Monday, July 11, 2022

Larry Niven, Ringworld ***

Ringworld is a hard sci-fi classic from 1970. Aliens known as Pierson's puppeteers discover an immense circular ribbon world and send a four-person cross-species team to investigate it. They end up crash-landing on Ringworld and need to explore it to figure out a way to get back home. It's world-building at its most basic and literal, similar to another book about exploring an object of unknown provenance, Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama.

The story is constructed purely as a scaffolding for imagining how the artificial world would work. The adventure is exciting enough but plays second fiddle to conversations about Klemperer rosettes and hyperdrives. The characters, too, are little more than mouthpieces for scientific theorizing. Each individual, alien or human, gets a single defining trait (Louis is curious, Nessus is cowardly, Speaker is aggressive, Teela is lucky) that completely determines their actions.

The lack of fleshed-out characters is one way you can tell that Ringworld is a genre book from 1970. Another sign of the times is that a motivating concern for the intergalactic action of multiple alien species is overpopulation.

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