Even in the future, technology will fail us.
Even in the future, technology will fail us.
I'll start out saying what I did like about the book. Everyone else seems to say the same thing: the concept of a Dyson Sphere, broken down to a single ring, is completely captivating. Take a landmass the size of Earth's orbit to give you the circumference of this ring, and flatten out the Earth and line several of them up together to give you the width of the ring. The result is a ring-shaped planet of immense proportions. It would have taken the Ringworld Engineers to haul hundreds if not thousands of planets from neighboring star systems and transmutated them into the stuff the ring is made of. According to the book, they economized by making mountains hollow and such, so that they would appear as corresponding indentations on the outside surface of the ring. Seeing as how it would always be high noon on this ring planet, an inner orbit of huge black square panels lay between the ring and the sun, thus simulating night and day. The rest of the ring would be illuminated beautifully at night like a brilliant blue arch, just as we would see the full moon in our night skies. It seems that Niven thought of nearly everything, except that some MIT engineers proved the flaws of physics of the ring and how the soil would erode into the oceans and such.
Ringworld is pitched as a Hard SF book, and as far as the ringworld is concerned, it really is. But the rest of the book is pretty much space opera. There really is no explanation to the rest of the technology at all, such as "booster spice," the stasis field, indestructible ship hulls (although how can battles be waged with such hulls?), the teleportation booths and panels, and the translator that was basically the same as the universal translator from Star Trek. I'm sorry, but if I meet an alien today and only tell him "chop suey," there is no way that his translator will spontaneously know that I'm talking about a type of Chinese food dish that was made popular in America by Chinese immigrants in the 19th Century. I cannot just say "I like fish" and a computer will psychically know what "I" means, let alone "fish" or the verb "like." Oh yeah, and if you strap enough hyperdrives together, then you can really go super fast in space. I didn't mind any of this at all, as I really enjoy space opera, and that translator device was a utility to move the plot forward. But to be honest, this isn't a Hard SF book at all. The characters were mostly pretty interesting, and the dialogue was not dry like what I would have expected from a Hard SF book.
The aliens are very interesting. Some people may scoff at the cat-like kzin because aliens such as cat people, lizard people, and insectoids have become rather cliched in SF literature. But really, I don't mind that at all. Ender's Game featured a war with an insectoid alien race, as well as Heinlein's Starship Troopers. The kzin, Speaker-To-Animals, was a very interesting and intelligent creature, not to mention a total badass. He can fly a starship, argue physics of space travel, and still yank out the spine of a man before the victim even knew what happened to it. The two-headed puppeteer Nessus was very intriguing, and his extreme intelligence was matched by his eccentricity and cowardice. If a cat man is an alien cliche, a two serpent-headed, three-legged herbivore creature that uses its mouths for hands is definitely pretty imaginative.
And lastly, the protagonist, Louis Wu, is Asian. Chinese to be specific. That in itself is pretty cool. He's 200 years old and yet physically healthy and young. I imagined him like a Jackie Chan type of character or something. In fact, while I was reading this book, I kept imagining what it would be like if this book were to be made into a movie.
Before I reached the end of the book, I realized that it would be better off to not make this book into a movie. Here's where the review turns negative.
The big mystery of the ringworld is who built it, why did they do it, and why did they abandon it. That is what really drew me into the story. Disappointingly, only the second question was answered in the book. Since the book leaves so much still unanswered, Ringworld really needed a followup sequel. I imagine that these questions are answered in the sequel, Ringworld Engineers, but I've kinda lost interest in every getting around to reading this book. Once the four characters crash land on the ringworld, so much of the book is taken up with just them flying to the edge of the ring on their "flycycles," which seem to be a rather impractical mode of transportation for long-range distances, but whatever.
The story somehow revolves around Teela Brown, who has supposedly been bred to be lucky as though it were some psychic trait. That part was still easy to swallow, despite what many reviewers say to the contrary. It's a space opera, in my opinion. OK, so luck can be a genetic, pseudo-Esper power. That's cool. The problem with Teela is that she is a complete bimbo. She is not well educated at all, and in fact she's pretty stupid and careless. But to be honest, even though Louis Wu is very intelligent, he's also a complete idiot too.
In my opinion, the two aliens in the story are cool, while the humans are idiots. Louis and Teela meet at his 200th birthday party, she reminds him of a woman who once broke his heart, who turns out to be her own grandmother. I guess that charms her, so they start boinking like crazy. The book was published in 1970, during the prime years of the whole hippie generation and all their "free love" crap that has crippled the moral fabric of American society in countless ways, and this book is certainly exemplary of that. It was once explained to me that the proper boundary for an age disparity of a relationship can drawn by halving the age of the elder and adding eight years to it. So for a 20 year old, it's acceptable to date an 18 year old. For a 60 year old, it is acceptable to marry a 38 year old, etc. That somewhat makes sense, but since Louis is 200 and Teela is 20, that's rather creepy. This is made obvious in how Louis and Teela have completely nothing in common with each other whatsoever. Louis is smug and condescending towards her ignorance on many occasions, and laughs in her face and makes her cry. They really share nothing in common whatsoever, except their interest in having constant sex.
And to make it worse, the book's numerous sex scenes are completely annoying. I can put up with a bit of smut here and there, but how these encounters were written was so immature. It was like a 15-year-old boy with a raging boner wrote these based off of his sexual fantasies. There is nothing romantic or eloquent about these at all, the worst being when the book describes Teela suddenly "impaling herself" upon Louis and nearly immediately works up to an orgasm. This is so childish and dumb.
And so is Louis, despite being 200 years old. Despite professing his "love" for Teela, twice in the book he counts her for dead and his stoic reaction was, "Well, she was kinda dumb, anyway. Oh well, I guess she's dead 'n stuff." Not even shedding a tear. Then later when she shows up with some moronic Fabio type fantasy hero stereotype, shirtless and armed with a sword, she's fallen in love with him and wants Louis to make it look like he's selling her to become his sex slave. I imagine the guy to look like the Warrior from the artwork for Atari's Gauntlet videogame. "BLUE WARRIOR NEEDS FOOD BADLY." Louis is jealous now, even though he didn't seem to care if she was dead or not and the thought of trying to look for her didn't even cross his mind when he was sure she'd fallen off her flycycle.
But I guess it didn't matter, since he'd already started banging Prill, who is essentially an astro-whore. Yeah, seriously. I really started to wonder what Niven's attitudes towards women were once Prill came into the story. There were only two main female characters in the book, and they both served as sex vehicles for Louis's spontaneously ignited lust. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
So Ringworld wasn't a terrible read, but I really don't think it deserves to be lauded as the classic SF book that it is labeled as. The only truly intriguing part of the book is the ringworld itself, and still the book doesn't answer the mysteries of the ringworld that I hoped it would. Most of the time involves the characters flying on their cycles and having sex and getting attacked by the natives (the book doesn't even have Prill explain to the protagonists exactly why laser-based weaponry was seemingly universally banned on the planet, either). The part where they find the map of the ringworld and how Louis figures out how to get their crashed spaceship off the ringworld was pretty cool, I thought. I didn't see where the ending was heading until just before it happened, and I liked that it wasn't predictable. Despite its weaknesses, reading Ringworld did make me proud of the creativity that the SF literary genre is capable of. This imaginative energy is what attracts me to the genre. In all, the concept of the ringworld is what is truly classic, but the plot and the characters are very lacking.
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"It's from 'star stuff' that he's made. It's the cosmos that gave him life. But how does that help him feed the poor? How does that help him love his wife?" --The 77s
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