Books in April

Most of what I read in April were Larry Niven books. I finished off the Known Space novels with Juggler of Worlds, then proceeded on to Ringworld, The Ringworld Engineers, The Ringworld Throne and Ringworld's Children. The idea for Ringworld is, of course, quite cool, although I don't think he's even scratched the surface of the stories that could be told. I kind of wished he had designed it, then handed it off to another writer to tell stories in. For one thing, for something of such immense size, it seems awfully homogeneous. The different races of hominids just didn't feel as culturally different to me as I think they were meant to. And there isn't much there that isn't hominids. Given that the main activity of all these hominids is to have sex with each other (since they are too genetically different from each other to produce offspring, this is Ringworld birth control), you can kind of guess why there are no sheep.

The other aspect I think he really fumbled was Teela and her "luck". I like the concept of luck, and especially how the Norse dealt with it as "hamingja", where it was a heriditary sort of luck (and related to why the sons of heroes tend to also be heroes in the sagas). But the Ringworld books spend a tremendous amount of time waffling on whether or not Teela was lucky (and it didn't feel like character waffling so much as writer waffling; I suspect Niven didn't even know and was hoping it would become clear as he wrote, only it didn't. To be honest, as a writer I've totally been there. Although I tend to take care of that sort of wishy-washiness in subsequent drafts). He also doesn't make any clear distinction between "luck" and "fate", which I think of as two entirely unrelated concepts. Partly this is just me growing up on comic books where characters like the Scarlet Witch and Longshot were lucky in the sense that they manipulated probabilities moment by moment. Which is what luck would be to me, a moment by moment, the coin keeps flipping heads sort of thing. Fate is something else entirely, bigger than a moment by moment thing.

Basically the idea that Teela's "luck" compelled her to fall in love with Louis Wu to bring her to Ringworld because that's where she was fated to be is just loathsome. Fate putting you on a ship, fine. Fate compelling you to "follow your heart" because you're a chic - ick.

There was a last minute bit of waffling that got interesting - when Louis Wu postulated quite Richard Dawkins Selfish Gene-like that Teela wasn't lucky, it was her genes that were lucky, and that luck only served to lead Teela to have more offspring/replicate more of her lucky genes. But then you realize she only ever had the one kid, and she could have had more on Earth or on one of the other Known Space planets without ever having to "follow her heart" to Ringworld at all that it all sort of falls apart again. I wished he'd thought it through first, wrote it second. It could have been a cool character.

Which is not to say I didn't enjoy the books. Protectors and puppeteers are both cool things. And there was the moment at the end of Ringworld when Teela left Louis Wu for the the Seeker, who in my head was totally the Groosalugg:

Which I totally mentioned lots of times when I was reading these novels, and Quin nodded along as if he understood. Yes, she got her Groosalugg. Yes, that would have been cool for her. Well, I've been rewatching Angel episodes when I'm doing other stuff lately and got to the first Groo episode and pointed it out at one point when Quin was in my office, "Look, it's Groo!"

"Who?"

Yeah, totally just nodding along when I talk.

Sadly, Teela didn't get to live happily ever after with her Groosalugg. But then neither did Cordelia.

The only non-Niven book I read in April was Do Your Ears Pop in Space by space shuttle astronaut R. Mike Mullane. A fun book with lots of interesting info about what it's really like up there in orbit. It didn't add much in the sense of novel research, but I was particularly engrossed with all the details about the Challenger disaster. I remember that day well (I think it's the JFK assasination for my generation; we all know where we were that day). I was home sick from school, and so was my step-dad. He came in to wake me up so I could watch the news reports on the TV. This book really gets into what went wrong, did the crew know something was wrong, could it have been prevented, etc. This came out before the Columbia disaster so there isn't a similar discussion on that mission, which would have been interesting. If you're at all interested in space, this is a highly recommended read.