Ringworld

Ringworld by Larry Niven won both the Hugo and the Nebula awards when it was published in 1970, so I had high hopes for it.  However, after I’d read about a third of it, I had a hard time caring about the fate of the characters, so I skipped ahead to the last sixty pages.  As far as I could tell, I didn’t miss anything very important.  I don’t plan to read the sequels.

Louis Wu is two hundred years old, though he looks thirty.  A two-headed cowardly alien named Nessus invites Wu, along with a fierce catlike warrior called a kzin (think of an orange Wookie-Klingon) and one of the luckiest human women alive, to explore the manmade construction that looks like a giant ring around a star, with a landscape on the inside and a rotation just fast enough to give it the right amount of gravity.  It’s a stunning concept of what a civilization could do to evade overpopulation: make a new living place with extravagantly more surface area than a planet.

The exploration of the Ringworld is the main point of the book, although none of the characters has clean motivations for doing so.  What they find there, to me, was a bit of a letdown, considering the setup.  The engineers of the Ringworld met with some catastrophe several generations ago, and the quick degeneration of the civilization allowed several returnees to be taken for gods (I think).  Playing god is one of the major themes of the book, population control being another, and trying to direct fate turns out here perhaps slightly better than one might expect.

I must not have cared quite enough for Louis Wu to want to follow his story as patiently as I was being required to.  Intellectually I wanted to know what happened, but I wasn’t at all emotionally involved.  While the worldbuilding was flawlessly complex and most engaging, the execution of the tale simply wasn’t to my taste.