Larry Niven’s Ringworld is a book with a great central(?) concept, a book that could be really good if it weren’t for the raging misogyny, the racism, the eugenics, and also if it actually did anything interesting with its central(?) concept.
the novel follows a 200-year-old man named Louis Wu, whom Niven introduces by blithely announcing to the reader that Louis is, under normal circumstances, constantly in yellowface:
Louis Wu. From a distance he was an oriental, with pale yellow skin and flowing white hair. His rich blue robe was carelessly draped, so that it should have hampered his movements; but it didn’t.
Close up, it was all a fraud. His skin was not pale yellow-brown, but a smooth chrome yellow, the color of a comic-book Fu Manchu. His queue was too thick; it was not the white of age, but sheer clean white with a subliminal touch of blue, the color of dwarf star sunlight. As with all flatlanders [i.e., Earth-dwellers, as far as I can tell], cosmetic dyes were the colors of Louis Wu.
on a surface level, one might attempt to argue that this displays a postracial future (the next paragraph tells us explicitly and specifically that Louis’s features “were neither Caucasian nor Mongoloid nor Negroid, though there were traces of all three: a uniform blend which must have required centureis”). it seems to me, however, that the characterization of his painted skin as “the color of a comic-book Fu Manchu” belies this, as it indicates the persistence of the classic racist trope of an East Asian man almost a thousand years in the future. either that or we have to conclude that Niven is simply a bad writer and is falling back on present referents — in which case the fact that the present referents he’s falling back on are racist ones doesn’t actually make it any better.
Louis Wu is contacted by Nessus, a “Pierson’s puppeteer,” an alien species thought to have abandoned “Known Space” on a journey towards the Magellanic Clouds to escape the effects of a massive wave of supernova radiation slowly expanding out of the galactic core. Nessus invites Louis to join him on a mysterious expedition. at a bar, they recruit an alien — Speaker-To-Animals, an ambassador of the kzinti, a warlike feline species — and then at Louis’s 200th birthday, which he’d skipped out on, they find Teela Brown, a human woman Louis believes is totally unsuitable but whom Nessus, for initially unexplained reasons, insists is a vital part of the expedition.
the expedition, it transpires, is a journey to an artificial structure or artifact, the titular Ringworld, a vast, habitable ring encircling a distant star. after a bunch of arguments about who should be in charge, they arrive at the Ringworld system, seeking its builders, only to basically immediately crash-land on the ring. so the four of them begin a journey across the vast width of the Ringworld in search of any surviving technology that might be able to help them leave, encountering some surviving residents — apparently human — as well as signs of the Engineers and having some Big Reveals about the puppeteers’ involvement in human and kzin history.
there are a lot of problems with this book. aside from the racism that gets it started, it is full of absolutely raging misogyny. this is exemplified by the treatment of alien women: female kzin, we’re told, are “non-sentient”; puppeteer reproduction includes at least one “sex[]” that is “property. Nonsentient; stupid”; when they do finally meet a living Engineer, she is almost immediately revealed to have been one of three ship’s prostitutes on a long-haul interstellar cargo ship (the only women on board, of course). Teela is, superficially, in a better position, but the narrative infantilizes her, both through Louis’s perspective (she is often a “girl” in his eyes, despite the fact that they’re hooking up) and through her arc.
Teela’s arc rests on both a narrative and a conceptual-ideological problem. partway through the novel, the other members of the expedition learn that the puppeteers in general and Nessus in particular have been involved in a large-scale and long-term eugenics program involving both humans and kzinti. first, they arranged for the kzinti to lose a series of devastating wars against humans, in an effort to cull the portion of the kzin population that was hyper-aggressive and responded to aliens with either murder or enslavement and produce a more “docile” kzin. second, several centuries ago they intervened in human politics to create a program that would allow them to (attempt to) breed a preternaturally lucky strain of human, of whom Teela is one.
everyone responds negatively to this revelation, as might be expected. Speaker refuses to talk to Nessus for a long time. Teela runs off in tears. Louis is also angry, but less so, and he gets over it relatively quickly. there are several problems here, though. the first is a narrative one: humans are, explicitly, already engaged in an active eugenics program. anyone may have one child, but under normal circumstances only people with particularly desirable genes are allowed to have more than one, outside of a lottery that anyone can enter (Teela’s “luck” comes from the fact that she is descended from several generations of lottery-winners). against this backdrop, Teela’s response — anger that humans and kzinti have been treated “like two strains of cattle” and bred “like beasts” — feels profoundly disingenuous and narratively contrived, since there is no indication that she has any fundamental objection to eugenics, provided humans are practicing it on other humans. like. oh, now it’s bad to have a Human Breeding Program? okay. sure. (kzinti and puppeteers are, of course, also doing eugenics — like humans, as a form of population control, because this was 1970 and everyone took it for granted that overpopulation was the most pressing political and environmental concern.)
exacerbating this problem is Louis’s response to Teela, which is, essentially: “sure, your ancestors were subjected to a controlled breeding program and treated like animals, but can’t you just forgive and forget the beneficiaries of that breeding program who are still profiting from it centuries later?” this already has deeply racist implications in the context of the United States in 1970, when the book was published, but this is made substantially worse by the revelation (which Louis does not share with Teela), that Nessus is not only a later beneficiary of this breeding program but one of its original organizers. it’s as if Thomas Jefferson were still alive in 2025 and descendants of the enslaved people who worked on his plantation were being expected to personally forgive him for his treatment of their ancestors while he was still living on the plantation, where they still worked for minimum wage. just absolutely vile.
beyond this, however, is a larger narrative problem: while Teela’s luck is introduced relatively early, once the characters learn that it is the result of the puppeteers’ breeding program the novel’s plot abruptly shifts in focus: suddenly, the book reframes all of its events not as an expedition to explore and report back on the Ringworld but rather as a kind of cosmic morality play for Teela’s benefit. her luck, we are told, has arranged everything from the beginning in order to ensure that she would come to Ringworld and be able to come of age and, through safely controlled hardship, become the best possible version of herself. (she’s extremely flat as a character at this point, but it seems unlikely that even if we got to see this development on the page Niven would be able to write her interestingly.)
this highlights the most frustrating thing about this book: it could have been good. the concept of the Ringworld is compelling, as evidenced by its adoption in later science fiction: it is almost incomprehensibly vast (Louis and the others struggle to make sense of its size), opening the possibility of an enormous diversity of cultures and physical landscapes that the novel’s characters could move through. instead of centering the Ringworld and its inhabitants, however, the novel focuses increasingly on Teela and the claim that its entire plot has been driven deterministically by her luck. Louis, Speaker, and Nessus are ostensibly interested in the history of the Ringworld, and then we get a two-page summary and move on. no-one (except, ironically, Teela) appears interested in the currently living, human- or human-seeming inhabitants of the Ringworld. only on literally the last page of the novel does Niven seem to finally, belatedly, realize that a story that that was actually about the Ringworld might have be interesting to read:
“We never saw the rim wall. They [i.e., Teela and her “native lover” will, who are remaining on the Ringworld] will. I wonder what else we missed? If the Ringworld ramships got as far as Earth, they may have picked up some blue whales and sperm whales, before we made them extinct. We never got out onto the ocean.
“The people they’ll meet. There’s no end to the ways a culture can go. And the room...the Ringworld’s so big...”
“We can’t go back [i.e., to the floor of the Ringworld], Louis.”
“No, of course not.”
“Not until we can deliver our secret to our respective worlds. And acquire an intact ship.”
The End
imagine if he’d gotten there three hundred pages earlier!
there are two other particularly frustrating could-have-beens I wanted to flag. Speaker-To-Animals is probably the highlight of the book for me — he’s both endearing and funny, in a way I’m not entirely sure is always intentional. he spends a bunch of the novel attempting to take charge of the expedition by unilaterally and ineffectually claiming that whatever situation they’re currently in makes this a military problem and thus under his jurisdiction; the other characters either humor him or simply ignore him, which is a fun dynamic. it is, unfortunately, undercut by the sexism of the kzinti world-building. why is Niven so eager to imagine women as not only subordinate to men but in fact non-sentient? I suppose in some ways there’s at least a refreshing honesty there.
the other highlight is the female Engineer, Halrloprillalar (aka Prill). of course her narrative is also sexist: from ship’s prostitute to “conditioned” by Nessus using an addictive device that directly stimulates the pleasure centers of the brain — in order to protect Louis from Prill’s attempt to “condition” him herself using her extensive knowledge of humanoid physiology and sex. (the narration explicitly tells us that women’s sexuality and/or feminine wiles are equivalent to the addictive device.) before this, however, we get an account of Prill’s life story, and this is probably the most compelling thing in the whole book: Prill’s ship returned to the Ringworld after the disaster that caused the collapse of the Engineers’ technology (literally, in the case of their floating cities), and most of its crew died attempting to land on and then escape again from the Ringworld. Prill, one of the sole survivors, set off on a 200,000-mile journey across the width of the Ringworld to return to her home city, presenting herself as a god along the way. once she arrived in its ruins, she taught herself physics and engineering in order to make a living space among the wreckage, and she has lived alone as a local god for an indefinite period of time.
this is the good stuff! give me a book about Prill! please don’t make me think about Louis Wu anymore. did I mention that during an argument just after they arrive on the Ringworld Louis tells Teela that the reason she’s on the expedition is that “[w]e need you to keep me happy, so I don’t rape Nessus”? and this is a man we’re apparently supposed to find sympathetic.
also, someone has to say it: “tanj”, short for “there-ain’t-no-justice”, is incredibly stupid future profanity. just let them say “fuck”.
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