The Ringworld saga

Niven’s story is a classic of what I’d call “engineer’s science fiction”, which deals with understanding and marvelling at constructions on a cosmic scale. In this case, the construction is the ringworld: imagine a length of ribbon that you would fold back on itself to make a circle. Now, blow that up so that the ring sits roughly in earth’s orbit, orbiting the sun, one side of the ribbon facing inwards towards the sun. There you have it, the Ringworld. A magnificent construction of a scale that dwarfs all of humanity’s present achievements, and is only equaled by the mystery surrounding it: who built it? Where did they go? Why did they abandon the Ringworld?

I enjoyed this book a lot, because I generally like the idea of playing reverse archaeologist, and being handed an artifact from our future, rather than our past, to dissect. The story is quite engrossing, though it is a little hard to get into for the first few chapters, and the interrogations of the characters only echoes the wonder I feel trying to picture the might of the ringworld and other artifacts such as the cziltang brone.

The political interplay between the various races is also quite fascinating to follow, but is visited more extensively in the sequel, The Ringworld Engineers. In spite of this fascinating and believable jousting of the species of the stars, I found the sequel a little disapointing, because I feel that it tries too hard to explain the Ringworld. Niven wrote the sequel in part to respond to criticism and ideas regarding the engineering aspects of the Ringworld, and it is ever so slightly too obvious in the writing. I also found the ending to be only middling, and some of the revelations simply destroyed too much of the mystery for me to stay interested.

I bought the third book, Ringworld Throne, but it simply didn’t retain my interest in the light of the second book’s events, and I gave up after a few chapters. It seems to me that at that point, the Ringworld has become merely the backdrop for a completely different story, rather than being at the center of the story. And I couldn’t get interested in that. Maybe another time.

Starship Troopers

Next up, a dose of Heinlein. Heinlein is one of my favorite science fiction authors. His stories are engrossing, the characters are interesting (if a little unrealistic at times), and the intrigue is supplemented by shards of all out political, philosophical or social commentary about humanity at large. I find the mix extremely enjoyable to read and reread.

So, imagine my joy when I found in a bookshop in Canada a second hand copy of Starship Troopers, one of his landmark and most controversial novels. The movie based on the book was a decent enough flick, despite the obvious bias against the Federal society, depicted as a quasi-fascist regime.

Reading the book, it seems obvious that Heinlein is not describing a fascist regime. He is cetainly describing an atypical society in many ways, different from all the government experiments that we’ve had so far in our history. Of course, it’s not a democracy in our sense, since citizenship is not acquired at birth, but through sacrifice and toil in the federal service. I don’t think it qualifies as a dictatorship either, since anyone has the right to volunteer for federal service and work for their citizenship.

The book has had a lot of hate heaped onto it, because people are obviously quite attached to their fundamental freedoms: “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. But Heinlein, through several professors of History and Moral Philosophy, makes a compelling case for the fundamental weakness of automatic citizenship, and why the ultimate authority should only be given to those willing to give their lives for the body politic, ultimate cost for ultimate value. There are also a few cheap stabs at communism, but History seems to have proven him right in many ways, and again, there are rather interesting moral and pragmatic arguments made against the communist moral structure.

Not only is the book a great work of science fiction in terms of depicting the army of the future (Heinlein practically invented the exoskeleton and high-tech intelligence gathering in Starship Troopers), it is also a fascinating essay on politics and morality. In many ways, I find myself agreeing with Heinlein: why is citizenship and the ultimate sovereign authority granted indiscriminately, without even the slightest proof that the citizen has the moral sense to use this power for the benefit of society? I suspect that this comes back to the pervasiveness of religions that assume that moral sense is innate, rather than acquired. No matter that facts don’t seem to agree…

One of the professors of H&MP in the book summarizes this situation as “The people voted for the impossible, and the disastrously possible occured instead”. Sounds familiar? Maybe it’s just the american elections that make me pessimistic about our great democratic experiments.

Assignment in Eternity

Assignment in Eternity is a short story prequel to some of the events in Friday (another brilliant Heinlein, go read it). I think it’s a much more satisfying story to read if you read Friday first, since you can then connect the events of Assignment in Eternity with the references dropped here and there in Friday. The story is just that much more enjoyable when you can connect things like that.

Double Star

Third Heinlein I read on this trip, Double Star. Not as good as the best Heinlein, but nonetheless a pleasant read and reread. It deals with questions that we may have to face one day, about overcoming prejudice and xenophobia beyond humanity, as we push out towards the stars. Unfortunately, the ending is quite guessable after a while, but it remains a pleasant book.

Glory Road

Fourth Heinlein (and, I think, the first I actually read), Glory Road. Not much to say here. It’s a light story, fun to read, but as far as I remember there was no huge philosophical point being discussed. Well, maybe that work is something that humans have to do to remain sane, that after a while just doing nothing, or doing things without earning the possibility of doing them first (e.g. being rich beyond belief) eventually drives people crazy. Okay, so there is a point I guess, that a Man’s value is in action, not past prestige. In any case, it’s a nice light read, quite enjoyable.

Saturn

Next up, Ben Bova’s Saturn. I’d already read and loved his Mars and Return to Mars, so I had high expectations for this one. In my opinion, it’s not quite as good as Mars. I feel that there is too much focus on societal interplay, and over time it becomes tiring. Kind of like Dune in a way, where the plans within plans within plans just end up pissing you off. Some of the New Morality characters also got on my nerves, simply because they exhibit the same righteous indignation against technology that can be found here on Earth today.

I cannot stand people who fear what they do not understand, and rely on a shaky “moral” code to force their ignorance and unwillingness to learn onto the rest of us. I did enjoy the book despite this (hint: any book that I read through to the end I consider good, and I recommend you read it), but it lacked the pioneer feel and mystery of Mars and Return to Mars, the two aspects that I really enjoyed in the red planet novels.

Manifold Time

On to a hard S.F. author, Stephen Baxter. I’d already read Ring, which I think is the perfect example of what is meant by hard S.F.: if you can’t deal with battles on a cosmic timescale between two lords of their domains of the universe, who fight by hurtling entire galaxies at each other, go back in time to reengineer their own evolution in order to fight the threat to their existence, and construct artifacts hundreds of thousands of light years across out of flaws in the fabric of spacetime, then you’re not ready for a Baxter story. He has you coming up for air every couple of chapters, so incredible are the implications of his ideas.

In this context, you’ll imagine that if I loved Ring’s hard S.F., I was quite excited to see what Manifold: Time had in store for me. And, again, Baxter blew my mind away. As with Ring, you have to wait until the very end for all the events to come together in a single chain that makes sense, and the ending surprized and amazed the crap out of me. Again, if you’re not up to dealing with exploring universes of the Manifold, skipping through time into the deep future of the universe, and using black holes as power stations, you may want to skip Baxter. Otherwise, go read Manifold: Time, I guarantee satisfaction.

Ender’s Game

Next up, Orson Scott Card and the magnificent Ender’s Game. The story of Ender Wiggin, the war against the buggers, Battle School and youth destroyed in the name of xenophobia. I can’t summarize this book, it’s fantastic, incredible and wonderful. And, if you become sufficiently engrossed, it is just possible that the Speaker for the Dead might make you weep in the final pages.

Speaker for the Dead

Speaking of the Speaker, the sequel to Ender’s Game is just as fantastic, and is called, unsurprisingly, Speaker for the Dead. This is actually what Card wanted to write originally, and Ender’s Game became a sort of prequel in which he got rid of all the questions of how the Speaker for the Dead originally came to be, to focus on what the Speaker does in this book. Among other things, Speaker for the Dead tells the story of the piggies, the second sentient alien race that humanity comes into contact with, and how it revives the old fears of the bugger wars.

The scifi part of it is also fascinating, describing an empire of a hundred worlds where communication is key: while starships travelling at relativistic speeds take decades to cross the interstellar void between worlds (with only a few days of subjective time inside the ship), each world is linked by ansible with all the others, enabling FTL communication. This rapport of fast communication and slow travel defines a lot of the societies in the Hundred Worlds.

This also places emphasis on what the character Demosthenes calls the “hierarchy of exclusion”, derived from scandinavian vocabulary: four levels of “otherness”, ranging from human from another city all the way to the true alien, whose motives and ways are for ever unreachable to us. All in all, a fascinating read, and a very well told story of just how alien and incomprehensible other sentient species may appear to be, until they are properly understood and accepted.

There, I think that’s about it. I’ve probably forgotten some, and I’ll remember later today as I unpack my bag and see them there. But those above are the ones I remember best, and I highly recommend them if you’re looking for a bit of sci-fi escape.

Now, I hope Kaikoura has a lot of second hand bookshops, I need to sell some of these off and get some more. I’ve run out of reading material.