1985 Locus – THE INTEGRAL TREES by Larry Niven

In 1971, the first Locus award went to Larry Niven for his creation of an offbeat new type of science fiction world in Ringworld. He did the same thing with The Integral Trees, and, lo and behold, gets another Locus. Ringworld swept the awards though, Integral Trees just won the Locus.

The world of Integral Trees isn’t really a world at all, it’s actually a cloud of gas around a neutron star. In one area, called “the smoke ring” this gas gets fairly dense and is actually breathable. Various plants and birds live in the smoke ring, including the titular integral trees – giant plants that span the entire width of the smoke ring (winds bend each end in opposite directions, causing them to look like integration symbols from calculus). Humans colonized the smoke ring from a slower-than-light starship, and societies have developed both on the trees and on dense vegetation masses called “jungles.” Over hundreds of years, the humans have grown tall from low gravity and developed tribal societies that mimic the traditions of their colonizing forebears (The Scientist is a position like a shaman, for instance). In the novel, we follow one group of tree-dwellers as their home tree disintegrates and they are enslaved by jungle dwellers. It’s short and fast-paced, as the protagonists skip from one strange and harsh environment to another in a series of action sequences.

Whether this physical world is plausible or not, I’ll leave aside (it doesn’t feel plausible, but Niven is the type of hard sf author who certainly did the math). It’s the human world of Integral Tress that rings hollow to me. The societies are generic and dull (the jungle-dwellers are slavers, the tree-dwellers are noble savages), and the characters are too. The best-developed character is Clave, the group leader who is a fierce and loyal warrior, but a bit full of himself. The protagonist Gavving is a decent guy, and his love interest Minya is a tough girl. Most of the cast is completely interchangeable. I really did not care about any of them.

This should have been a short story that introduced Niven’s interesting world and moved on. I have a whole essay bouncing around in my head about how there should be more sf written as faux-non-fiction rather than the author trying to cobble together a story as a vehicle to introduce his "cool Idea" (maybe I'll actually write it out some day)*. This novel was the inspiration for that line of thinking.

* I have three words for anyone who might scoff that this would further lower the literary establishment's respect for speculative fiction: Jorge Luis Borges.

Grade: C-

1971 Hugo and Locus, and 1970 Nebula - RiINGWORLD by Larry Niven

If the 60s was a decade of experimentation and social awareness in speculative fiction, the 70s represented a turning back to science fiction’s roots in the hard sciences and pulpy adventure. For my money, no one represents this retro phase of science fiction better than Larry Niven. Niven’s work is very reminiscent of Heinlein’s, and early Heinlein at that. It has the same combination of imaginative engineering problems and off-beat, iconoclastic central characters.

Ringworld is part of Niven’s Known Space, the world that provides the setting for most of his solo fiction. Humans have made it to the stars and colonized new planets (like “We Made It”). They’re challenged by a catlike, war-mongering and honor-obsessed species called the Kzin (who surely inspired the revamped Next Generation Klingons) and occasionally manipulated by the highly advanced yet very cowardly puppeteers. The puppeteers have discovered a engineered ring with a circumference the size of the Earth's orbit – it's some sort of immense habitat that promises amazing technological revelations. They hire a 200 year old human, Louis Wu, a Kzin diplomat, Speaker-to-animals, and a human woman named Teela to investigate.

The first half of the novel is incredibly fun. We meet the different characters, and learn about the alien species involved. The puppeteer cowardice and the Kzin penchant for violence are wonderfully exaggerated and lead to some humorous moments. Wu is also amusing, though maybe a little to perfect (again, in the tradition of Heinlein). Teela is included in the mission because the puppeteers believe that humans are evolving good luck due to a breeding lottery, and they think that she is the vanguard of the probability-enhanced, and thus will bless the expedition.

These are all great ideas, and, like I said, the set-up is fun. The second half of the novel, which covers the ringworld itself, doesn’t quite live up to its promise. There’s a nice description of its lack of horizon, and the effects of punctures in its hull, but, for the most part, it’s just a really, really big alien setting complete with generic barbarians. The lame ringworld inhabitants were especially frustrating to see after the complex and nuanced alien society that LeGuin created for The Left Hand of Darkness. I wondered how living on this strange planet would affect these people, but we get only hints of this, and the ringworld barbarians are generally gullible, violent and stupid…and that’s about it.

There’s nothing that new here, other than the ring itself. But, even if it is somewhat familiar, it's extremely well-executed and fun. The novel is full of great ideas and, overall, it's a very good adventure tale. There should be no surprise that it swept all three of the major sf awards.

Grade: A-