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.
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