To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip José Farmer

Scattered is probably a fair way to describe what’s happening here. Two novellas build this book. And I think that split nature is a part of the problem: because the first novella deals with nudity, surprise, human savagery, and history, some of the more interesting aspects of the world as a whole are ignored or glossed over. These may lead to future stories, I see that there is a series following this book, yet when they come up in the second novella, they feel tacked on. While fixups are not inherently bad, Farmer puts the two novellas together poorly. The seeming lack of a shared theme further damages this book as a novel.

Know a man's faith, and you knew at least half the man. Know his wife, and you knew the other half.

The biggest problem lies in Farmer’s inability to clearly communicate conclusions to his themes. He’s dealing with some interesting issues: death, love, humanity as humanity, morality, religion, political science, history—Farmer brings up a ton of themes. Too many to adequately deal with all of the ideas he brings up. Scattered. And themes that would have been important to explain plot points—wanderlust, egalitarianism, warfare—are skipped over and implied instead of explored. That said, the theme of humanity as humanity is really well done, and I wish the rest of the book lived up to it. In short, Farmer states that humanity never really changes that much. From pre-homo sapiens to 21st century people, these resurrected characters are all given a second chance, and the first night is an orgy of rape and fear and murder. Humanity’s selfishness survives a second chance, in a way that reflects humanity as it seems to be.

The second biggest problem I see is that Farmer keeps talking in asides. Eventually plot points are dropped—Farmer spends pages dealing with the tension between Alice and Burton, but then they get together seemingly randomly, and the whole sub-plot is dropped from then on. The discussions of the characters create info-dumps, and their continuations are scattered throughout the novel. For instance, a 20th century Jew from America confronts Burton about a book he wrote that seems anti-semitic. They agree to discuss this later, but it’s a long time later when they finally do. And the weak payoff satisfies the buildup not at all. In short, the book rambles and trips over itself in the way the plot is paced and dialogue functions. Scattered.

The fortune of the man who sits also sits.

Farmer creates a couple of interesting characters, drawing heavily from historical figures. It’s uncomfortable, reading fictional representations of historical figures, as the archetype writes itself, and I’ve no idea how honest Farmer is being with these historical figures. I don’t need historical accuracy, but who is the intended audience? If it’s other Burton fanboys, then what does this book offer that I am missing, as a non-Burton fanboy? If it’s people who have never studied Burton, then a niggling question arises of who the historical figure was and how he is related to this fictional portrayal. There is an opportunity here, I think, but I’m not sure if Farmer’s method is the best or not. It works, because I don’t know Burton from Adam, but it’s a dangerous tactic.

The writing is pretty plain, but I want to lay the blame for that on the situation within the book. Namely, millions of people suddenly arise from the dead on a world constructed to observe their society and lives. Their newfound immortality and cosmopolitan situation—in both place and time—means that they have to teach each other to communicate, to get along. So, perhaps a plain language helps communicate this back-to-basics premise of the novel. Yet it doesn’t come off as strong wordplay.

Purgatory is hell with hope.

What can I take away from this novel, as a writer. First, the importance of some focus, some obstruction to the creative process, seems necessary to writing a better book than this. The scattered themes, conversations, and plots leave me unattached and largely uncaring. Second, the writing of plain language may be important to the premise, but the lack of beauty in the writing irks me. I wish Farmer had written better, while still retaining a plain diction—he pushed too far to one side in writing, and his writing ends up boring. Third, unnatural dialogue bores. These characters give five paragraph speeches like five paragraph college papers. No thanks—info-dumping substitutes for dialogue poorly. Fourth, the use of historical characters contains potential, but executing it requires great care. The redemption arc of Herman Goring plays as an aside to the main story, whatever that main story might be—and I’m not sure trying to redeem Herman Goring in the afterlife is the best move for any author. I will not be looking for other Riverworld books to read.

Conversation #1: Binti by Nnedi Okorafor

Introduction: This is a new thing on this blog: a conversation with a friend about a book we both read. Boru and I have spent thirteen years meeting once a week, every Tuesday night. We often discuss literature, or our other shared passions, over cigars. (By discuss, I mean shout at each other.) We also co-founded a monthly, structured, cigar and philosophy discussion group, TOOL, where a group of our friends does their homework on a film, album, or book chosen by a member of the group, then spends four hours talking about its ideas and craft. Tuesday Night and TOOL have both been beneficial in my own life, and I think in Boru’s as well.

This conversation is something new we’re trying. It may work, it may not. Here, we have both read a single novella for the first time, Binti by Nnedi Okorafor. We pre-agreed to have a written discussion about this novella, which promises to be quieter than our usual shouting. Here, as I write these first lines of the conversation, it is a Tuesday night, and our usual meeting has been cancelled this week because of Valentine’s Day. Since I do not observe this holiday, I get to begin the discussion.

Letter 1
I chose this book because it won the Hugo for novella (17,500 to 40,000 words), so it was on my list to read. I know it’s out of your usual reading radar, being science fiction, but it doesn’t appear that apologies are in order—it isn’t a mess. Thank you for reading it with me. After reading it, I do want to discuss this with somebody. Having gone in blind, I'm pretty happy about that good fortune. But it’s also not the greatest book I’ve ever read. I’ve got a few things that I want to talk about.

First, I’d like to tackle a big question. Why science fiction? Not why in general, but why here specifically. A question I often pose to things I read is why they are in the genre that they are in—be it science fiction, literary fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, romance, comics, or whatever. It seems to me like the genre can both help and hinder a book. For instance, my typical example presumes that somebody wanting to write about the dangers of fanatical monotheism would lose half of their intended audience if they wrote about Christian Fundamentalism or Islamic Fundamentalism; writing about a made-up religion’s Fundamentalists through the lens of science fiction or fantasy would help the author not lose half of their intended audience. On the other hand, the marketing materials and covers of typical fantasy and science fiction novels certainly chase away potential readers—but in any genre, books that are more about the genre than the characters are typically bad. (Sorry, gathering my thoughts by typing.)

So, here in Binti, for what purpose is it a science fiction story? On one hand, there could be a genre-specific reason: science fiction rarely features people racist against other groups of humans. Science fiction is often optimistic—the Cyberpunk era being the only contrast I can think of right now. In Binti, Okorafor questions that inherent optimism, pointing out that magic spaceships aren’t necessarily going to solve humanity’s problems with getting along. It’s a well-made point, and one that revolves around her technology discussion, which is on a more applicable scale. She discusses different sources of technology: the earth-based Otjize and the unknown-based Edan. Both are equally miracle workers, one is ancient as dirt, one is frighteningly futuristic. I think she’s trying to make an argument I already agree with: technology is just technology. High-tech and low-tech are the same thing. Traditional methods and technological methods differ not at all. In other words, magic shrimp space ships aren’t going to squash human hatred, they’re just going to allow it to spread across the skies. But they will change, or modify some human problems: humans aren’t the big fish in Binti's galactic pond anymore, they’re just five percent and it’s not even the strongest or smartest or most powerful five percent. And I think that’s a potential reason for couching this story in science fiction: what better genre to discuss the ineffectualness of potential future technology than that? And while she's there, she'll just point out this massive oversight within the genre too—racism. However, I realize that this is a dense book filled with tightly inter-related ideas. Boru, you don't read as much science fiction so your head is probably clearer here. You tell me—if you would like—why is she writing this story as science fiction? What would have been uncomfortable for other genres?

Letter 2
I, Boru, am happy to be a part of this. I have found Tuesday night, and TOOL, very beneficial to my mental health. It will be interesting to translate those stimulating conversations into something less ephemeral.

I enjoyed Binti as well. And it isn’t my favorite book of all time. I think I might know why it’s science fiction, though.

The sci-fi element allows Okorafor to do a few things. It helps the oppression/redemption story to seem new. We’ve seen this in many mediums over the last 50+ years: slave narratives; apartheid stories; tales of the Civil Rights struggles of the 60’s; and so on. Although this tale has been told in science fiction as well (Enemy Mine comes to mind), the future setting allows for some details that might let it seem somewhat fresh. And, it allows the author to show bigotry and redemption across several arcs. She creates several groups that get to show their bigotry and then overcome (mostly). The Koush are prejudiced against the Namib, and shed this prejudice after Binti shows exceptional ability. The Meduse are prejudiced against the Koush, whom they see as representative of all humans. Again, through her exceptional abilities, Binti wins them over. And, the faculty at Oozma show colonial instincts toward the Meduse. When given evidence that they have transgressed, they return the Meduse chief’s stinger. Okorafor shows these different levels because she gets to create them. This structure would be harder to pull off with existing earth-bound groups. She also gets to externalize, and complicate, the effects of assimilation through the transformation of Binti’s hair. A more realistic fiction would be forced to either explicate this effect through bald exposition, or through lengthy character building. The first would be ham-fisted at best. The second doesn’t fit well with the idea of a novella.

In the same vein as the first question, I am stuck wondering why this was a novella. As you know, Anonymous The Younger (ATY), I’m down with a good short story. I don’t mind having some questions left unanswered. I’m a Carver fan, for heaven’s sake! Part of my mild dissatisfaction with Binti is that Okorafor left so much unsaid. We read much about the fears of assimilation–the warnings of Binti’s parents, the Meduse calling the edan “the shame”–and the physical effects, but we are shorted on how those affected process these. The story itself made me think that I would get some insight into this, but it never follows through. I know there are more Binti books, so perhaps the author decided to honor her commitment to novella and address this topic later, but it left this reader unhappy. I’m not asking for a 600 page revision (although that might be fun), just a little more of a glimpse into how Binti, and Okwu, deal with becoming part of a different community. What say you, ATY? Should this have been a novel?

Letter 3
I'm glad you brought up that comment about enslavement by Binti's mother. That was very prominently placed there at the beginning. But, no, this should not have been a novel. Mostly because the most awe-inspiring thing about this novella is its density. Most novellas try and make a single point, or at the most three. Here, Okorafor uses these interrelated themes that every action and scene exhumes further. More characters, scenes, and exposition would probably have bogged it down and dulled this razor-focus the novella has. Listing the four biggest themes I saw, it’s easy to see how mixed together they are:

—On one hand, it’s about Binti being physically violated without her consent, being used by others: the Khoush touch her hair at the spaceport; the Meduse sting her before replacing her hair with their own tentacles, okuoko, without consent. And both of these change Binti fundamentally, so they're not sensationalist lit.

—Another theme is the role of technology and nature: the Edan and the otjize are both wonders, one technological, the other traditional dirt. The Third Fish in a giant, spacefaring shrimp used as a ship, and made in a lab/shipyard. It's probably the central metaphor for this theme, though more time is spent on the other two examples.

—Another theme is home and uniqueness. At home, we are not unique, but in the larger world, we are all unique. This is more Binti's personal journey, as much as she's allowed to have one by the circumstances.

—But I think the most prominent theme, and the one most affecting to Binti as a character, comes from her mother’s prophetic words at the beginning about the university leading her into slavery. It’s the idea of colonization, empire, and its effects on one person. I would argue against your thought that this isn't drawn out enough, and say that by being written the way she wrote it, the inevitability of assimilation is shown effectively. And that's the point that Okorafor makes: thoughts and people are equally enslavers. As you know, while I was laid up in the hospital a few months ago, I read Sandman by Neil Gaiman. The basic premise is exhumed by Alan Moore like this:

I suggest that if reality were genuinely a simple matter of forensics, ballistics, and gross physical mechanics, we’d all have things a fucking sight easier. The distressing or glorious truth is rather that our fantasies are real things. They exist, albeit in an immaterial realm beyond the reach of science or empirical investigation. They influence our behaviour and thus influence the material world, for better or worse. In effect, fantasy is a massive component of reality and cannot really be discussed as a separate entity in itself.

(Of course, this is also what Moore is getting at in From Hell, but that's strictly an aside.) Where Okorafor goes with this premise is multifaceted. On one hand, the Edan and the the otijze both react to Binti's dreams in ways that explicitly affect reality. But more importantly, Binti is enslaved as equally by the circumstances to friendship with Okwu as she is by the thought patterns of her tribe, by being a scholarship student as she is by the school's intellectualism itself, by the Medusae changing her hair as she is by her father's artistry. She has so many competing ideas and ideals that a novel would have a hard time focusing. Okorafor explores these themes to a satisfactory conclusion, and something longer runs the risk of being as repetitive as Ayn Rand. So an intriguing balance between density and length is superbly achieved here, to me. It leaves enough mystery up to the reader’s extrapolation, but gives enough facts to guide that extrapolation.

Now, I'm not saying that the point is that this is strictly defined enslavement, but that the benefit for Binti is when she manages to meld the inner and the outer enslavements to accomplish great things, things that haven't been done in years. She uses the obstacles—because of both dreams and physical necessities—to find a path that fits her. From what we know of the loosely sketched other characters in this world, only Binti could travel this path. I take this conclusion that thoughts and physics are both reality as Okorafor's main argument in the book. But is this just a case of osmosis? Is this insight only because Gaiman's earlier work is on my mind since I just read it? Is this too much of a stretch for this text?

Letter 4
I see your point about the length of the piece—a deeper exploration of all the themes of the book would have been difficult to pull off. Okorafor, by hinting at each, gives the reader many points of departure for exploration of the topics without pushing said reader in any particular direction. I can appreciate that.

And I think your Moore-colored glasses make for an interesting frame for a deeper exploration. Okorafor is dealing with some heady stuff here, it seems. Why not structure a reading around a heady premise? This works as well a some approaches, and better than most. A less secular reading of Moore's idea would lead one to see a synthesis of faith (in the broadest definition) and fact.

Binti's faith in the beliefs of her community of origin could be seen as what gives the otijze it's healing properties. Her desperate need for survival leads her to "pray" to the Edan, and it comes to life. The use of math to put one in a trance that allows for a stronger connection to universal forces would be the best example of this.

I think this might be the bigger theme. How does a person use the tools of enslavement (using your broad view of the term), faith, and fact, to forge a relatively autonomous and authentic self? To examine the tools and make them his/her own? We see Binti accepting and rejecting these tools in her struggle to be her own person, and to survive. Accept the otijze, reject the isolation. Accept the academic quest for knowledge, reject the ivory tower patronization. Accept the desire to survive, reject the drive to destroy. If we accept all outside influence, we are enslaved. If we reject all outside influences, we are a slave to our opposition. We can't escape enslavement, but we can be aware of how it affects us and how we react. I almost wonder if Okorafor is trying to show a path out of colonial influence.

Letter 5
That's a great insight into the treeing Binti does, Boru. The treeing crosses the line between faith and fact in an intriguing way that initially had me quite confused. I think your conclusion is spot on, that Okorafor is forging a path out of colonialism. But... but the path she presents is one of Binti being useful to the potential colonizers in a way that doesn't betray herself. This contrasts with being a curiosity to them, as she was in the spaceport. This usefulness seems better than being a freak show exhibit. But having to prove your worth before being accepted as who you are is an unfortunate pill to have to swallow. Maybe that's just part of what being human is all about though, for everybody.

In a way, Binti goes through the typical path of the colonized through this novel: marginalized and used as a natural resource for luxury and practical items; a remarkably intelligent colonized person then rises up and accepts an invitation to be educated and trained, accepting because of personal reasons; then is enslaved as a freak by the Khoush, Medusae, and University; then proves a innate and unique usefulness that cannot be ignored; then trying to take on the best aspects of multiple cultures to actually forge a path out of colonial influence. Again, assimilation is inevitable seems to be the point. (Or "resistance is futile," I suppose.) In this way, Okorafor seems to suggest that the colonization cannot be reversed or ignored by either the colonized or the colonizers. But because the colonization happened, the path out isn't a path back or a path in—just returning home or becoming the Khoushest Himba wouldn't be honest to the experiences and would limit future potentials in life extensively.

Letter 6
Is it possible that Okorafor might also be giving us a glimpse into the mind of The Magical Negro? Your discussion of exceptionalism struck a chord with me.

From Mammy in Gone With The Wind to Bagger in The Legend of Bagger Vance, we've seen examples of the colonized bringing spiritual enlightenment to the colonizer. Always exceptional in some way, they transcend the bonds of servitude and patronization to bring growth and awareness to their "superiors." We see the story through the colonizer's eyes, so we see their growth and the influence The Magical Negro has on them, but we rarely get insight into the mind of the "noble" colonized. Baldwin and Wright, among others, have given us modern day glimpses of the internal lives of the oppressed, but their protagonists aren't "making things better" for their oppressors. In Binti, we have a savior of not just one, not just a community, but an entire galaxy of colonizers. She shows everybody the way to peace. And we get to see what she is thinking while she does it. We get her inner monologue, not the filtered view of those she saves.

Perhaps, by subverting this trope, Okorafor shows that the "exceptional" is more like us than exceptional? Maybe she's using something familiar to further humanize "the other?"

As you know, I love it when an artist turns a cliché on it's head. Am I reading too much into this?

Letter 7
Ah, this seems to be a referential piece that I was missing. Thanks for filling it in for me. Binti has the same effect as the magic pixie dream girl on those around her, but through hyper-rationalization and accident, rather than unthinking enthusiasm. She shows a better way, even though sometimes she may not want to.

I think that we are agreed on the themes, except that I still believe the theme of thoughts as reality is in here and emphasized, and you think that's a stretch.

So, one last point specific to her writing and storytelling, the reveal in this story seems to ape China Mieville’s typical tactic—though he didn’t originate it, he has popularised it, at least for me—in that it appears about third of the way through the story. But that’s where the similarities seem to end for me. As you wrote a while ago, here on this blog, his twists reveals the fantasticness of a situation that seemed mundane up until then. In Binti, the reveal rockets the story off in a new direction. And I don’t know if it works as well. Don’t get me wrong: I appreciate reading new things and I hate writing rules, but a new thing has to be effective.

So, what does Okorafor actually do? First, she sets up the relationship between the Himba and Binti herself—Binti is a minority within the Himba culture, the one who seeks the stars rather than “preferring to explore the universe by travelling inwards”. Then she sets up the Himba-Khoush antipathy: the Himba are a minority group in human affairs that are at least regionally run by the Khoush. The Khoush differ extensively from the Himba, acting as a sort of aristocracy. Then comes the minor role humans play in greater galactic culture: only five percent of the prestigious university is composed of humans. So Binti is a minority within a minority group within a larger minority group. Perhaps I'm drawing too much on Martin Heidegger with these nesting worlds, but it seems to me that this layering is a difference between the way Okorafor and Mieville deal with their reveals. While they do similar things, the setups are so different that the end-result is different. Binti takes a left turn into destiny, Mieville's characters continue on the same path but with the reader having a new understanding of the context. On my second read, the bit before the reveal seemed less altered by the reveal than in Mieville. The first part was just reading along, understanding from revisiting those words rather than from knowing the end, and waiting for the other shoe to drop. In other words, Okorafor's reveal feels more like an injection into the story to switch its tracks into a new direction, where Mieville allows his pre-reveal language to give greater context to the same story.

Ringworld's Children by Larry Niven

What keeps bringing me back to these Larry Niven books? I think it’s the connections I miss in his sparse writing style that he then spins into future stories. For instance, the deus ex machina of the floating building in the first book comes back to help define some of the world building in the second and third books, even the sensationalist sex is expanded upon in later books (but not in enough depth to mean that expansion escapes sensationalism). It’s an awareness of every little detail, and a building off of it. With this super-sparse, jump-cutting writing style, every word matters. And Niven builds on single words in ways that mystery authors would be proud to have done—though mysteries often obscure important facts through wordiness instead of sparseness. In other words, it’s these logical connections between the world building and the storyline that I appreciate. It’s a believable world, for the most part; but that doesn’t matter as much as the way Niven presents it. These jump cuts leave me no time to contemplate: I read, Niven solves the problem, I keep reading. Yet if I put the book down, I too can apply my mind to this logical puzzle of a story and world Niven has created. And this fourth book scratches that itch—surprising as the third failed at that. This mystery is the flipside of his sparse writing.

Then he saw his own droud sitting on a table.[...]
So, a replacement. Bait for Louis Wu, the current addict, the wirehead. Louis's hand crept into the hair at the back of his head, under the queue. Plug in the droud, let it trickle electric current down into the pleasure center... where was the socket?
Louis laughed wildly. It wasn't there! The autodoc's nano machines had rebuilt his skull without a socket for the droud!
Louis thought it over. Then he took the droud. When confused, send a confusing message.

The same still cannot be said for the characters: these hyper-rationalist characters still come off flat and uninteresting. I understand that culturally top-down speculative fiction like Star Wars exists for solid reasons: the most at stake, ease of worldbuilding, being in the action, etc. But after four books where Louis Wu just happens to be kidnapped, tricked, or forced into being the savior, the mantle still doesn’t fit. He’s not nearly as smart as a Pak Protector, yet we’ve had Protector after Protector turn to him for advice. It fits awkwardly: here at least Niven notices this awkwardness and initially only brings Louis into the inner circle as a consultant on the Fringe War, but then his typical storytelling gets the better of Niven and Louis is planned to be part of a triumvirate of Protector rulers. It doesn’t fit what Niven has given us of his characters, as little as that is, so I still believe Niven writes characters poorly.

[T]he Hindmost [mourned]. "All gone. I lost my place as Hindmost chasing the Ringworld's wealth of knowledge. And those you spoke of, those you love, Louis, what of them?"
"I'll never find them. Hindmost, that's the point. Now let's fix that autodoc before something intimate tears loose inside me."

In closing, Niven writes interesting ideas, then doesn’t know what to do with them. He admits in this book that these plot ideas are partially taken from fan forum theories. It’s an interesting idea for an author to engage with his fans in such a way, but Niven may rely upon those fan theories too much. It makes sense to be inspired there, but to ignore building characters for four books makes no sense. I am surprised I read all four of these, but they were not challenging reading, they did not burn my brain. Pulp fiction. The worldbuilding ideas are interesting, but Niven takes them so far, that there is little mystery left to the reader at the end, and the books are not great. At least one review mentions that this novel seems more phoned-in paycheck collection than an inspired continuation of the story, and I’m not sure I could argue against that.

A number of Web sites have sprung up (well, at least two) whose topic is Larry Niven's fiction. In September 1999, tipped off by my lovely agent, Eleanor Wood, I logged onto larryniven-1@bucknell.edu. They were arguing about whether you can clone a protector, and whether Seeker and Teela Brown might have left a child behind. If they'd been right I wouldn't have seen a story, but they were off on the wrong foot, and I could fix it. After a few months of following these discussions, rarely interrupting, I had enough material for Ringworld's Children.

Ringworld Throne by Larry Niven

This book differs from the two preceding it by using a pair of plots. One plot, the first half of the book, is all sex and violence as a sex-solidified-coalition attempts to take down a vampire infestation that grew when Louis Wu boiled the sea and blocked out the sun. The second half of the book is Louis Wu picking a new head protector for the ringworld through pseudo-orchestrating a big protector fight. Niven attempts to tie these two together by having the goblins carry off a spoil from the vampire eviction that then seems to inform a part of the later protector duel. But this is thin, very thin, and it’s basically a fixup novel, composed of two short stories poorly linked together.

Two-tenths of night passed this way, I think. Then the wind swung around. I didn't notice right away: the vampire scent was gone, but we had our own smells by then. But Chit saw —"
Chit: "Vampires trying to creep upon us across the ice. They're not much darker than snow themselves."
Kay: "The wind went gusty and stayed that way. They'd get a whiff of us and look around, and we were conspicuous, I guess."
Paroom: "Ten tens of them."
Kay: "Toward morning they stopped coming entirely. We left a carpet of vampires dead in the pass."
Twuk: "There's nothing under the Arch like the stink of a hundred vampire corpses. They do avoid their own dead."
Vala: "Might keep it in mind."
Twuk: "We collected our cargo and our bolts and bullets at halfdawn. Vala, I think we *saw* the Shadow Nest."
"Tell it."
"Warvia?"
The Red woman didn't look down. "From spin the light of day flowed toward us while we were still in dark. We were exhausted, but I was at my post, here on the cannon tower. The clouds parted. I saw two black lines. Hard to tell how far, hard to tell how high, but a black plate with structures above, high in the center and glittering silver, and its black shadow parallel below."

Niven’s sparse writing style still comes off like a mystery novel at times. Implying heavily but making sure not to be too explicit. Jokes about William Shatner-speak would apply here, I think, but I’m not a trekkie so I don’t really know for sure. An appropriate analogy for the style is probably jump cuts between short scenes. For instance, when the vampires first attack, that is a tense scene: there are people disappearing into the night; blasts of light from the cannons; the confusing smells of alcohol, pheromones, and sulphur; an unsteady alliance (not yet sealed with sex) trying to not fall apart; a wife cheating on her husband; low ammo, confusion, death and destruction. And these hyper-jump-cuts work great. They give me a sense of the fog of war, of the desperation and frustration of this night-fight.

In every direction she could see pale hominid shapes. So little detail. You had to imagine what they looked like; and with the scent tickling your hindbrain, you saw glorious fantasies.
They were closer. Why wasn't she hearing guns? She'd reached Anthrantillin's cruiser. Up onto the running board. "Hello? Anth?"
The payload shell was empty.
She used the trick lock and climbed into the payload shell.
All gone. No damage, no trace of a fight; just gone.
Soak a towel. Then: the cannon. The vampires were bunching nicely to spin. Bunching around Anth or Forn or Himp, somewhere down there? It didn't matter. She fired and saw half of them fall.

Yet, Niven seems to really like these jump cuts and uses them throughout the book, in the ruminative and relaxing sections as well as the crazy battle scenes. As this tendency is embraced by multiple types of scenes, all of that conveyed desperation is lost because the jump cuts become normal.

Vala said, "The Grass Giants have crossbows. Why are they worried? Crossbows won't have the reach of guns, but they'll outreach vampire scent." The wagonmasters looked at each other. Anth said, "Grass eaters —"
"Oh, no. Elsewhere they're considered scary fighters," Whand said.
Nobody answered.

This novel explores the ringworld technology less than the prior two, but really starts to get into the ringworld ecology. Humanoid protector-breeders evolved over thousands of years to fill the niches in the environment left empty by the original protectors. Separate species fulfill various aspects of environmental health like the goblins eating the dead of the other species. That’s really what this book is about, Louis learning about the various bipedal species, sexing them, watching a group of various species take on the vampire problem, and then using his knowledge to pick an appropriate head protector. Any theme is going to be loose in this adventure tale, but I think a sense of putting the whole ahead of the parts is probably the strongest theme.

At some point the negotiations had become a swimming party.
A sword could be used on oneself. Just turn it around. Jump from the top of a rock?

So, again, I felt like some mindless adventure with an interesting idea or two, and this fit the bill well. A frantic pace to the writing turned pages, but nothing really burned my brain up after reading. The two big faults—the writing being too frantic and the book being an awkward mashup of two stories—really detracted for me. At least he tries to use the sex constructively in the novel, but it doesn't really come off that interestingly. I’ll read the fourth because, well, there’s only one book left to read. But if there were four or five more books in the series, I would stop here. The tight focus of the first novel is entirely gone, and I feel that this writing style matches best with a tightly focused book.

"Louis Wu, react."
Louis answered. "You've started something you can't stop. You've attacked two war fleets, three if you count the Fleet of Worlds. Political structures get old and die, Bram, but information never gets lost anymore. Storage is too good. Somebody will be testing the Ringworld defenses for as long as there are protons."

The Ringworld Engineers by Larry Niven

Niven returns to the ringworld with information gathered from enthusiastic MIT students who had studied the orbital mechanics of the structure and found that its rigidity meant it didn’t actually orbit the sun, and would instead be unstable and fall into the sun if it got off its path. If that doesn’t excite you, I probably would recommend skipping this book. It’s not quite more of the same, from Niven’s Ringworld series, but it’s certainly similar. It leaves me questioning why I read this book. Not why should anybody read this book, but why did I?

Chmeee snarled, “How much intelligence does it take to sneak up on a leaf?” He flipped the droud to Louis and shambled toward his water bed.

I guess I read this book out of curiosity. I like Science Fiction. I don’t consider this a great book, but it’s good science fiction. It’s obsessed with ideas, and these ideas drive the story: evolution from a common ancestor based on environmental niches that hominid species can fit themselves into; Louis Wu and company arriving as an Excession and trying to discover the truth behind the myths of these regressed peoples; the ringworld falling into the sun. This last is the true focus of the novel, and what most of the novel deals with directly. Niven tells an engaging story about three people trying to save the ringworld from wobbling in its track and falling into the sun. So, it’s an exploration and adventure tale, with a standard linear narrative--though there is at least one flashback here. And I am entertained. Further, this unrelatable idea of a ringworld interests me in a way. It’s a sort of mental puzzle box--the idea seems so fantastic that seeing the shortcomings takes some time.

He was on the flight deck, speaking via the intercom system; and that might or might-not have been significant.

But my main problems with the novel are brought about by social issues that are mentioned but not explored in any illuminating depth. In the same way that Niven uses hard science fiction themes as points to hang the story off of, he also uses social themes like pregnancy free sex (as negotiation method and currency both), electronic drug addiction, insanity, the inevitability of death, kidnapping and slavery, different cultures and species working together or not, etc. But he simply states these social issues and then drops any further exploration of them. The exploration by Louis Wu of this ringworld take center stage, and everything else is a dropped ball. That’s frustrating to me, as the novel raises some interesting issues before rushing past to further pursue the story of righting the ringworld’s wobble.

She stood. “Shall we indulge in rishathra?”

Louis had been expecting that, a little, and it wasn’t Laliskareerlyar’s odd appearance that made him hesitate. It was the terror of taking off his armor and his tools. He remembered an old sketch of a king brooding on his throne. I’m paranoid. But am I paranoid enough?

In Ringworld, Louis Wu slept with every female character in the book. And here, again, it’s mostly the same. He meets a bearded lady and sexes her. He meets a giant and sexes his wives. He gets followed by a librarian who sexes him. Etc. The quote above isn’t even from one of those sexual relations. It’s annoying that Niven doesn’t do anything with the sex, simply describes it and moves back to the adventure tale. Even John Carter of Mars did more interesting things with sexual relations, and that isn’t saying much at all. The sex is unnecessary to the story. The book is simply sex, violence, and a mystery. The violence always results from the mystery, the sex comes in the periods between the violence, and the mystery consumes as much of the book as isn’t sex or violence.

The sun was just past zenith in a nearly cloudless sky. An endless sunlit landscape stretched before them: ponds, groves of trees, fields of grain, and rows of dark green vegetables. Louis felt like a target. A coil of black wire was taped to his shoulder. Now he pulled it free and flung it away. One end was still attached to his suit. It would radiate heat if she fired now.

So, in short, I wanted to read more of an adventure tale that began with Ringworld, and this fit the bill. Without being the introduction of the concept, this novel leaves much to be desired. But I didn’t hate the book and can understand why fans of orbital mechanics in literature would love this book. It wasn’t for me. It’s not good writing, but it’s writing that gets out of its own way. It raises interesting social points then drops them in a way that feels like wish fulfillment. Some of the ideas are fascinating though, and I kept reading for those.

Ringworld by Larry Niven

This novel is Niven’s most famous work, but I’ve never been as enthusiastic about it as friends have. Perhaps that’s why I picked it up for a second read. The pacing follows a typical detective-adventure tale’s pacing: it starts somewhere fairly normal, then keeps veering in unexpected directions so that the goals of the characters rapidly shift. I mean, I know they’re just trying to get off of the ringworld, but first they try finding locals, then finding a spaceport, then surviving a trap, then setting another trap, then surviving an ambush, then letting one of their members go, then climbing a mountain a couple of thousand miles high, then escaping out a giant hole. These quickly shifting goals keeps the exploration party and reader on their toes. And it works as well as it ever has, you know? Dumas could’ve written this book for all the structural experimentation done by Niven, but Niven pulls it off well.

“Exercise is wonderful," said Louis. "I could sit and watch it all day.”

One of Niven’s strengths is that when you stop reading to think about the events, cause and effect help these crazy shifts in goals and situations make sense.
—For instance, the wire they need to haul their half-dead spaceship up the mountain and off the ringworld was what they originally ran into to chop their spaceship up and cause themselves to crash in the first place. This mostly saves the ending from accusations of deus ex machina.
—Another example: the exploration party is composed of four characters, three of whom have been manipulated by the other, the one who picked them. So their tension and anger fits well within their context of being hand-chosen by Nessus—unknowingly before the book starts with the fertility lotteries and starseed lures, and knowingly with the actual mission to the ringworld.
—Or Prill, who initially comes out of nowhere, but actually fits well into the larger context of ramscoop ships and the failure of ringworld civilization.
—Niven doesn’t explicitly hammer these cause-and-effect tendencies of his writing down the reader’s throat, but he does mention them briefly.

Gradually he was learning the size, the scale of the Ringworld. It was unpleasant, like all learning processes.

It’s a book of brief mentions: Niven’s writing style forsakes interior monologue and narrative explanations. He trusts the readers to pick up what he is putting down, even when he uses just a single sentence to change the context throughout the rest of the book. Most authors would use a paragraph or two explaining and restating why everything would be different. Not Niven. Niven is more likely to say something like, “Louis laughed, and Teela burst into tears,” instead of explaining why Louis’ laughter caused Teela’s tears. It’s a book that goes beyond trusting the reader’s intelligence in a couple of different ways. First, with monumental shifts in interpersonal relationships and context taking place within a single sentence instead of a couple of paragraphs, Niven requires his reader’s undivided attention to every word. Second, his characters are rational as well. Hyper rational. And that seems to be a fault for this novel. In order to have the reader be able to extrapolate what they need to in order to understand the book, the characters have to be rigidly rational creatures acting rationally. Where Louis seems irrational, there is a contextual explanation for his rationale through the world that Niven builds. So, while in our world it is irrational to leave one’s own birthday party, here, Niven explains how the culture allows this to happen and makes it seem normal for Louis in that time. Anywhere Teela seems irrational, it’s her Luck taking over and driving her around as its pawn, which is shown through Louis’ detectiving out Teela’s story and explaining it to her/the reader. These unrealistically hyper-rational characters leaves their portrayals flat, and makes the book feel more contrived than it needs to. Humans are not always rigidly rational creatures. Except here they are.

“Humans," said the puppeteer, "should not be allowed to run loose. You will surely harm yourselves.”

Of course, when it comes to the ringworld itself, Niven’s sparse language opens up and he spends a ton of time talking about it. It’s an interesting mental exercise, the ringworld, and I think Niven’s enthusiasm is one of the reasons that this book still resonates with so many people. But despite the time spent discussing it, Niven’s sparse language means that the main, on-the-surface, applicable theme is not the ringworld itself. His theme is really about the other place where he spends the most words, where he breaks with the sparse language to explore a concept: luck and planning. It’s a detective novel with Speaker and Louis discovering the plans of Nessa and the nature of Teela. The ringworld itself plays as the setting, the science fictional theme that helps push the book along a path and provides a complex context for the interpersonal detective work. And Niven treats his theme fairly even-handedly. Initially, Niven gives the readers the positives of luck and planning; but as the book goes on, the negatives come to light and start to wrinkle the awe Louis and Speaker feel at Nessus’ planning and Teela’s luck. Both planning and luck are shown as a double edged sword. Teela’s luck keeps her alive, but drives her towards a future fit for her in ways that are uncomfortable to her and her companions. Nessus’ planning is solely focused on preservation of his species, Pierson’s Puppeteers. This focus helps the species survive, but also gives other species a casus belli against them. Some of the tensest parts of the book are when Louis and Speaker discover the Puppeteer acts that have altered their races in egotistical ways. Also, the planning of the ringworld’s builders has created this vast monument, but has also led to its downfall. Because Niven allows his wordcount to explore these concepts of luck and planning more than others in the novel, I believe that these are the main themes of the book.

Danger doesn't exist for Teela Brown.

Subtextually, questions of technology are prevalent throughout the novel.
—For example, these four explorers who can travel anywhere on their worlds in an instant, and who can travel faster than light—something as short as “we were using the wrong theories before we bought the right ones from galactic Outsiders” being the explanation given for FTL travel—are suddenly stuck on a huge ringworld moving at what is a snail’s pace to them. They are forced back to our time in terms of travel speeds. Niven never lays out clear conclusions to this thread, but he examines its effects on the characters through plot point after plot point.
—Another example is that Louis uses sabbaticals to reconnect with boredom. Being 200 years old when the novel starts, he represents a bit of an anachronism in his culture. Is his method of relaxation Niven commenting on technology having a dislocating effect on humans? Niven doesn’t say, but that could certainly be read into the novel.
—The most obvious example is that the ringworld itself is a failed technological marvel. As an artificial thing it offers positives and negatives—this is perhaps his most Heideggerian example about technology within the book. On the one hand, more space allows more people to dwell there—which solves the problems of overpopulating planets. On the other, resources are vastly limited and too fragile because of the artificiality of the world—the solution to overpopulation creates its own problems. In other words, to borrow from Heiddeger, technology will never solve technology’s problem: the ringworld solves certain problems of planets, but creates new problems of its own by being solely focused on solving those planetary problems.
—These questions concerning technology keep popping up in the novel, but Niven doesn’t explain them. As much as I want to hold this up as the best science fictional novel dealing with Heidegger’s great book Questions Concerning Technology, Niven doesn’t spend enough time extrapolating for the reader to make this connection obvious. He does not discuss conclusions, just lays out the situation. These questions are a prominent undercurrent to the whole book, but not the main focus of it.

Heat is produced as a waste product of civilization.

Louis has sex with every human-like female in the book. This is clearly anachronistic to the science fiction of today. Teela is the best sex Louis can imagine, before he meets Prill. This one-note portrayal of human relations bores me. It’s unrealistic and smacks of Captain Kirk syndrome—sex everything. Louis even sells Teela to a local wandering hero with a big sword at one point. It’s too typical of older science fiction to have strong male characters and complex relationships between males, while featuring weak female characters and one-note relationships between males and females. Louis sexing both of the women in the novel comes off like wish fulfillment, and not like a discussion about sexual relationships between lovers.
—While Teela and Prill are sexualized, the relationships between Louis, Speaker, and Nessus are given space to grow and gain complexity. A friendship develops between Speaker and Louis that is touching. Their relationships with Nessus go through distinct phases throughout the novel, and affects their budding friendship deeply. It’s not the strongest friendship in fiction, not the most well developed, but it’s certainly above average and better than Louis and the two women.

The gods do not protect fools. Fools are protected by more capable fools.

As to Niven’s ability to write aliens here, they speak like humans, and are just as hyper rational as Louis. Speaker and Nessus both feature different premises than Louis, premises from which to build their rationality. But these premises are not divergent enough for their alienness to be believable—all out warrior-hunter and calculating coward are both easily understood as extremes of certain human traits. This is a weakness in the novel, a novel with such prominent aliens.

The puppeteer unrolled completely. "Did I hear you call me cute?"

Niven prioritizes showing over telling. I understand that Louis is moderately compassionate and vastly curious through his actions alone. I understand Speaker is a natural warrior-hunter when he bounds off to hunt a ringworld rabbit, or when he steals the weapon from Louis. I understand that Teela’s luck is her driving force through the way she burns her feet, or questions Louis concerning pain. And I think Niven portrays both the positives and negatives of “show don’t tell”. I appreciate the cause-and-effect of the story, but some more interior monologue about technology could’ve really made this novel something spectacular.

The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum.

So, in closing, Niven writes characters and human relations poorly, but tells an engaging story well. Cause and effect helps his story make sense, but it requires the reader to extrapolate from sparse hints spread throughout the book. He focuses his words on an interesting mental exercise, the ringworld itself, and really shines when his worldbuilding is doled out to the reader slowly throughout the book. He does a good job, but it’s a book that I still don’t like as much as some of my friends. For a book about exploration, he certainly doesn’t allow his writing to explore enough of the interesting concepts and questions the exploratory party of characters uncovers. I see it as a worthy successor to Asimov, a science fiction author whose short fiction is often great, but whose longer works don’t speak to me because he often just drops ideas in the reader’s lap without exploring them much himself. I like this book better than any Asimov book I’ve written, but they are similar writers and I still don’t really enjoy the hyper-rational characters, the female sexualization, and the lack of believable aliens. Good book. I’ll read more Niven for sure. Not great though.

Heaven's Reach by David Brin

The prior two books in this trilogy use many short chapters to slowly introduce readers to characters and situations, often ending with cliffhangers before switching focus to another story, then another, then another, then back to the first again to resolve it. This pace allows a sense of complexity to build throughout the book. By using short chapters, Brin allows details to be fresher in his readers’ heads than other authors, like George Martin, who use a similar chapter structure but much longer chapters.

And then here, in the third book, Harry is introduced. A neo-chimp who has cut ties with Earth in order to work for one of the great galactic institutes. He explores E-Space, which is this zone where ideas are alive—ideas are memetic creatures that have shape and some small material content. Where the characters that I’ve been reading for two books are still given short chapters, Harry’s are long. And for half the book Harry doesn’t relate at all to the rest of the story. It’s a problem of expectations: by starting the whole trilogy stating that these three books were written as one, then leaving Harry to be introduced near the end, I’m more confused than intrigued by his initial chapters. He’s too far off to one side. He eventually connects in somewhat interesting ways, but so much time is spent simply describing E-Space while furious action is going on in every other short chapter, that being asked to read Harry’s chapters is the first pacing problem these books have. Also, his connections seem more haphazard than planned.

The theme here deals with salvation. The Transcendence of the galactics starts to make sense as the reader is given more details through the story. The human concept of personal-salvation and the galactic concept of species-salvation come to some weird place where they almost synthesize but fall apart again. These are some interesting questions. And the science fiction aspect of the stories allows him to approach these questions in fascinating ways. There is literally a supernatural Harrower plucking ships off of hyperspace threads and putting them elsewhere like some old deus ex machina.

Concepts that had eluded him because they could not be shaped with images and feelings alone, but needed the rich subtlety of abstract language to shape and anchor them with a webbery of symbols.

To be clear, I do not think it a problem to learn about Transcendence now, after five other books hinting at this process. It’s part of Brin’s storytelling tactic to focus on what the reader needs to know for his story to make sense. I think that’s actually a strength of his storytelling—he trusts the reader without feeling like he has to info dump or spoonfeed them (the weird situation with him writing sequels for the first time, and feeling like he needs to recap his recaps in Infinity’s Shore and this book being the only contrary example).

But, Harry’s E-Space and the Transcendence questions show that this story has clearly gone from a tale of a few characters going through hard times in an interesting larger context—Brin’s bread and butter and what he does so well—to a tale focused entirely on that larger context, on big ideas as themes, on big ideas as characters themselves, who show up in Harry’s world of E-Space. For what I’ve read of Brin, this is outside the normal track of his writing. I appreciate that he’s experimenting and broadening his writing tasks. But he’s also a bit messy when it comes to the big questions, and he’s not as clear as I tend to expect from him. So, in part, I appreciate the experiment, though I think he fails at it in some ways. But this series is space opera, it’s over the top and excessive and melodramatic and I love that. I would rather somebody mess with these ideas than leave interesting things out of their novel. Brin just didn’t pull big ideas writing off as well as Arthur Clarke typically does.

It’s an interesting novel that ends up not being one of my favorites of Brin’s. His strengths are not played to as a writer, to an extent that it seems to go past experimentation and into some weeds that affect the quality. Harry’s chapters are initially so far out of left field that they pull me away from the other narratives I’m following from the first two books. By the time Harry is tied in with the rest of the book, it still seems haphazard and tenuous. But it’s worth reading for the closure of so many story threads from the first two novels. Probably. I liked it, but it will negatively affect my desire to go back and read this trilogy. I look forward to reading more of Brin’s writing though. His writing is consistently good.

Infinity's Shore by David Brin

At the end of my review for Brightness Reef, I wrote that I was excited to read Infinity’s Shore. I immediately opened up Infinity’s Shore, and found myself annoyed. There is no blatant intro info dump here, which is a good, but Brin keeps covering the same explanatory territory in ways that annoy. How many times does he have to explain what Biblos is, what “the peace” is, that this character’s body is hydrophobic, that Herbie is mysterious. Come on, we get it. Perhaps he is responding to criticism that the myriad races were difficult to tell apart in the last novel, but these three novels were written as one, according to Brin. So, by seven-eighths of the way through this second one, I shouldn’t still be hearing, “Gillian misses Tom”, and watching the author again drop that thread right there, as if Brin is introducing me to this for the first time, again. He recaps his own recaps.

Humans wrestled endlessly with their own overpowering egos. Some tried suppressing selfness, seeking detachment. Others subsumed personal ambition in favor of a greater whole—family, religion, or a leader. Later they passed through a phase in which individualism was extolled as the highest virtue, teaching their young to inflate the ego beyond all natural limits or restraint.

But it raises a more interesting question: how much of the sequel should be spent covering aspects of past books, ensuring readers do not miss connections? Too much seems insulting. Not enough seems frustrating to comprehension. So much of speculative fiction explores multi-book themes and stories. This recap question should be forefront on many writers’ minds. According to Brin, this is the first time that he has done a sequel, so I hope he gets better at it in the future. I do not have an answer to that question of sequels as standalones, and it's probably a case by case basis, but it surprises me that it arises here.

Yet egotism can also be useful to ambitious creatures, driving their single-minded pursuit of success. Madness seems essential in order to be “great.”

Brin is typically sparse with his information. It’s one of the things that makes his worldbuilding spectacular: historical events in-universe are hinted at, but not explained.
—For instance, whatever happened in that Shallow Cluster where the dolphin ship found Herbie is never fully explained. Instead, Brin gives a sentence here or there discussing aspects of what happened. But he never goes full info-dump and gives out the whole story via reminiscence or dream. This leaves the reader with concrete facts, but an incomplete picture. Delicious.
—Another example is that of transcendence. This has been hinted at through the other four books in the Uplift series, but Brin explains more each time he touches on it here. It’s like the reader is right there with the characters, understanding more as they understand more.
—This tendency to hint but not explain past events and galactic context shows that there is depth here, but Brin knows better than to focus on that depth because the focus of his story is elsewhere. It’s a fantastic tactic, and one that clashes with his recapping his own recaps.

The theme here is what makes us ourselves. Lark never wanted to leave Jijo, but now he is off-planet and is he still Lark? Emerson is back among his friends, but he has no capacity with words, so the two people he used to be—an engineer onboard the dolphin ship and a mysterious, almost mute stranger—do not apply to this new situation and he is again trying to find where he fits in, who he is. Dwer is stuck with Rety on a spaceship escaping Jijo, yet he is a part of Jijo’s ecosystem in such a fundamental way that he is at a loss to even know what his options are in this new place. Who are we, how do we know that, and why does that change? These are the questions Brin approaches with this novel. It’s nice to see the Uplift universe being used for more than a discussion of diversity, though diversity still plays a big role in this novel.

The story is satisfyingly complex and there is a ton going on. The writing is great: the aliens feel alien in the way they talk. Each character is distinctive. But, being the second of three novels, much is left in the air at the end, leaving it with weak legs to stand on as its own book. So, again, this is a book I devoured as a reader, though I was regularly annoyed with how much repetitive recapping occurred. It left me again hungry to read the next novel in the series.