Ringworld, by Larry Niven

[Omphalos]

Ringworld by Larry Niven starts out on page one with a problem; I appreciated greatly that Niven wasted no time in setting up the book, and instead just got into it. Louis Wu, a 200 year old man, has become bored, again, with life on Earth. Society has become homogenized,and there are no frontiers left anywhere in the Sol system. To deal with his frustration over all of this, Louis has developed a habit. Every forty years or so he throws his hands up in disgust, boards a ship and shoots off outside the boarders of Known Space where he usually discovers something or someplace new and useful. The action begins on day of Louis' 200th birthday. Louis is playing a game with transfer booths, teleporting an hour ahead each time he jumps so that he can enjoy 48 hours of birthday. As he travels he tires to figure out how to get off of Earth this time, when he suddenly and unexpectedly was diverted to a hotel room containing and alien; a Pierson's Puppeteer called Nessus who made Louis an offer he could not refuse...Please click here, or on the book cover above, to be taken to the complete review..

 

[AE35Unit]

Ah fabulous book,its name is practically legend! I can't say I understood everything that was described in the book (the business with the Pak protectors described more fully in the sequel largely lost me)but wow,what an imagination on fire!
I love the names he gives to the ships,Hot Needle of Enquiry and the Lying B@stard,brilliant.( I reckon the names of the ships in Iain M Banks' culture novels must have been inspired by it).
Also the introduction in my battered paperback copy tells me that 'if the book you're holding is the paperback with all the typos keep it,its worth money' or words to that effect.

 

[Vertigo]

My take I'm afraid is not as complimentary as I had both hoped and expected.

First of all I have no explanation for why I haven’t read any of Niven’s Ringworld books before as I have liked most of his books that I have read but I also wish I had read it thirty years ago as I would probably have loved it then, whereas I now find myself much more ambivalent, as I seem to with most older SF that I read. There so much in this book that is also found in much (though by no means all) older SF that a modern author would simply not get away with. A forum I participate in has a thread running discussing the “naivety of early SF” and this is a classic example. There is a naïve exuberance in the ideas Niven throws into the melting pot; some plausible, yes, but many just ridiculous. Maybe, though, they only seem ridiculous to me now in hindsight?

The plot is really a classic quest with a motley group of travellers who find themselves ship wrecked on the titular ringworld; a massive ribbon circling a star, a million miles wide and many millions in circumference, landscaped into a single world with the surface area of many millions of planets. The original civilisation that created it has long since collapsed and our protagonists must find a way to escape and return home.

The writing is as excellent as I have come to expect from Niven but I just kept finding that naivety pulling me out of the story. The idea that humans could be bred to be lucky is just, to my mind, fundamentally ridiculous and yet that is a cornerstone of the plot. Niven clearly had fun coming up with his ‘puppeteer’ alien but the result is simply implausible; an alien with two heads on prehensile necks (the brain is in the torso), each head having one eye and a mouth that doubles as a hand. Think about it! The puppeteers are an advanced technological race, but imagine only having eyes that are attached to your hands; it would be impossible to achieve stereo vision of anything being manipulated; evolution would be ashamed to come up with anything so impractical. Another example is the shallow understanding of ecology demonstrated by Niven’s idea that the ringworld engineers simply wouldn’t have included anything that they didn’t like such as flies, mosquitoes, wolves and other predators, and even bacteria. In fairness he does speculate that they might have had to include colonic bacteria but he clearly hasn’t stopped to consider the impact of picking and choosing only the ‘nicer’ organisms to import into your constructed world. On top of this were numerous examples of frankly sloppy science and here I don’t mean science that is too implausible but rather just wrong; something I found a little surprising from Niven.

I was really looking forward to reading Ringworld but found myself somewhat disappointed; I should have read it thirty years ago when it was written and I would have been a far more accepting reader.

3/5 stars.

 

[Vince W]

I read Ringworld when I was a kid and again about a year ago. Conversely to your reaction I enjoyed it more this time round @Vertigo. Perhaps this is because I am quite disappointed in a lot of the new science fiction produced with their overtly dark tones and needlessly pessimistic views.

I also don't think of Niven's science as implausible, but rather underdeveloped or incomplete. As a 10 year old I wouldn't have recognised this though.

With many classic stories today, I find I can overlook most inconsistencies that have appeared (now) that have aged the book if the story is good. Say what you will about the science, Ringworld has some great characters that have not diminished since it was first written.

 

[Vertigo]

I read Ringworld when I was a kid and again about a year ago. Conversely to your reaction I enjoyed it more this time round @Vertigo. Perhaps this is because I am quite disappointed in a lot of the new science fiction produced with their overtly dark tones and needlessly pessimistic views.

I also don't think of Niven's science as implausible, but rather underdeveloped or incomplete. As a 10 year old I wouldn't have recognised this though.

With many classic stories today, I find I can overlook most inconsistencies that have appeared (now) that have aged the book if the story is good. Say what you will about the science, Ringworld has some great characters that have not diminished since it was first written.

Oh I agree with regard to the writing and the characters. I just felt Niven hadn't thought some of the science out too well. For example he has the ring orbiting at 770mph which at 1au would give a reasonable gravity. Night and day is provided by 'shadow squares' in a closer orbit of the sun. He then says at some point in the book that either night or day (I can't remember which) is approaching at 770mph which would only be correct if the shadow squares are not moving but they must be moving to be in orbit. So night or day would approach slower or faster than 770 mph depending on the direction of rotation of the shadow squares. Now you might think that's picky but as soon as I read it my mind immediately said "wait a minute that can't be right" and I was pulled out of the story. This is any sort of new science it's just sloppy science/maths which, frankly, I don't really expect from Niven. That is just one concrete example but there were many more; all small; all niggly.

As I said, thirty years ago when it was written I would probably have been very accepting of that. Now, quite simply, I'm not. I don't mind handwavium, I don't mind speculative science, I don't even mind (currently) impossible science like FTL but I'm completely intolerant of science/maths that is simply wrong no matter when it was written.

Maybe I'm just getting to be a curmudgeonly old man but there it is!

 

[Vince W]

Not curmudgeonly. Maturely meticulous.