Ringworld is widely accepted as a sci-fi classic, but even more than most such books, this novel displays the central contradiction of the genre. On one hand, this book is one of the most poetic works in sci-fi. On the other hand, it’s almost total lack of poetry is its greatest limitation.
Sounds like a puzzle, huh? But not really. The conception of Ringworld is remarkably poetic. What would Virginia Woolf have done with the Ringworld sunsets, which do not take place on the horizon, but rather curve upward, but directly overhead? What magic would Faulkner have extracted from this terrain, the thousand mile high mountain called Fist of God, the sweeping deserts and massive oceans?
But we don’t have Faulkner or Woolf, just Niven’s flat narrative. There is not a single page or even paragraph in this book that stands out for the quality of its writing. Yet a mind that could conceive and populate Ringworld must be capable of creating great metaphors and fanciful prose. I sense that Niven, like many of his peers, has felt obliged to write down to his target readers. He imagines a bunch of pimply high school nerds who want the exciting and outlandish, and with the least amount of fuss and bother about the sentences.
I complain about Niven, but this is a flaw characteristic of the genre, and the stamp it bears from its painful birth in the world of pulp fiction. Niven is just an especially interesting example, since his conceptual creativity is so marked. For example, he describes at one point a type of hurricane tilted on its side, caused by a puncture in the Ringworld floor. His description is striking, even down to his scientific analysis why the meteorological result of this phenomenon is a combination of swirling circular cloud around a vertical patch of clear blue sky – the whole result looking like an enormous human eye in the sky.
This is clearly poetic thinking of the highest order, but its actual presentation on the page is handled with straight, uninflected narrative – albeit backed up with some impressive scientific jargon. Even without much embellishment, this description is memorable. But it could have been so much more, with just a little more care taken in the presentation. In short, Niven is a great master of what I would like to call this the “Asimov Effect” – the ability to grab a reader with a story that is conceptually imaginative in the highest order, but written in a flat, undemonstrative way.
The story of Ringworld provides some interesting twist or surprise every few pages. We find floating buildings, and hostile sunflowers and various fascinating gadgets. Much of the narrative is inessential to the plot – for the most part, the reader is invited to enjoy the spectacle of a motley trans-galactic crew of "heroes" (of varying degrees of heroism and trustworthiness) wandering around Ringworld, a hula-hoop-shaped artificial world of mysterious origin that is one million miles wide and 600 million miles in circumference. In other words, this is an extremely large hula hoop. Here our protagonists encounter and overcome various obstacles, and eventually focus on finding a way back home. This is little more than a National Geographic study of a brave, new world. But the story never lags, and the scenery is always fascinating.
Niven is best in his characters. He has put together a small team for his outer space expedition, and each member is wonderfully wrought. We have two-headed Nessus, a remarkably successful coward who manages to get everything he wants through indirect manipulation. He recruits Speaker-to-Animals, who is as brave and foolhardy as Nessus is cautious – think of him as a cross between a Klingon and a panther. We round out the quartet with two humans: Teela the oblivious airhead with a streak of luck as long as Ringworld itself, and Louis Wu, the two hundred year old Everyman, who struggles to get his colleagues to work together as a team. Once again, the creativity and care that Niven has exerted here is striking, and show what a gifted storyteller he is.
So Ringworld is our quintessential flawed sci-fi classic. But it still is a must-read for those interested in probing the genre. Above all, it shows that poetic thinking does not always result in beautiful phrases and clever turns of phrase. Sometimes it merely presents us with a very ingenious hula hoop.