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.