Ringworld (Larry Niven)
Originally reviewed on November 25, 2023.
Tanj it, I read this because it was a classic sci-fi, one of THE main classic sci-fis, but the imaginative concepts were not worth the flat characters, vague prose, and rampant misogyny.
Plenty of men will line up to tell you to just ignore the misogyny and enjoy the book already, but how can I? How can I enjoy the book when misogyny has infected every aspect of it? What else am I to focus on, the story? Well, the writing of miss Teela Brown is all over that part. I'd call her a manic pixie dream girl, but that'd imply Louis likes her at all. The only time she isn't annoying the crap out of him is when they're banging. Maybe I can look at the worldbuilding? Nope, the kzin have nonsapient females apparently. And the puppeteers are speculated to be the same.
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Oh, new characters joined the cast, are they any better? Nope, one's a woman who instantly starts banging Louis because she used to be some sort of sex workers on her ship and now she's trying to manipulate him but alas she apparently falls for him. Oh, a new male character, maybe he has nothing to do with misogyny- Nope, he wants to buy Teela off of Louis.
None of the characters have that much going on, and they don't develop much. Louis is better than you and smarter than you and sick of the world. Speaker-To-Animals is from the planet of proud warriors, and Nessus is from the planet of cowards.
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I'd say the humans are safe from the Planet of Hats generalizations, but then again all the native ringworld humans encountered are hairy superstitious "savages" while all the spacer humans are comparatively more well-rounded.
Niven's prose is... Vague and nondescriptive. I thought maybe it was a me-problem at first, because I frequently felt lost and had no idea what the heck was happening. But other people appear to have the same issue. It's hard to visualize what's going on a lot of the time. Thankfully, Louis, the super-intelligent Gary Stu that he is, explains everything to us over and over again, so you won't actually miss anything. Did you predict anything ahead of time? Your reward is Louis flatly explaining it right to you.
It takes so long for things to happen. I know, space is big and so is the ringworld. But it takes so long to get there, so much waiting around in a space ship and finally, they... crash, I guess? I could barely tell, but finally they're on the ringworld! And... They hop onto flying motorcycles and scoot across the skies, paying no real mind to the world below. I suppose I was expecting an adventure, but this was more like... A railroaded tour. Look to your left and you'll see Fist-of-God mountain! To your right, killer sunflowers! If you thought that killed the tension, don't worry, that dead horse is gonna be beaten even further by the fact that the flying motorcycles also dispense food, water, and medicine at the press of a button. So our protagonists can quite literally sit on the cycles for days at a time and do nothing but give each other the silent treatment the whole time, my sense of wonder and imagination is utterly challenged.
There's this whole mystery set up about the Ringworld engineers and what happened to them,
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but it's kinda just... Dropped, after awhile? At some point Louis speculates that the dumbasses didn't consider germs and got wiped out by mold or bacteria, and I guess that's the accepted explanation for their disappearance? I imagine the real reason will be seen in another book in the series. And then the explanation that they can't bounce back because they made the ring shallow and has no natural resources to mind. I feel like a people so intelligent they could make a ringworld wouldn't make oversights that enormous?
I can tell this is supposed to be one of those books where you gloss over the characters and story and just enjoy the science part of the fiction, but I just didn't get much out of it. Yes, the ringworld is indeed very big. Allegedly a hard sci-fi, this things full of FTL travel and teleporters and magical weapons and food generators and luck magic that can be bred for.
That said, I really am fascinated by the world of this novel. I don't know if I could stand getting through more writing to access the world of Known Space, but man, I really do like the puppeteers and the idea of the ringworld.
★★☆☆☆
ISBN:0-345-33392-6