imagine that kzinti and puppeteers view humans the way many humans view fantasies where every animal is sapient: often intriguing, sometimes disturbing, and ultimately more complicated.)
Are the premises credible to my lay mind? Well, to a point. I appreciate that Niven remains vague on matters like power sources while emphasizing astronomic proportions and geological phenomena writ large. The one piece of technology that I could never accept as realistic is a translator that can figure out an entire previously undocumented language after hearing a few sentences. I give it a pass for the sake of plot advancement. Anyway, they do lose the use of translators later.
If any premise is more absurd, it's the genetic luck. Sure, Teela and others like her could be mere statistical anomalies, and the whole crew vacillates in the strength of their convictions regarding her luck; but we're left to decide between increasingly numerous severely contrived coincidences and the idea of passive psychic powers either affecting or being affected by events far across space and time, setting you up to get what you "need" before you know it. Again, my advice is to view it as an exploratory what-if, not a super-soft sci-fi misfire. At its extreme, luck doesn't look so lucky: Not only do you remain embarrassingly babyish in some ways, but you may cause trouble for others, you have little if any free will, a plethora of such lucky people will turn the world upside down, and you might never die even if you want to.
As best I can tell, there are two overarching morals in Ringworld. One is that we'll have to do something about overpopulation eventually. Humans in the story deal with it by legally restricting procreation and allowing extra kids only via lottery (Teela descends from six generations of winners, hence the attention of Nessus). Puppeteers tried abstinence, but it worked as well for them as it would for us. The kzinti just kill each other out of stress if they start to get crowded. And the Ringworld engineers apparently wouldn't have bothered if not for population issues.
The other moral, almost counteracting the former, is that playing God is dangerous. Everyone does it in a way, even Louis. More often than not, the effort comes back to bite them. Well, I agree with the sentiment in general, but try not to read it as "Don't ever play God," because then you have to figure out where to draw the line.
Thanks,
sleepyjohn00, for recommending the book. I don't find it life-changing the way you did, and I doubt I'll read another in the series, but it kept me entertained.I'm all sci-fied out in the literary realm. I'll take a break with Matthew Pearl's The Dante Club, a murder mystery featuring real 19th-century figures like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow as detectives. The time seems ripe, since I also recently read "The Courtship of Miles Standish" just to see what my mom had to read in school (flowery but hard to absorb).
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no subject
"Ringworld Engineers" was interesting, Speaker-To-Animals has his true name, and we find out some surprising things about the Ringworld builders. However, it had some elements, that I didn't buy, and got a little more ... pervy. (It becomes clear that Prill's talent is not what Louis thought it was in the first book.) "Ringworld Throne" was something of a slog, alas, and was a great deal heavier on the elements that I didn't like about "Ringworld Engineers".
However, I really liked "Ringworld's Children." It has some huge surprises.
Niven's "Known Space", in earlier stories, seems somewhat utopian, though there are hints that things behind the scenes are not nearly so rosy. The non-rosy elements are a major starting point for "Ringworld Engineers", and show up big-time in "Ringworld's Children." (And that is not the big surprise in that book. Let's just say the Ringworld itself has certain ... capabilities.)