The Fourth Time is Not a Charm
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Author: Larry Niven
Title: Ringworld's Children Genre: science fiction Though you might get stiff argument from fans of the Star Wars series* or of STTNG, it's darned near a tenet of faith among those who watch the entertainment media: a sequel almost never lives up to the original. One need only consider a few examples: Rocky II, any book with "Dune" and other words in its title, the second and third Matrix installments. In view of those latter two, an oft-quoted corollary to the rule of sequels is that every successive attempt to capitalize on the popularity of the original simply gets worse. One might hope that Larry Niven - the creative mind behind Ringworld, one of those benchmarks against which all modern speculative fiction is measured - might be able to evade the clutches of the sequel trap. Hope against hope, however, for Niven twice proved himself as vulnerable as any other author. First, it was the forgettable Ringworld Engineers, followed by the even more regrettable Ringworld Throne. For the latter, a measure of kudos is certainly due for the means by which Niven knitted together Ringworld, his "Known Space" series, and the Brennan-monster of his early novel Protector (based on an almost forgotten short story World of Ptaavs); however the plots of both ...Engineers and ...Throne proved vague and meandering. No more content to rest on his heavily tarnished laurels than (apparently) are the estates of Robert Ludlum and Frank Herbert, Niven once more returns to the 600-million-mile ribbon of scrith we first glimpsed more than thirty years ago. In Ringworld's Children, Louis Wu awakens once more to a world in which the horizon goes up instead of down and there's an arch behind the sun. If you live on a construct 3,000,000 times the size of Earth, you learn to stop being surprised. Although he long ago celebrated his personal bicentennial, Louis awakens to find himself in the body of his teenaged self. "Young" Louis is in the Ringworld's repair center (underneath Mons Olympus on the map of Mars), accompanied by the ghoul turned protector Tunesmith and the Puppeteer Hindmost. Arrayed just beyond the rim of the Ringworld are the ships of half a dozen species, all of whom want the Ringworld enough to destroy it to keep it out of their enemies' hands. When a human-made antimatter explosion punches a hole in the floor of the Ring, Tunesmith springs into action, sending Louis, the Kzin Acolyte, and Hanuman, a Protector from a semi-sapient species to observe. As luck would have it, a three-man fighter arrives at the same time, bearing Roxanny, the first human Woman Louis has seen in decades. The two of them rescue Wembleth, hominid of unknown origins. It only takes a day or two, though, before a Ringworld native protector, Proserpina, arrives to split up the party. As Louis struggles - for unstated reasons - to enter a huge arcology, Proserpina takes the remaining three back to the Repair Center, where she engages Tunesmith. Which Protector will save the Ringworld - if it can saved? And will Louis arrive in time to shift the balance of power to the best candidate for the job? Who is the best candidate? And who is Wembleth? And does anyone really care? In the end, that's the question: Who Cares? In the original novel, Niven constructed not only one of the most inventive worlds of all time, he also constructed a rich tapestry of characters and whirling, anastomosing and coalescing plots and subplots. His characters were deliberately unidimensional: a pathological coward Puppeteer, a preternaturally violent Kzin - yet each found some means to grow. Four books into the series, however, those characters' patterns have been set and the actors have become secondary to a vague plot to save the Ringworld. Given the scale of the construct, we can be certain that will be a titanic undertaking that only a Protector can manage - and it is. By making the Ringworld engineers Protectors, Niven immediately painted any future plots into a corner. Of all the characters in Niven's fiction, the Protectors are the most predictable. He compounds that restriction by making the Protectors equally inscrutable, failing to allow readers to view the action from the viewpoint of the Tunesmith or Proserpina as they battle for control of the Ringworld, even momentarily. Without such insight, readers might as well be reading Niven's grocery list. Sure, there's a little sex and a couple of - frankly, rather silly - plot twists. But overall the action is slow and the characters boring. Ringword's Children does have a few redeeming points, particularly in the absence of Niven's one-time writing partner, Jerry Pournelle. Without Pournelle's constant environmentalist bashing, Niven can make a few points about the problems of over-engineering one's own environment. The engineers failed to bring carrion-eaters along on the Ringworld, so hominids were forced to evolve to eat the flesh of the dead - otherwise the world would eventually be knee-deep in decaying flesh. That's a statement about the necessity for diversity that would have never made it past Pournelle's blue pencil, I suspect. In the end, however, the third sequel to Ringworld is nearly as lamentable as the third. Niven has gone one, no, two - and perhaps three - times too many to that particular well. Were I you, I'd skip it. Want to see my review of Ringworld? I liked that one! * Fans of Star Wars will, however, readily admit that a prequel never lives up to the original. |