Ringworld, by Larry Niven: **1/2

This Hugo award winner from 1970 is pretty fun, and also a pretty good example of why I don't read a lot of sci-fi. It's got some good characters, a lot of fun tangents, some good ideas, and it all adds up to something kind of cold and impersonal, which isn't really what I look for in this kind of book. Somehow I feel like I should like this kind of stuff more than I do, but it just doesn't contain the magic (figurative and literal) that the fantasy stuff has. I'm not sure why, but I just don't seem to get emotionally involved in these books. Nonetheless, it's still pretty good for this kind of thing, and I liked it. It's a pretty neat concept, with the Ringworld and all, and certainly the book never ran short on ideas. Niven has to be a pretty damn smart guy to put together all of the mathematics and to be able to conceptualize the specifics of this place. I had to work pretty hard to get my head around a lot of the ideas, and that wasn't because Niven had misthought or miswritten them. It's just cause they're tough in the first place. I think if it had a bit more of the thriller aspect, maybe I'd get into it a bit more. I don't konw. It's funny, because I pride myself on the fact that I enjoy slow, thoughtful books, like Don DeLillo's Underworld, or Thomas Pynchon's V, but I never got into this one, despite the fact that it's very clearly well-written, well-thought out, considers interesting moral questions about society, race, and the future of humanity, and yet I found it dry. I don't know.
(late fall 2001)


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