The Ringworld, PRE-visited
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Author: Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner
Title: Fleet of Worlds Genre: science fiction It has apparently become fashionable for F&SF authors to publish "prequels" to their most popular works. A case in point is the recent trilogy to boil from the pot, errr, pen of Terry Brooks, in which he constructs a back story for his "Shannara" universe. The latest prequel that's crossed this reader's nightstand comes from the word processor of Hugo-Nebula award winner Larry Niven, who's teamed with Edward Lerner (who?) to create a back story for the novel that originally won him those awards (among others) back in 1970, Ringworld. After a four-part series (Ringworld, The Ringworld Engineers, The Ringworld Throne, Ringworld's Children) in which - to put it charitably - each sequel was a lesser book than its predecessor, Niven and Lerner have gone the opposite direction. The result? Fleet of Worlds, complete with a blazing subtitle reading "200 Years Before the Discovery of the RINGWORLD." Niven and partner have returned to the yesteryears of Known Space, some time after humans attained FTL travel from the Outsiders and some time before Louis Wu and his motley crew vacationed on that ineffable ribbon in space. Those who've read the original Ringworld (several times, in my case) may remember that the reason humans can't find the Puppeteer home system is that it no longer exists: the Puppeteers packed up their home planet and four farming worlds, formed them into a Klemperer rosette, and are skedaddling the Galaxy to escape the explosion at its core. They'll probably also remember that Puppeteers are manipulative little congenital cowards. And, they'll most likely remember Nessus, the Puppeteer who took Louis et al. to the Ringworld in the first place. Guess who's back¹: apparently Puppeteers live a l-o-o-o-o-o-n-g time. Nessus is insane. Puppeteers consider any of their number who would travel through space and interact with aliens to be from cloud cuckoo-land. Not that Nessus would have to go particularly far to interact with aliens, since there's an entire colony of 'em living on one of the farm worlds (NP4, if you're keeping track). Know what? Those Colonists are human, except that they not only don't know they're human, they don't even know humans exist. But Nessus knows about humans, because he's been to Earth (no wonder he's batty...) His crack team of Colonist scouts (Kirsten, Omar, and Eric) have demonstrated not just a very un-Puppeteerlike courage, but also a frightening level of intelligence and capability. That's a problem, because the concept of a batch of humans loose in the Fleet is enough to send the entire trillion Puppeteers on Hearth into ostrich-like hiding (that's what they do - roll themselves into little balls and tuck their heads up in the middle). What's worse, the Puppeteers have a secret about that "Colony"... a secret that, were Kirsten and company to figure it out, would rock the world - or, more properly, all five of the worlds. Meanwhile back in "known" space, the humans are a little closer than the Puppeteers would like to having some vague idea what direction to look in for the Puppeteer world. And so the master manipulators must embark on another long-term plan, a plan that will take generations (and four more books) to come to fruition. That is, if Kirsten will let them: she's a lot smarter than the Puppeteers counted on. Fleet of Worlds follows (see footnote¹) the standard convention for prequels. It's (obviously) set in an earlier time, but more to the point it seizes upon a handful of minor plot points from the "target" novel and stretches them out like freshly-chewed bubblegum. In this case, there's the titular fleet, Nessus's eventual mating with "the Hindmost," and Puppeteer meddling in human governance. The temporal setting is more or less true to Niven's Known Space oeuvre, pre-Kzinti wars. Niven and Lerner spin off a quick tale of the Puppeteers sending the Colonists as scouts to investigate a low-tech (but fast-learning) species living near their projected path. The whole tale of watching the Gwo'h, as they call themselves, seems an homage to Theodore Sturgeon's classic "Microcosmic God," but otherwise mainly just takes up room. In other words, a lot of page-space is taken up with action that's peripheral to the plot. For my money, that weakens the book - and it was already not the strongest stick in the pile. Much of the ground "laid" by this book has already been plowed. If you ask me, Niven and Lerner didn't do the Ringworld tradition much good with their prequel, which tends to be pretty much par for the course as prequels go. What they've done is two-fold: they've propped up the underpinnings of some minor points in the Ringworld story - Puppeteer meddling in human affairs, the Puppeteer flight from the galaxy - and left themselves a brand new avenue to explore with the "Colonist" branch of humanity. I can imagine their parlaying that thread into another series of books - a good idea, since Known Space has pretty much petered out into an interminable series of books on the Man-Kzin Wars. Fleet of Worlds seems calculated to draw on the huge success of one of SciFi's most venerated novels to allow the authors to pull a ready-made audience in a new direction. I'd hope, though, that any writing in this new direction would improve on its introduction, which is neither thrilling nor particularly fresh. ¹ ummm... I'm not certain "back" and "follows" fit. The language of prequels is fraught with temporal paradox. |