Karl Schroeder: Lady of Mazes

Review of the novel Lady of Mazes, by Karl Schroeder.

I had suggested reading something by Schroeder for the Kepler’s book discussion group, and was happy that we’d be reading this one since it’s the one book by him I haven’t read (I read Sun of Suns when it was serialized in Analog). Unfortunately, I think this is the weakest of Schroeder’s four novels to date.

The novel is told in three parts. The first part takes place on Teven Coronal, a ring station whose populace is divided up into separate “manifolds”, virtual reality spaces with different technological levels and cultures. Peoples’ perceptions are carefully regulated based on their belief systems, and it’s difficult to move between the manifolds since it requires being able to consciously change your perceptions. Our heroine, Livia Kodaly, lives in the Westerhaven manifold, which has a veneer of upper-class Renaissance culture (where authority and reputation govern who’s willing to interact with and listen to you), but with a sophisticated technological level. But Livia and her friend Aaron were in an accident some years earlier in which they were stranded outside the manifolds, and this experience changed their perceptions of Teven, and Livia is able to move between the manifolds more easily than most of her peers.

In this part, Teven is invaded by representatives of something called 3340, who are subverting the manifolds by pushing the peoples’ perceptions to the edges of what their manifolds support, which causes the boundaries between them to collapse, resulting in war between the manifolds. Livia, Aaron, and their ally Qiingi – from a low-tech manifold – manage to escape the invaders and cast off into space in a makeshift craft, in seek of help.

This leads to the second part, in which they arrive in the Archipelago, a society of stations in the vicinity of Jupiter. There they learn that Teven is in a part of space which is kept off-limits to the rest of humanity through the authority of powerful posthumans known as the Anecliptics. One of Teven’s founders gained the right to the station through a bargain with the Anecliptics, but no one else is allowed in, making hope of allies to save Teven look bleak. The Archipelago is rather the opposite of Teven: Individuals freely interact, but each has their own computer-managed “narrative” which nourishes their lives to make them as comfortable and rewarding as possible. A handful of people choose to live without narratives, but they’re in the minority. Among these is Doran Morss, a rich man with his own ship who seeks to free humanity from the oversight of the Anecliptics and the narrative system, but his pleas mostly fall on deaf ears.

Livia and company find their way in the Archipelago, covertly trying to find someone to help them save Teven, until they learn what 3340 is and what its goals are. This leads into the third part, in which we learn about Teven’s history, the Anecliptics’ mistakes, and 3340’s plans and allies.

Once again, Schroeder delivers the goods in the form of some thought-provoking and challenging ideas, contrasting the homogeneous society of the Archipelago with the forcibly-separated ones on Teven, and driving the plot with the struggle to free oneself from societal constraints imposed by higher beings. But unfortunately the goods come along with some “bads”: The book’s themes and struggles feel so abstract, and its characters so one-dimensional, that it’s very difficult to figure out what the various sides are, never mind which ones to get behind.

The book is extremely slow to get moving, although others in our discussion appreciated the first part (of three) for its cultural anthropological examinations. I felt like I got the idea rather quickly, and I wish for character development and for the plot to get moving, but it wasn’t until the second part the either happened, and then it was only the latter; the characters never did develop very much. Doran Morss could have been the most interesting character in the book – experienced, thoughtful, passionate – but we only saw brief glimpses of his feelings, so he was only slightly more than a peripheral figure – not much more than a plot device to enable 3340’s ultimate goal, really.

The final third felt quite muddled to me; although Livia’s resolution to the basic problem of 3340 was pretty clever, the story tailed off after that, with a set of epilogues (of sorts) which just didn’t work for me.

There are a lot of crunchy ideas here, but I think Schroeder just didn’t organize them into a good story. The book actually bears a lot of resemblance to his first novel, Ventus, which I’d say was his weakest book before I read this one, but it feels more concrete and like it flows more smoothly, even if its ideas are more conservative. But story counts for a lot, and the story here was both thin and scattered. A disappointment.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End

Review of the film Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.

Pirates_of_the_Caribbean_At_World__s_End.jpg

We went to see the third Pirates of the Caribbean film, At World’s End, last night. As longtime readers may recall, I loved the first one, but was disappointed in the second one. The third one completes the story begun in the second one.

In that film, Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) had been betrayed by Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightly) and was killed by the kraken controlled by Davy Jones (a CGI construct viced by Bill Nighy). Jack’s crew, as well as Elizabeth and Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) go to a witch friend of Jack’s, Tia Dalma (Naomie Harris), to find out how to get him back, and she hooks them up with Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), apparently back from the dead.

In this film, Barbossa and crew try to persuade the other pirate lords (other than himself and Jack) to band together to defeat Davy Jones, who is now under the control of the British Lord Beckett (Tom Hollander), who is set on wiping out the pirates. Barbossa gains control of a ship, and he and his crew sail over the edge of the world to bring Jack back from the wasteland of Davy Jones’ Locker. On their return, the principals all have different agendas: Jack is under the allure of killing Jones to take his place as an immortal captain; Barbossa simply wants to stop Jones and Beckett, and remain alive. Will wants to rescue his father, Bill (Stellan SkarsgÃ¥rd), who is a servent aboard the Flying Dutchman. And Elizabeth, well, it’s never entirely clear what her motivations are, since she remains torn between Jack and Will, has some other curve balls lobbed her way, and remains something of a muddled character.

Like the second film, At World’s End is rather muddled. I agree with Peter David that it’s not a hard film to follow, but that doesn’t mean it’s altogether clear. Jack ends up talking to hallucinations of himself, but once he’s out of Davy Jones’ Locker, it’s not clear why. Will and Elizabeth are working out the broad strokes of their relationship during the film, and don’t seem to trust each other on a fundamental level, but none of it rings true; it feels contrived for dramatic effect, which just makes it hard to get invested in either of their characters. And far from lending needed gravity to the film, Geoffrey Rush’s Barbossa is mostly played for comedic effect, often as a foil for Depp, but since he’s not a true adversary, he ends up seeming like a fifth wheel.

The film is full of sumptuous special effects. The effects of Davy Jones, the Dutchman, and his crew all feel a little old by now, but the climactic battle between the Dutchman and the Black Pearl is pretty impressive. The surrealistic land Jack finds in the Locker is cleverly portrayed, but not at such length that it gets boring. But the CGI does get in the way sometimes, often seeming to cry out, “Look at me! Look at how clever I am!” The final confrontation with Lord Beckett is very much in this vein: It’s a very impressive scene, but its sheer technical audacity takes away from the drama of the scene itself.

The characters and acting are uneven. To be fair, even the best writers would have had a hard time pulling off Captain Jack’s character through three films, making him basically likeable, and yet an almost-completely self-interested rogue. Hell, that they pulled it off for the first film was an accomplishment all by itself. Depp’s gotten a little criticism for mincing his way through the role a little too gleefully, and I think the charges have some warrant. He’s still a lot of fun to watch, though.

At the other end, Elizabeth went from being overmatched in the first film to rather unlikeable in this one, and Knightly not nearly a good enough actress to pull off this sort of challange. In the middle, Bloom does a decent heroic job with a decently heroic role, while Rush does about as well as one could hope with a poorly-written one. On the other hand, the cast of the Black Pearl’s crew fill their partly-dramatic, partly-comic roles quite well; I particularly enjoy Kevin McNally as Jack’s right-hand-man Gibbs.

The film takes an interesting turn at the end, completely dispensing with one major plot element, while sending one of our main characters in an unexpected direction. It actually works, but it all feels a little too messy, and a little too dragged-out, to be a really satisfying story.

The net result is that the film is much like the second: Enjoyable, but haphazard and too long. I wish it took itself a little more seriously, and a little less flamboyantly. But, sequels often feel the need to top their predecessors, and often try to their detriment. The first one is far better than either of the other two.

Alastair Reynolds: The Prefect

Review of the novel The Prefect, by Alastair Reynolds.

  • The Prefect

    • by Alastair Reynolds
    • HC, © 2007, 412 pp, Gollancz (U.K.), ISBN 0-575-07716-6

I realized while reading this book something that sets Reynolds apart from his high-tech brethren in the SF field: Reynolds’ stories are essentially grim suspense/horror tales, and their basic pattern is one of setting up a milieu and hinting at a variety of outre people, places, events, or other horrors which populate it, and then setting the story in motion. Consequently, the reader spends much of his time waiting for another shoe to drop, and in true Charles Addams fashion, Reynolds’ stories are full of more shoes than you expect. And since he tends to “play fair” with the reader, not pulling out some unlikely surprise at the last minute for sheer shock value, you know that the characters have a chance of getting through the novel, but they’re probably going to have to walk through hell to get there.

The Prefect is a prequel to the Revelation Space cycle of stories, occurring decades (maybe a couple of centuries) before the events which turned the planet of Yellowstone into the peculiar hell it was in those novels. Here, the Glitter Band is a ring of ten thousand space habitats orbiting Yellowstone, and Panoply is its law-enforcement branch, primarily tasked with guarding it from external threats to its existence (due to its uneasy symbiosis with the starfaring Ultras), and internal threats to its stability (people trying to subvert its democratic electoral system).

Tom Dreyfus is Panoply’s top Field Prefect, an exacting but fair and honest man who works some of the toughest jobs in the system. Eleven years ago, an AI named the Clockmaker threatened the survival of the Glitter Band. It was defeated, but Dreyfus’ wife died in the encounter, and he’s now fully committed to his job. His two partners have similar obstacles: Thalia Ng is the daughter of a man who was convicted of treason, while Sparver is a genetically-engineered pig, and thus the subject of much discrimination.

The book opens with Dreyfus’ team locking down a station which had illegally exploited a hole in the polling software, which Thalia is assigned to fix. While she is working on the fix, space station Ruskin-Sartorius is destroyed, and Dreyfus’ investigation suggests that an Ultra ship is to blame. The Ultras provide little insight into what happened, and Dreyfus’ only witnesses are three simulations of three members of the family from the station. With a little legwork, they track down communications with Ruskin-Sartorius to a remote asteroid and Dreyfus and Sparver go to check it out while Thalia goes to test her software fix on a few of the older stations.

All of this is the initial dance leading up to a powerful entity making a bid to take over the Glitter Band, and this is where Reynolds really exercises his suspense skills: Thalia gives us a short tour of the diversity of the stations in the Glitter Band while Dreyfus and Sparver engage in some forensic investigation. There’s no question that something big is around the corner, but the story still keeps moving forward even as the tension builds. The story is a series of puzzles for Dreyfus and the other characters, as they need to figure out the goals and motivations of their adversary, as well as how to stop it as it makes its move on the stations in the Glitter Band.

The characters in The Prefect aren’t the strongest in Reynolds’ arsenal, and they definitely take a back seat to the plot. While Dreyfus and Thalia each have some painful history behind them, it’s only an influence on their behavior, not a strong underlying motivation. Dreyfus, as the title character, embodies the best of Panoply, its efficiency and compassion, and is forced to weather the storm of his less-incorruptible peers and superiors, but he never feels truly flawed, and so he fills the role of a fairly traditional detective. Still, the main characters are all entirely likeable and that helps make the book enjoyable.

For those who have read Reynolds’ earlier books, there’s irony in that we know that Dreyfus’ efforts to save the Glitter Band will eventually be undone by the Melding Plague, but we still root for him to save this jewel of human civilization. The story comes to a surprisingly rapid – yet satisfying – conclusion, and I wouldn’t mind reading more about the era of the Glitter Band, but ultimately I think I enjoy the more downbeat era after the Melding Plague more. Perhaps there’s a story which can bridge the two periods.

The Prefect falls somewhere in the middle of quality among Reynolds’ books, being a solid detective story with a variety of interesting ideas backing it, but it doesn’t excel in either concepts or characters like Chasm City or Pushing Ice do. But if you’re just looking for an exciting high-tech tale, then look no further.

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Heroes: Season One

Brief thoughts on the wrap-up of the first season of the TV series Heroes.

Heroes wrapped up its first season tonight. I still have basically the same criticisms that I had early in its run: It’s very slow, the writing is very inconsistent, and the characters are erratic.

I feel somewhat unhappy with the resolution of the “blowing up New York” storyline. It was never convincing to me that the culprit would be either Sylar (since he obviously had to be stopped somehow) or Peter (why would he lose control of his powers in the first place? And why would he stick around in New York rather than flying away?). But I think the writers backed themselves into a corner there.

The series’ protagonist has always been Hiro, I think, and his arc comes to a satisfying conclusion. His main challenger, Mohinder, spent just about the whole season with almost nothing to do, which is too bad since Sendhil Ramamurthy is one of the stronger actors on the show. But overall the season ended up being rather muddled from a storytelling standpoint, more soap opera than adventure.

So Heroes rates as “okay” television, which – to be honest – puts it ahead of most television. (At least it’s not Yet Another Police Procedural. Heck, even House is basically Yet Another Police Proecedural, in that it’s got exactly the same structure, just with medicine instead of law.) It doesn’t look like NBC will take long to stretch it too thin, as Heroes: Origins is already slated for the fall. Sheesh.

Anyway, now I can spend the summer catching up on Veronica Mars and/or Battlestar Galactica. Although what I really want is to just bludgeon my way through the whole series of Justice League Unlimited. Unfortunately, most of it isn’t available on DVD yet.

Andrew Sean Greer: The Confessions of Max Tivoli

Review of the novel The Confessions of Max Tivoli, by Andrew Sean Greer.

I knew by page three that I wasn’t going to like this book.

The tip-off was that the prose was just too purple for my tastes: It was difficult to slog through the raw verbiage, and there were too many digressions and embellishments. The story seemed too enamored of its narrative voice, and not enamored enough with, well, its story.

The story is a simple conceit: Max Tivoli was born in 1870 in San Francisco, but as an infant his body was 72 years old. Although born the size of an infant, he grew quickly, and as a teenager looked like a man of about 60, his body aging backwards as his mind aged forward. At age 6 he meets his lifelong friend, Hughie, and at age 17 he meets the love of his life, Alice. But while Hughie accepts Max for who he is, Alice cannot: He doesn’t tell her. Instead he hides his condition from almost everyone (save for Hughie and a select few who figure it out themselves), and attempts to woo Alice at three different points in their lives.

The story is narrated by Max when he’s 60 years old, in 1930, and appears to be a 12-year-old boy. He’s living with another boy, Sammy, and Sammy’s mother, and reminisces in detail. But, really, not enough detail: The book is really only about Max and his obsession with Alice, even though their only common feature is that they were both born to relatively high-class families which were brought low. But Max seems to have no interests, no hobbies, not really any ambitions beyond being with Alice.

The book’s conceit, Max aging backwards, seems almost superfluous: Other than the period in 1930, his earlier exploits could have been the adventures of any normal man dealing badly with unrequited love. For all his eloquence of tongue, Max is not introspective, he provides little true insight into such an unusual life as his condition must create. He’s a shallow thinker, of the worst sort, really: He spends great amounts of time and energy describing tedium.

And as for that purple prose: It seems especially inappropriate for its narrator, who’s not very well educated. It makes him seem like a poseur. And ultimately Max is just not a likeable figure, and he spends so much time in self-pity that it’s difficult to actually pity him. Alice is no better, although she’s slightly better rounded; but she’s no less self-absorbed and disagreeable.

Author Greer does have a couple of clever turns of plot, mainly when Max learns some hard truths about each Hughie and Alice near the end. But rather than tragic, it all just feels rather tiresome. It seems like Max Tivoli gets wrong everything The Time Traveler’s Wife gets right: It’s not romantic, its characters are hard to root for, Max’s condition isn’t especially interesting, and the tragedy of the story left me simply shrugging. I went back and re-read passages of Time Traveler several times after finishing it; I had no such compulsion for Max Tivoli.

Maybe Greer was going for something that simply eludes me. But there just wasn’t much here for me to enjoy, and consequently, not much for me to learn from. It was eloquent wordsmithing in the service of a slight story. A pity.

Larry Niven: The Ringworld Engineers

Review of the novel The Ringworld Engineers by Larry Niven.

The sequel to Ringworld was published a decade after the original, and from Niven’s introduction it sounds like it was inspired by a desire to shore up some of the scientific deficiencies in the original, such as the implausibility that the Ringworld would hold its position about its star without drifting away or collapsing upon it.

On the one hand, I’m not sure Niven should have bothered: No science fiction novel is going to be perfect, even if (maybe especially if) it’s meticulously worked out, and the fact that Ringworld sparked such interest and criticism I think helps make it a worthy novel on its own. Better to take the lessons learned and put them into a new novel, rather than trying to “fix” the earlier work.

On the other hand, Niven left a bunch of backstory out of Ringworld, and the sequel afforded him the opportunity to revisit some issues, such as who built the thing.

In the novel, the deposed leader of the Piersen’s Puppeteers, the Hindmost, wishes to find a matter transmuter whose existence was deduced by the original Ringworld expedition, and to this end he kidnaps Louis Wu and Speaker-to-Animals (who has earned his own name, Chmee) and brings them back to the Ringworld. Once there, they discover that the Ringworld has drifted away from the orbit of its star, and is less than two years from striking its primary and being destroyed. Louis has an idea who built the thing, and wonders why they didn’t provide for this possibility. Louis has also spent several years as an addict of electrical current fed directly to his brain, and feels he has a lot to atone for, and so he embarks on efforts to improve the lot of various cultures they encounter while on the Ringworld, even as they both try to save the world, and seek out the matter transmuter (which Louis is certain does not actually exist).

Engineers is as much a travelogue as its predecessor, but it feels like it drags on even longer. While much of the purpose of this is to give Louis a sense of the population of the Ringworld in order to set up a hard choice he has to make at the end, it just feels like more of the same. I did appreciate that the novel finally tackles head-on the nature of the Ringworld’s builders, and we even get a sense of what they were like, in an oblique manner. But overall the novel doesn’t have the sense of grandeur or the clever ending of Ringworld, and of necessity it completely avoids the humanity-changing implications of the conclusion of that novel. Instead it’s a continuation of the stories of Louis Wu and Chmee.

But despite the scope implied by Known Space, The Ringworld Engineers seems claustrophobic, exploring old venues and closing doors rather than opening them, and consequently it’s just not as exciting as the first book. It’s not entirely redundant, but it is disappointing. Ultimately, I think Niven would have been better off leaving the Ringworld only as explored as the first novel depicted.

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Larry Niven: Tales of Known Space

Review of the collection Tales of Known Space by Larry Niven.

The next book in my ongoing odyssey of Larry Niven’s classic SF writing is this short story collection, which fleshes out his Known Space universe. It’s no surprise that the liner notes and timeline are almost as interesting as the stories themselves: The fun of future histories is often the history as much as the stories, figuring out how everything fits together. Although Known Space isn’t as carefully fit together as H. Beam Piper’s less-famous Terro-Human Future History, that’s merely because Niven didn’t set out to write a future history (Piper did), and Niven acknowledges that he wrote himself into a corner at times through the invention of devices like the stasis field. Known Space still holds up remarkably well, though. Tales comprises about half the short stories in the universe, the other half being in Neutron Star, which I haven’t yet read.

About half the collection takes place in the early days of Known Space, before humanity’s first contact with an alien (in World of Ptavvs), when they were still confined to the solar system. These are some of Niven’s earliest stories, and pieces like “The Coldest Place”, “Becalmed in Hell” and “Wait It Out” feel like they could have come straight from an Isaac Asimov collection from the 40s. Which surprises me not at all, since I think Niven was the direct inheritor of Asimov’s mantle (since Asimov was fairly quiet in the SF field in the 60s). They’re nuts-and-bolts explorations of little bits of science, with slightly witty, slightly melodramatic narratives.

The collection gets more interesting when Niven turns his eye towards cultural elements: “Eye of an Octopus” considers the unusual nature of Martians in Known Space. “How The Heroes Die” concerns an act of treason in a very small community on Mars which leads to a vendetta of blood, a high-stakes act when living on the razor’s edge. And “The Jigsaw Man” introduces the quandary of organ transplants, which leads to a variety of moral and legal conflicts only touched on in this one story.

My favorite story in the collection might be “At The Bottom of a Hole”, which reprises elements from “How The Heroes Die”, and introduces the complex political tension between Earth and the people living in the asteroid belt (the “Belters”), and how people living at the edge of the law may find themselves unable to turn to either one.

The later stories are something of a hodgepodge. “Intent to Deceive” is a canard, “Cloak of Anarchy” feels like an experiment more than a story (although it feels in spirit similar to Vernor Vinge’s recent novel Rainbows End), and “The Borderland of Sol” is an ambitious tale which felt rather disappointing in that the explanation for the starships disappearing at the edge of the solar system was far more prosaic than I’d hoped.

On the other hand, “The Warriors” concerns humanity’s first encounter with the Kzinti, and it’s full of nifty aliens, human optimism, tragedy, and a neat resolution. I wonder if the Babylon 5 accounts of mankind’s first encounters with the Minbari (e.g., in “In The Beginning”) were inspired by this story, as they have very similar feels (and endings, for that matter).

The collection rounds out with “There is a Tide”, which is a fun – though not exceptional – first contact story, and “Safe at Any Speed”, which is a sort of epilogue to Ringworld, considering where humanity might go after the world-changing events of the novel. Chronologically, I guess it’s the last Known Space story (the sequels to Ringworld I think concern the Ringworld and various aliens, rather than humanity’s future and Known Space generally), and it’s not bad, but as with any story taking place at the far side of a singularity, we only get a glimpse of the wonders which we can barely imagine.

I had a lot of fun reading Tales, even though it does feel a bit dated at this point. Once again, it’s easy to see why Niven was held in such high regard in the late 60s, writing some terrific ideas-driven SF.

Five Years Gone

People seem really excited about this week’s episode of Heroes, “Five Years Gone”. I enjoyed it too, but I don’t quite get the widespread enthusiasm for it.

(Spoilers for Heroes follow.)

First of all, it’s the sort of episode I wish they’d had, oh, in the fifth or sixth episode. It would have jump-started what was an extremely slow beginning to this series. (At least half of the first six episode seemed superfluous, intended to maintain suspense, while really just making the show boring.) Granted, the Sylar reveal (which was cool) wouldn’t have been possible had the episode occurred that early, but that and other obstacles could have been written around. For instance, Hiro could have made multiple trips to this future, revealing more a little bit each time. (Heck, it would have been better than Hiro and Ando’s tedious adventures in Las Vegas.)

Second – and more importantly – the story in this episode isn’t really new to me. The story is actually a pretty clearly templated on (if not lifted from) “Days of Future Past”, a story from the X-Men comic book series from 1981. This doesn’t really surprise me, since comic book writer Jeph Loeb is a co-executive producer of Heroes, and no doubt creator Tim Kring and many other members of the writers and crew are comic book fans. Both stories feature a dystopian future in which superpowered figures are being oppressed and marginalized due to political reactions in the wake of a superhuman-driven disaster.

The story is substantially similar to the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Yesterday’s Enterprise”, too, down to the pyrrhic-victory-in-the-present-but-returning-to-win-a-full-victory-in-the-past conclusion. Someone in Ceej’s entry on “FYG” said he wanted to see the outcome of the fight between Peter and Sylar, but it seemed clear to me that nothing in the future was going to end well for our heroes; probably Peter and Sylar managed to annihilate each other and take out the rest of what was left of New York.

Sheridan’s trip to the future in the Babylon 5 episode “War Without End” also bears some similarities, although the crux of that story is basically different. But my point is that the key elements of “Five Years Gone” are hardly new; the story has its chilling elements, but to me it was basically old-hat.

Heroes is a moderately entertaining series, but I find it frustrating because it’s so slow. Several of the characters frustrate me, too (I wish someone would just smack Mohinder, for instance, and I really hate the Niki/Jessica character). I am glad that the main story will actually conclude this season, and they’ll have a new story next season. A seasonal cliffhanger I think would just make me give up on the show.

Larry Niven: Ringworld

Review of the novel Ringworld by Larry Niven.

  • Ringworld

    • by Larry Niven
    • PB, © 1970, 342 pp, Del Rey, ISBN 0-345-33392-6

When I started reading science fiction “seriously” in the mid-1980s, Ringworld had the reputation as being the most important hard SF novel before William Gibson’s Neuromancer. But as with most of Niven’s oeuvre, I’ve never read it. I tried a couple of times, back in the day, but was never able to get through it – was never able to even get as far as the characters getting to the Ringworld. But now, I have.

Given what I know about science fiction now, I think Ringworld can make a case for being the most significant SF novel between Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965) and Neuromancer (1986). The reason for this is that I think Niven’s classic work fits perfectly between two generations of hard SF: He has a no-nonsense writing style and a logical approach to working through the implications of his ideas as part of the plot (which is very Asimovian, and to a lesser degree very Heinleinian), but he also anticipates the high-tech cutting-edge social implications of technology a la John Varley and Vernor Vinge and, well, William Gibson. And Ringworld shows this latter characteristic – and Niven’s high concept ideas content – quite strongly.

The whole premise of the novel is the Ringworld itself, a strip of habitable land which entirely rings its primary star. I’ve read a lot of “big dumb object” stories, and they all suffer to a large extent from having an ending which is a letdown: Trying to understand why an alien species would build such a large thing, and crafting a whole novel around it, it’s extremely difficult to have an explanation which is rewarding. Ringworld sidesteps this issue by presenting the Ringworld’s existence and reason for being from the outset: Why would someone build such a thing? For the living space, obviously!

The plot features four extraordinary individuals: Louis Wu, a 200-year-old man who is a little bored with life; Nessus, a Pierson’s Puppeteer, a highly advanced alien species whose culture is based on cowardice; Speaker-to-Animals, a Kzinti warrior; and Teela Brown, whom Nessus thinks might have been bred to be lucky. The Puppeteers discovered the Ringworld and want to know who built it, and whether they might be a threat, so Nessus – considered mad by his people – rounds up his team and they head to the Ringworld to explore it. Landing there, they are awed by the sheer scope of the project, and encounter many wondrous and dangerous things and creatures in their adventures.

What I like about this novel which I don’t like in, say, Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous With Rama, is that Niven doesn’t go for the cheap thrill of Things We Don’t Understand: Everything on the Ringworld makes sense, even if it takes a little while to figure out, and it never feels forced or contrived: It all follows from the basic sense of wonder of a giant engineering feat which has somehow been left alone for millennia, and whose builders are absent.

The really unusual thing about the book is that the outcome of the story ultimately isn’t about the Ringworld: It’s about the evolution of humanity and the role these individuals and their species have played in it. The Ringworld is just a backdrop against which this drama plays out. It’s all a little improbable (which is sort of the point), and I don’t entirely buy the “perpetual deus ex machina” approach that underlies the direction Niven sends his universe, but it does make for a thought-provoking read.

Ringworld does fall prey to the “lots of walking around” pitfall of such stories: The characters spend a lot of time just flying about and seeing things and having brief, fairly disconnected encounters with people and things on the world. Consequently, the story bogs down from time to time. On the bright side, it’s not one of the extra-long novels which pepper bookshelves today, so it’s not hard to power through the tedious stuff and get back to the good stuff.

Although in some ways the book feels a little musty today – in that it doesn’t anticipate modern hard SF staples such as cyberspace or nanotechnology – so much of what it popularized is still with us and still influencing SF: Ramjets and slower-than-light travel, the varied races of Known Space, the evolution of humanity and the consequent singularity (even if Niven’s singularity is very different from Vinge’s). Niven’s narrative strength in delivering a sense of wonder still holds up more often than not, and really, in a world where Star Trek is among the best-known forms of science fiction, Known Space still feels cutting-edge.

For those reasons, it’s still a little amazing to me that I never read the book cover-to-cover until today. It’s must reading for any fan or student of science fiction.

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Larry Niven: World of Ptavvs

Review of the novel World of Ptavvs by Larry Niven.

  • World of Ptavvs

    • by Larry Niven
    • PB, © 1966, 188 pp, Del Rey, ISBN 0-345-34508-8

Astonishingly, I’ve read very little by Larry Niven in the past: A couple of his story collections, and I tried reading Ringworld, but was not able to finish it at the time This was 20 years ago, but it’s a mystery to me. But I’ve collected his early novels over the last few years, and figured my recent trip to Florida was a good time to get through a few of them. In particular, his Known Space novels.

World of Ptavvs is the chronologically earliest-occurring of the novels in Known Space, taking place in the early 22nd century (and is one of the earliest written, as well). The alien Kzanol is a Thrint, a race which, millions of years ago, controlled most of Known Space and enslaved all other races it found. (This Thrintun are referred to as the “Slavers” in other stories.) A mishap while travelling forced Kzanol to put himself into stasis, and he landed on Earth and remained there until the present day, until he was dredged from the ocean and dubbed the “Sea Statue”.

Larry Greenberg is a low-level telepath who specializes in communicating with other species, notably dolphins. A scientist develops a stasis field and reasons that the Sea Statue might also be a creature in such a field, and recruits Greenberg to telepathically connect with the Statue when he frees it from stasis. However, it goes horribly wrong: The Thrint are true telepaths, able to control other creatures mentally. Kzanol imprints his mind on Greenberg’s, and Kzanol/Greenberg escape with a Thrint disintegrator weapon. The real Kzanol revives and steals a spaceship, and Kzanol/Greenberg follows him, the group heading for the outer solar system where Kzanol believes some of his equipment should also be stored in stasis, which could allow either incarnation of Kzanol to take over the world. A member of Earth’s police force, ARM, follows, as do a number of ships from the asteroid belt, as Earth is in an uneasy cold war with the Belters.

The novel is primarily an action/adventure yarn with some interesting underpinnings. Unfortunately it never quite rises above its basic structure of the “good guys” chasing the “bad guys” after the McGuffin of Kzanol’s device. Although this proves to be an interesting little travelogue, showing us the state of Earth writ large, and its tense relationship with the Belters, it’s still pedestrian stuff.

What engaged me in the book were the supporting ideas, especially the long-dead Thrintun, their slave races, and the remnants of their era which have survived into the present day. I’m a sucker for stories involving bits of the past coming to impact the present (which may be why I continue to read Jack McDevitt’s SF mysteries such as Seeker), and besides Kzanol himself qualifying (and ending up as a man-… er… thing-out-of-time) there are a few other leftovers which rear their heads here as well. While they’re not integral to the plot so much as a portent of what humanity will have to deal with as they head into the stars, they’re still pretty neat.

The story also includes two pieces of showstopping technology. Well, Kzanol’s mind control abilities aren’t really technology as such, but they’re so powerful (if limited in the number of people he can control at a time) that it’s easy to see why the Thrint were able to control Known Space in their day with ease. Niven is clever in introducing a Thrint as a single creature isolated from everything he knows, turning Earth into a little cauldron to see how it reacts to Kzanol (and vice-versa). The second element is the stasis field, which naturally is tremendously powerful, and apparently plays into the later Known Space stories to a large degree. Being able to stop time around some area, and consequently rendering that area indestructible, has many applications, which are explored pretty widely in the introduction. (Vernor Vinge of course explored these issues in his later pair of novels The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime, but it’s interesting to see Niven working with a slice of the implications here, almost 20 years earlier.)

World of Ptavvs is a little disappointing and isn’t essential reading, but there’s some good stuff in here. There’s better stuff in the later books, though.

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