As engineering, extremely impressive; as literature, grossly overrated. (Ringworld - Larry Niven)

Member Name: jdkane

Product:	Ringworld - Larry Niven
Date:	19/03/01 (35 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Science; see the sequel for the one without all the bugs, but a genuine new idea- A

Disadvantages: Characterisation; eyeballs on strings; C

I want to look closely at Larry Niven's Ringworld, because it is as much a study of a case as of a novel. It raises important and rather ugly questions; chiefly, what it is that makes good science fiction?

The idea of a Ringworld, the astroengineering of it, has attracted immense interest, including that of Freeman Dyson himself. The writing and literary side...Life is neither fair nor simple, as most people who have managed to look up from their paperbacks will probably have noticed. There are excellent novels which have not reached a fraction of the interest they deserved, and very popular novels without a trace of literary quality. As you notice when you look back down again.

I can state my opinion of the Ringworld in one phrase; justifying it will take longer.
As engineering, extremely impressive; as literature, grossly overrated.

The novel subsists on the science- fictional capital of the idea behind it. The characters are forgettable cardboard cutouts. Look closely at them, form images of their personalities, try and get inside their heads. If the writer is doing his job properly, you certainly should be able to, and be at least mildly interested by what you find there. Of course, there are limits, and scepticism, which doubts the possibility of knowing any mind including your own, is fundamentally unassailable, but you have to go a long way in murky philosophical waters before you come up against it...let's not bring an insoluble but partially evadable problem any closer to home than we absolutely have to.

On the other hand, skepticism is invaluable as a tool for the maintenance of good faith; you can always pretend the writer had something coherent in mind, even if you can't for the life of you work out what. Which is the problem here. How can such a magnificent theory rest on such a slender character foundation? Then I recall that he was educated as a mathematician and everything falls into place. r>
The novel is actually set in the long- standing Known Space universe, and this was in fact Larry Niven's alternative to tearing it down in flames on the instigation of Norman Spinrad. He was just plotting how to destroy everything when he heard about Dyson Spheres, realised he had an alternative, and wrote it up. I'm not sure if this was the sound thing to do; I think I would have enjoyed reading Down In Flames.

The novel is actually best read as a showcase for the technology, and the characters as not much more than eyeballs on strings. A Ringworld is a ribbon around a star, spun to provide artificial gravity- a figure of 770 miles a second is quoted- with sidewalls to keep the air in- relief mask style terrain, at the distance of Earth's orbit roughly, and with a surface area of three million earths. A great deal of work has been done on the Ringworld since it first appeared; it was taken as a serious suggestion in astrotechnology, by people as luminous as Freeman Dyson. The debugged version was presented in The Ringworld Engineers. This is the meteor- vulnerable, imperfectly shadow squared, unstable version, but it's still a hell of a construct. The plot is gifted with the complexity of a long standing, evolving universe- which is just as well, because you have to wonder how successful a dry run at this would have been.

Depressingly, the Ringworld is not populated by a full advanced technological civilisation; that would have been far too easy, and too difficult to work up a plot for. The ringworld is populated by a dizzying collection of fantasy-feudal like mutant descendants of a civilisation that collapsed, whose ancestors- the Pak- were essentially our own, Homo Habilis. The characters are more or less kidnapped into reconnoitring it by an alien- a Puppeteer. The species' name is well chosen, and if you ever need a real alien to drop into a Cyberpunk game to surprise the players, then they could very well be it.
Never mind predator; these creeps will terminate your bank account- and possibly, as here, the future of your civilisation- with total efficiency, every time. They're an excellent construct- even if they are the dismal science made flesh- but I'd rather not have to have dealings with them.

I don't think I'm giving much away by saying the decayed condition of the Ringworld is their fault. They virus- bombed it with a plague designed to eat the biological superconductor that was the backbone of the Ringworld's technology, intending to clean up by selling a cure. They never quite got around to that part. Remorse? Nary a trace. This appears to be fairly typical. Actually, he doesn't make them behave nearly as manipulatively as the tendencies he assigns to them ought to.

If the plot is readable, it's because it's something of a logjam. If you can't do a simple idea well, throw in a whole bunch of others until the reader starts wondering what the hell is going on- and thus fills in the blanks for you. Humans for generations have been evolutionarily selected, by Birthright Lotteries, for luck, one of them being the female lead; the ultimate character's psionic power; Author Control, in Larry Niven's words- meaning that whatever she did, because of her luck, had to turn out well. This presumably means that Niven composes by the first- draft method, a startling change from the meticulous planning of The Mote in God's Eye, which was subsequent to this, so are we talking about experience gained? In any case, it turns her into a monumentally irritating character, self- righteous beyond belief. She wanders off with a local primitive barbarian, and good riddance. The Kzinti- forgive me for being so tawdry, but they compare unfavourably in cultural soundness to the Kilrathi. Niven himself would be the first to acknowledge that, on the general principles involved in the Moties for one. You try and work out the pres
sures upon them, the threads of the fabric of their society, and I tell you it can't be done. If they are anything like us at all, their rhetoric is a good deal more bloody than the facts- and they cannot sustain such bloodshed without placing a value on life that seems too low to support a complex civilisation. No social force mentioned is enough to hold this mass of contradictions together. The Puppeteers are radically more feasible. All in all, it seems a little churlish to diss such a classic of SF- but the cult of total honesty does have it's advantages.

Imagination; huge in scope, but perhaps rips off a few too many fantasy elements; B-
Science; see the sequel for the one without all the bugs, but a genuine new idea- A
Scene- setting; inevitably contrived, but well put together; B
Characterisation; eyeballs on strings; C

Overall; classic idea novel, weak on traditional narrative qualities; B