Jeez, how jaded are you that you got no “sense of wonder” out of Ringworld? Aside from the whole Ringworld itself and all the other stuff Master Wang-Ka mentioned, you’ve got floating cites, superconducting cloth, shadow squares, stepping disks, the Kemplerer rosette… That last impressed me even more than the Ringworld.
There was an anime version of Starship Troopers; I have the first two or three episodes of it somewhere. (I’m not talking about the “Roughnecks” series either.) The suits looked good, not sure about the rest of the plot.
Them's fighting words where I come from. I'd regard Ringworld as one of the seminal "hard" science fiction books and quite well-written.
I'm fairly sure that the invulnerable ship was a necessary prerequisite for the puzzle in the short story "There is a Tide". But it's not ludicrous, given the technology of the Puppeteers. And you needed * something * like the fly cycles if you're going to explore something the size of Earth's orbit, even slightly.
I'd rather believe in a General Products hull than believe in the survival of the Enterprise's disk (and passengers) in ST-Generations, or the crashing starship in Pitch Black.I like this. I’ve been saying for a long time that the only way to to Dune properly is as a series of anime films.
You know which world *did]/i] instill me with a sense of wonder? The future earth from Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, which you may be familiar with. In fact, it might be the most awe-inspiring SF setting ever… and all we see is half a continent. That’s because it had history, culture, and personality.
Niven’s ringworld, on the other hand, was just an engineering concept. I only felt its scope becae the author kept on reminding me of it, not because he actually bothered to fill it with anything interesting. Maybe it’s because I’d encountered ringworlds (and spheres) before from other, possibly later books, but Niven just couldn’t use the novelty of the Idea as much of a drawing point - there had to be something more. I’ve read enough SF to get a grasp of how big space is and how much variety it can hoold, so the mere description of size, without complexity, doen’t impress me all that much. Where were the multi-planet sized empires? Where were the bizzare cultures of semi-devolved humans? Where was the deep, dark secret of the Builders’ (or whatever) self-destruction? I think the nadir of the book was when our intrepid adveturers (and they weren’t much more than a proto-D&D party, being led through a particularly linear module by a bored DM) made first contact with some locals. Let me paraphrase:
Shaman: “Observe the return of our masters!”
Louis Wu: “Actually, no. We’re just intersteller travellers.”
Shaman: “Oh. I guess that’s cool.”
Louis Wu: “So… what’s with the bald shtick? Any idea?”
Shaman: “Beats the hell out of me. See you around!”
How can any “sense of wonder” survive such an exchange? Wonder, awe, terror and joy are derived form the style of writing, not from the subject. Is it no wonder that Niven wrote his best books - Mote, or Footfall - with other people? I’ve often thought that Ringworld should have been written by Niven contemporary Roger Zelazny. Louis Wu, especially, is a classic Zelazny character, and I’m pretty sure he could have made even Teela Brown interesting. He might have given the actual science sort shrift, but that’s the price you pay for being a writer first.
Now, maybe it improves with the later books - I haven’t read them, and I probably won’t. I’m already prety sure that Niven, by himself, cannot produce the same level of emotional involvement as Gene Wolfe, Frank Herbert, Dan Simmons* , Zelazny, Aldiss, Silverberg, Adams, Martin… either in the characters, or in the worlds.
*In Simmons’s Rise of Endymion, he introduces organic Dyson Spheres, made of living trees, with whales and dolphins swimming through space around their roots. Now that’s impressive!
I liked Ringworld the novel, but part of that might be because I read it after reading Rendezvous With Rama, which had the same “explore an alien artifact” idea but was dull as hell.
Wait, wait, wait.
(emphasis mine)
Footfall? FOOTFALL? The one with the elephant aliens who use WINGNUTS as fasteners? That’s one of Niven’s best books?
I am speechless.
Well, you try operating a screwdriver without opposable thumbs.
I liked Footfall a lot. It was no work of art, but it was well written, the characters were good and it had this gonzo everything-but-the-kitchen-sink attiutude that was really endearing.
Hmmm… I wasn’t terribly overcome by Footfall - the aliens were just too damn stupid and the whole thing was just Niven’s Big Wet Dream anyway (SF writer reluctantly accepts important role in government advisory committee, saves entire planet - yay! authors aren’t useless after all)
The Geek Wish Fulfillment was half the fun - because he kept his sense of humor about it, and because the brainstroming sessions really were fun and interesting. As for the primitive aliens, I thing that was the whole point of the book. I mean, we’ve all read stories about being invaded by superior races, and here we have an invasion of Earth by an inferior race, who only got here through dumb luck. It was a neat, original reversal.
Nah, you want wet dreams, you’re talking Fallen Angels.
Sci-Fi geeks save humanity and Earth from no-fun religious nutjobs.
Hmmm…think we could transplant one of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ *Earth’s Core * novels to a Dyson Sphere? Visually, a sphereworld would look a lot like Pellucidar.
I stopped by the used bookstore last night and bought a copy of Ringworld. Actually, it isn’t as ‘meh’ as I had remembered. I was probably thinking of The Ringworld Engineers.
You mean he’s written books that are more of a self-indulgent wet dream than a huge place where everyone is required to have sex with exotic strangers in order to be polite?
Guess I’m glad I never read those two.
I Googled about, and I see that the SciFi movie is actually going to be a four-part miniseries.
[semi-hijack]
But what’s this? There’s a new Ringworld book out? Ringworld’s Children, just out, apparently. That one got by my radar. Well, even though the last one bit, I’m a sucker for anything with Louis Wu in it, so I guess I’m going to read it.
[/semi-hijack]
I’m more of a Beowulf Schaefer kinda guy…
So you’re saying that wonder derives from the style, and you use a paraphrase in a different style to prove that the book doesn’t have wonder? Am I being whooshed here?
And the multi-planet-sized empires and the devolved (actually more like un-evolved) ((and strictly speaking, just differently-evolved)) humans are in the sequels. Which stands to reason: You’ve got to introduce the Ringworld itself before you can introduce the various cultures and wide variety within it, and that just about filled the first book. Then, once the stage is set, you can enter the players, which he did in the second and third. Unfortunately, despite the established setting, the sequels were far inferior to the original book, due, I think, largely to editors cowed by Niven’s reputation and afraid to offer constructive criticism. In The Ringworld Throne, especially, I got the sense that there was a very good story hiding somewhere in there, just trying to get out… But it never got the chance.
Actually, for that matter, the original Ringworld rather suffered from Niven’s other writings, particularly Protector. It was published afterwards, but remember that it was known history to Wu and his crew. Given that, they should have immediately figured out the secret of the Engineers, as soon as they made first contact with the natives.
Yeah, I’ll be reading Children out of loyalty to the author and to what the series could have been, but I don’t plan on buying it. I’ll just wait until the local library gets a copy.
Whooshed? No. I was paraphrasing it in a rather (ineptly) exaggerated way because that was how the passege seemed to me. In certain ways, it was the anti-Solaris - not only is the Universe easy to communicate with, it also has nothing interesting to say. It was an extremely amateurish chunk of dialogue that first made a potentially alien culture into something mundane and familiar, eliminating any sense of strangeness which is a prerequisite for wonder; and second, it ground the story to a halt. It was as if Niven was telling the reader: “Human drama? You want human drama? Well, I’m a science fiction author - I don’t do human drama!”
Of course, maybe it was just me, and nobody else had a problem with that chapter. But to me, it epitomized everything that was wrong with Ringworld.