Ringworld
by Larry Niven
1970, reprinted 1985
Ringworld is reasonably famous work of science fiction. It's probably Larry Niven's best-known work. It's the culmination of all the other books and stories in his Known Space setting. Barlowe included one of its aliens in his Guide to Extraterrestrials. It won both the Hugo and Nebula awards, and you can probably find a copy in just about any used bookstore you check. It's long been on my 'probably ought to read this sooner or later' list, and before reading it, I kind of assumed it would eventually get adapted into a prestige miniseries, although now I rather doubt it.
The idea of the Ringworld itself is definitely the best-known part of the book, certainly more so than the plot or any of the characters. The Ringworld is an artificial habitat meant to provide almost unlimited living room. It's a circular hoop around it's own star, occupying approximately the entire orbit of Earth. The ring is about a million miles wide, bounded by walls a thousand miles high. For reference, the Earth is about 8000 miles in diameter, so you could stack about 100 Earths from wall to wall. The high walls keep the atmosphere from escaping, giant solar panels in a narrower orbit provide shade to create a day-night cycle, and the whole thing spins very fast to create a centrifugal force approximating Earth gravity. It's a thought experiment, not a thing that could actually exist, and one thing that makes it interesting is that it's very difficult to imagine it without shrinking it to more comprehensible dimensions.
The basic plot is that two humans and two aliens go to investigate the Ringworld, they crash land, and then have to use flying motorcycles to try to find help getting their spaceship off the ring. They see the sights, learn more about the history of the place, meet people who can't help them, eventually meet someone who can, and then finally leave. In structure, it's actually quite similar to Jack Vance's Big Planet, Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity, or Jack Chalker's Midnight at the Well of Souls. The success or failure of a plot like that is going to depend on how much you like the characters, and how interesting what they find on the surface is. No matter how cool the big-picture premise is, it can't save poor execution - and notably the big picture here doesn't imply much about the details. The ring could have almost anything on its surface, the same as any alien planet.
I'll touch on both of those in a minute, but I first want to note that I found the pacing of the book kind of weird. It's a 300 page book, and we don't arrive at the Ringworld until a hundred pages in, a third of the way through. And we don't meet anyone living on the ring for another 50 pages, at the book's halfway point. Because their flying motorcycles can go at supersonic speeds, the crew of characters we're following travel many times farther than it's possible to travel on Earth, but only interact with a few things, flying over and ignoring the rest. They encounter a village, some dangerous plants, an abandoned city, some dangerous weather, and then an inhabited city where they find help. For all that the ring is huge, Niven doesn't exactly stuff their trip across it with events.
I have a fondness for what I call Sapir-Whorf scifi, stories like Samuel Delaney's Babel 17 or China Mieville's Embassytown, that take real properties of language and amplify them until they're basically supernatural. Niven does something like that here (and really, in everything of his I've ever read) with Malthus's ideas about population growth and Darwinian evolution. The pressure created by population growth is more-or-less THE reason why any sentient species does anything. Growth plus evolution means, in Niven's view, that neoliberal economics, selfishness, rational-choice and game-theory decision-making are objectively true, and any attempts at kindness or altruism will give way to necessary cruelty within a few generations. And more generally, cultural change within any sentient species isn't actually driven by culture, but by the success or failure of how they manage their biological evolution. Nivens characters all believe this stuff, and the only times they're ever wrong are when they don't believe it enough.
This can potentially make for interesting fiction, although it can also just be offensive and pedantic, and not coincidentally, Niven pairs it with some pretty extreme sexism. What women are 'for' in Ringworld is providing men with children, with pleasure during sex, and otherwise staying out of the way. Both the aliens on the crew come from species where their females are literally non-sentient animals used solely for breeding. The human woman on the expedition is only there because the man likes having sex with her. At one point, to cheer her up when she's sad, he tells her if she weren't there to keep him happy, he'd be forced to rape the aliens. (Yes, this is really something Niven wrote as a reassuring sentiment!) When they later meet the person who can help them, her previous role on her crew was as ship's prostitute, whose job it was to keep the otherwise entirely male crew happy. She uses her sexual skill to try to enslave the main protagonist, something he claims any human woman could do to any man.
I sort of presume Niven's eugenic beliefs must've been racist too, although here we see that only by what's excluded. With the exception of the leading man, who is Asian, all the other humans in the book are White, including everyone on the Ringworld. Certainly Niven seems to think that each planet should be a monoculture, and each colony world should remain subservient to the home planet. Even the incomprehensible vastness of the ring seems to home to only one culture with one language, and a consistent way of signaling social class via hairstyle. I'm honestly annoyed that this book gets held up as an exemplar of good scifi!
The idea of the Ringworld itself is definitely the best-known part of the book, certainly more so than the plot or any of the characters. The Ringworld is an artificial habitat meant to provide almost unlimited living room. It's a circular hoop around it's own star, occupying approximately the entire orbit of Earth. The ring is about a million miles wide, bounded by walls a thousand miles high. For reference, the Earth is about 8000 miles in diameter, so you could stack about 100 Earths from wall to wall. The high walls keep the atmosphere from escaping, giant solar panels in a narrower orbit provide shade to create a day-night cycle, and the whole thing spins very fast to create a centrifugal force approximating Earth gravity. It's a thought experiment, not a thing that could actually exist, and one thing that makes it interesting is that it's very difficult to imagine it without shrinking it to more comprehensible dimensions.
The basic plot is that two humans and two aliens go to investigate the Ringworld, they crash land, and then have to use flying motorcycles to try to find help getting their spaceship off the ring. They see the sights, learn more about the history of the place, meet people who can't help them, eventually meet someone who can, and then finally leave. In structure, it's actually quite similar to Jack Vance's Big Planet, Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity, or Jack Chalker's Midnight at the Well of Souls. The success or failure of a plot like that is going to depend on how much you like the characters, and how interesting what they find on the surface is. No matter how cool the big-picture premise is, it can't save poor execution - and notably the big picture here doesn't imply much about the details. The ring could have almost anything on its surface, the same as any alien planet.
I'll touch on both of those in a minute, but I first want to note that I found the pacing of the book kind of weird. It's a 300 page book, and we don't arrive at the Ringworld until a hundred pages in, a third of the way through. And we don't meet anyone living on the ring for another 50 pages, at the book's halfway point. Because their flying motorcycles can go at supersonic speeds, the crew of characters we're following travel many times farther than it's possible to travel on Earth, but only interact with a few things, flying over and ignoring the rest. They encounter a village, some dangerous plants, an abandoned city, some dangerous weather, and then an inhabited city where they find help. For all that the ring is huge, Niven doesn't exactly stuff their trip across it with events.
I have a fondness for what I call Sapir-Whorf scifi, stories like Samuel Delaney's Babel 17 or China Mieville's Embassytown, that take real properties of language and amplify them until they're basically supernatural. Niven does something like that here (and really, in everything of his I've ever read) with Malthus's ideas about population growth and Darwinian evolution. The pressure created by population growth is more-or-less THE reason why any sentient species does anything. Growth plus evolution means, in Niven's view, that neoliberal economics, selfishness, rational-choice and game-theory decision-making are objectively true, and any attempts at kindness or altruism will give way to necessary cruelty within a few generations. And more generally, cultural change within any sentient species isn't actually driven by culture, but by the success or failure of how they manage their biological evolution. Nivens characters all believe this stuff, and the only times they're ever wrong are when they don't believe it enough.
This can potentially make for interesting fiction, although it can also just be offensive and pedantic, and not coincidentally, Niven pairs it with some pretty extreme sexism. What women are 'for' in Ringworld is providing men with children, with pleasure during sex, and otherwise staying out of the way. Both the aliens on the crew come from species where their females are literally non-sentient animals used solely for breeding. The human woman on the expedition is only there because the man likes having sex with her. At one point, to cheer her up when she's sad, he tells her if she weren't there to keep him happy, he'd be forced to rape the aliens. (Yes, this is really something Niven wrote as a reassuring sentiment!) When they later meet the person who can help them, her previous role on her crew was as ship's prostitute, whose job it was to keep the otherwise entirely male crew happy. She uses her sexual skill to try to enslave the main protagonist, something he claims any human woman could do to any man.
I sort of presume Niven's eugenic beliefs must've been racist too, although here we see that only by what's excluded. With the exception of the leading man, who is Asian, all the other humans in the book are White, including everyone on the Ringworld. Certainly Niven seems to think that each planet should be a monoculture, and each colony world should remain subservient to the home planet. Even the incomprehensible vastness of the ring seems to home to only one culture with one language, and a consistent way of signaling social class via hairstyle. I'm honestly annoyed that this book gets held up as an exemplar of good scifi!
Beyond all that, there are two other things you have to contend with. One is just the 1970s-ness of the setting, especially the way Niven chooses to mix humor into his writing. A lot of it just seems silly now. The sole curse word is 'tanj,' an acronym for 'there ain't no justice.' Two human space colonies are called 'We Made It' and 'Mount Lookithat.' Of the two aliens, one looks like a humanoid tiger, and the other, the Puppeteer, looks like a hunched-over person using their arms to make two ostrich-faced hand puppets. The woman on the crew, thanks to the success of human eugenics, is supernaturally lucky, like Domino from the X-Men, and the other three spend an awful lot of time trying to deduce from events just exactly how lucky she must be.
The other thing is that this is one of the last of Niven's Known Space works, and it sort of feels like he expects you to've read all the previous ones to fully appreciate it. The tiger-like Kzin have like, a 7 book series detailing their many wars with humanity. The Puppeteers build all the spaceships, and are in a bunch of earlier stories that I've read but mostly forgotten, at least one of which, I assume, explains why the hulls and inner walls of their ships are transparent like glass, which otherwise just seems bizarre. This omission especially surprises me, considering how many words get used telling us how cool the ring is and all the safety features built into the flying motorcycles. Niven does retell several of the earlier plots, which is part of why it takes Ringworld a hundred pages to actually get to the Ringworld, but a lot of ideas are also tossed out like you'll know what they are and why they're significant without him having to describe it. And some things we learn about the history of Known Space are clearly meant to be shocking revelations that recontextualize everything - but you had to believe something different first to fully appreciate that.
Anyway, if you can put up with all that, and a plot that's like half introduction, your reward is 150 pages of our heroes figuring out why civilization has collapsed across the Ringworld, and puzzling out how to get their ship off the ring. The collapse was primarily because all electricity, and thus all long-distance travel and communication, relied on a single system that failed and couldn't be fixed. Also no new electricity-generating devices could be built because the builders used atomic transmutation to supply materials, and so there's no metal not already in use on the ring. That all seems egregiously short-sighted on the builders' part, though Niven presents these as totally rational decisions despite their catastrophic (and foreseeable!) consequences. I was even more interested how impoverished Niven's view of nature is. The whole ring is like a giant city park rather than a real ecosystem, because after all, as Niven's characters remind themselves, why would you both including any desert landscape, or bringing along any pests or predatory animals? And at no point is this portrayed as a problem or mistake.
This will be my last book of 2024. I need to make sure the next scifi I read is something better than this!
Ugh. I have never any read any Niven, I don't think. I have read about the Puppetteers and find them sort of interesting, though.
ReplyDelete