j – Page 3 – Triple Take

J’s Take on Conspiracy 365: January

It’s been many months since we decided to devote 2012 to books by Australian and New Zealand authors and nearly that long since we picked this book as our first one for the year. So I didn’t really remember anything about it as I sat down (lay down) to read it, except that K had equated it to the TV series “24”.

That being the case, I can’t say I was disappointed by it particularly. But, man, was it so not my type of book. The best thing I can say about it was that it didn’t take long to read. Perhaps an hour and a half or so.

The main character, whose name I have already forgotten, — Callum? Collum? — has this crazy, sick guy screaming at him about how he should go into hiding for the next year. So we begin our countdown. The story is told by day and by hour:minute, hence at least part of the reason to equate it to “24”. The page count also goes down, something I didn’t figure out until more than halfway through, because I was reading so fast it took me that long to look at the page numbers twice. (I was impressed I’d gotten to page 121 as quickly as I did! Until I discovered a little later I was ‘only’ on page 091.) What struck me as odd about this format was that the story was still told in the past tense. If the goal was to give a sense of immediacy and ‘in the moment’, then it should’ve been in present tense.

So right after this guy rants at him and gets carted off by police or some mysterious people, the main character is in a storm in a boat. And then nearly eaten by sharks. Yea, just like that! We haven’t had a chance to get to know this character at all, and he’s already, randomly, nearly dying a few times. The book continues like that. Kidnappings, shootings, mysterious notes, without any real sense that the main character is truly affected by any of it. The frequent use of exclamation points seems to stand in for his emotion. ! !!

About the time he’s running around and choosing not to tell his mother or the cops about being kidnapped, I’m thinking.. at least he’s like.. 17 or 18, right? (The picture on the cover certainly looks about that.) But no, I’d missed a page right at the beginning that states right up front he’s 15. At this point, I’m finding it all rather incredible. And not at all in a good way. Who has their house broken into and burgled and the cops don’t come? Who gets kidnapped and doesn’t tell their mother or the cops? Who runs away rather than go up to the police and say ‘hey, dude, I totally didn’t hurt my little sister?’ What was he afraid of? At that point, he should’ve been glad if they had arrested him and stuck him in jail. It would’ve been safer for him! (!!)

I get sick and tired of male characters, particularly teenage boy ones, who think they have to ‘protect’ their mother by not telling her things! She’s a freaking adult. You’re a freaking kid. Tell her you were kidnapped!!!

An odd note, the little sister is named Gabbi. The author’s name is Gabrielle. I find it rather odd to name a character after yourself.

Oh yea, so the mystery. His Dad caught some weird brain virus and died. Not that he seems to have been isolated at all. Or cremated. Really? No fear this weird virus you know nothing about is going to spread to other people?

And there’s an Ormond Riddle, Ormond Angel, Ormond Singularity thing. Ormond is their last name. Don’t expect to ever find out what that’s all about, because as you may have guessed, there’s 12 of these books. In fact, this book ends in a really bad place and with no sense of closure whatsoever. It’s a good thing I don’t care at all, because I’m totally not reading the other books.

This would make better television than prose, as there’s a lot, a lot of action, but even so, I wouldn’t be at all interested in watching it. And it would still be unbelievable on several counts.

Next!

J’s Take on Nancy Drew: Vampire Slayer

It turns out Nancy Drew: Vampire Slayer didn’t mean Nancy Drew was taking on the role of a vampire slayer. It’s just that the so-called mystery involved a vampire slayer. This is a two-part graphic novel story about Nancy Drew, which turns out to be ridiculously difficult to get through interlibrary loan. You’d think Nancy Drew + vampires + graphic novel would’ve been a definite library buy.

Not that I can recommend it to any library book selectors, because it’s pretty bad.

Nancy Drew has two friends, Bess and George. I was a little surprised to learn George was a girl, as two girl sidekicks is a little unusual. By the middle of the second volume, I was fantasizing they were a couple, just because it would’ve made things a little more interesting. And believe me, it needed all the help it could get.

Nancy also has a boyfriend, Ned. And she likes finding mysteries to solve. Even when none exist. In this story, she befriends a pale dude whom everyone thinks is a vampire. He’s being stalked by a vampire slayer even.

Let’s start with the artwork, because that’ll be quick and easy. It struck me as uninteresting, uninspired, uncreative. It just was sort of there.

Characters:
Nancy — Man, is she annoying. Mostly because of all the narration. A lot of narration. Excessive narration. Superfluous narration. And do people really refer to their friends as ‘pals’? Like, repeatedly?

Bess and George — Of course one of them, I already forget which, is like a computer hacker. Because every detective needs one of those if they aren’t one themselves. But mostly they just hang out and be girly and get themselves into trouble.

Ned — Dude sports a collared shirt and a sweater! I mean, probably this is a hangover from the original books.. that’s the only reason I can think he’d be dressed like that. Unless he’s on his way to prep school. He also gets totally jealous of Nancy hanging out with this vampire, but never actually talks to her about it in any useful way.

Vampire — This is going to be a total spoiler and ruin the mystery for you!!!! Okay, you’ve been warned. He has porpheria which means he can’t handle light and is totally obsessed with his homemade vegetable juice chock full of beta carotene. To the extent that he doesn’t seem to actually eat anything. Also, he’s rich. And he totally faints for some reason. And he’s a recluse, for some reason, so he doesn’t know how to socialize with people. And Nancy feels all protective and ‘poor guy’ because of his illness and his inability to socialize and just ugh, ugh, ugh. I was given no reason at all to like this guy. Towards the end I was hoping he really was a vampire and the whole porpheria thing was a lie, because then it wouldn’t have been so totally lame!

Yea, I won’t even bother to go into the whole… twin thing.

The mystery, was no mystery. The plot, was totally contrived. (Ohnoes, we’re trapped in the house with a vampire slayer. And I have no idea my plucky pals are right outside spying on us through the security cameras.)

Nancy’s girlfriends (ah, if only they were her girlfriends and not just friends who are girls) are obsessed with this vampire movie, “Dielight”. Which I thought was silly.. why not just name the movie you’re really thinking of? Or create a completely different movie they’re obsessed with, like “My Creepy Stalker is a Vampire” or, y’know, something. But I was willing to let that pass without comment until there was a reference to Myfacespace or.. something like that. It just gets ridiculous.

I did have to look at book 1 again to doublecheck, but nope, not a single person of color in either volume. Not even in the audience in the movie theatre. The characters come in just two shades: white and whiter.

Finally, protip — it’s spelled straitjacket, not straight jacket, ‘k? Thnx.

Also, did you know Nancy was in this vampire’s house before? In a previous graphic novel adventure starring a magician? What? You didn’t? Good thing they mention it at least three times in this one! Otherwise you’d miss out on running out to purchase it to find out what happened before in this house!!

Did I mention I hate footnotes that try to sell you other books by the same author/publisher? It’s like… let me just jar you out of the story for a minute for a commercial.

In short: Save yourself time and money and skip this.

Nebula Project: A Time of Changes

When a man from Earth introduces prince-in-exile Kinnal Darival a telepathic drug from Kinnal’s own planet, he has a revolutionary epiphany. He takes the subversive and obscene step of writing his autobiography — in the first person, as part of a crusade to share this drug and this worldview with others.

What follows is a spoiler laden discussion of the book A Time of Changes. Beware if youâ€™re worried about such things.

J: I’d never heard of A Time of Changes before. And though Robert Silverberg is really prolific, I’d never read one of his novels before either. So I had no idea at all what to expect. Yet somehow I still managed to be disappointed.

K: I also went into this with what I must describe as complete ignorance of the author and the title. I had only just heard of him coincidentally a month or two prior to us coming to this book in the list. Unfortunately, I’m going to have to agree that this book was a disappointment on several levels.

J: I felt it was very similar to Left Hand of Darkness in a lot of ways, but with nothing at all in it to make it interesting. And a few things to actively dislike.

K: I’m again going to have to agree — the parallels to Left Hand sprang to mind almost immediately, with the surprising result of making Left Hand appear retrospectively way more progressive and daring than it felt at the time. There’s also a fairly unflattering (to A Time of Changes) comparison to Dune to be made here.

J: In what way? Other than being a colonized planet? And there really must be a term for that subgenre, but I don’t know it.

K: A colonized planet with a strange ‘native’ religion, people using drugs to achieve telepathy/communion with others, a person who comes in from the outside and begins imposing new ideas on the locals. It’s far more similar to Left Hand in plot shape, but I think the similarities to Dune are there.

J: I forgot about the drugs in Dune. And yea, again with the telepathy!! It’s like.. it’s not science fiction if someone’s not reading someone else’s mind.

K: That is getting pretty old. As are the long-lost/out of touch/vaguely medieval colonies from Earth. TIP: Just because you threw in a spaceman and set your story on a colony doesn’t make it seem like any less of a fantasy as compared to science fiction.

J: Agreed! Even the whole ‘can’t use I’ thing was sort of done in Babel-17, so there’s not much new here at all. But I do have to say that out of all the ones we’ve read so far, this one seems the most obviously dated to a time and place. Even moreso than Flowers for Algernon, which was pretty much set on contemporary Earth. Because it just screamed ’60s-70s drug culture’ and ‘let’s open our minds’ ‘let’s all love one another’.

K: It’s very dated. Very very dated. Though Silverberg admits in the preface that he discovered other languages already had constructs that avoided using the concept of ‘I’, it’s clear this was written very much from a position of western male privilege.

J: Oh, don’t even get me started on the gender stuff! I disliked the main character pretty quickly, right about the time he was all ‘I have a big penis’ and the backhanded insult he gave to himself about ‘women all over the place will attest I have no stamina’. I was ready to be sympathetic to him again when he was recounting his childhood, but that didn’t last long. And then it had utter fail right near the end with his bondsister. Spare me. She’s all pure and innocent and beautiful and youthful just because she never married or had a kid.

K: Well, of course. Because women aren’t actually people with interests and passions and thoughts of their own. They’re sperm receptacles. That was made completely clear when our main character Kinnal takes his telepathy drug with a woman — and instead of learning about her hopes and dreams and character, the only thing he learns about is her anatomy. Because apparently that’s all women can think about. Which means it makes complete sense that Silverberg rounds out our character by giving him the massive massive character flaw of premature ejaculation.

J: Like he wasn’t flawed enough by being a big old arrogant jerk! Which I have trouble thinking was entirely intentional. We never learned enough for me to be convinced there was anything particularly wrong with their society that ‘I’ was going to fix. Although the whole bondsister/bondbrother and drainer thing seems like a copout. If you’re going to keep yourself to yourself and not even have a self, well.. you need to do it all the way.

K: The whole society made very little sense to me, but I suspect most of the confusion resulted from Kinnal’s maunderings about how you can’t truly love anyone unless you love yourself. Which is incredibly trite and Oprah-ish to be the central point of any novel, let alone something which managed to win the Nebula Award. Especially when it’s not particularly well-explained how this so-called Covenant prevents people from loving themselves. Just because they don’t go around telling people their innermost thoughts? There were several parts where the philosophy was explained which I had to read over more than once and I still couldn’t follow some of the logic. Apparently, having a firm grasp of your inner self can lead you to make other people do things for you instead of standing on your own two feet? I swear that’s what it said at one point.

J: Some things I felt he hadn’t thought through very well. If you’re bonded to a bondsister and a bondbrother at or near birth, then it’s unlikely everyone’s going to be linked that way in a vast chain encompassing everyone. More likely you’ll get a closed loop of people about the same age, with maybe a few people lacking one or the other especially in geographically remote areas. And for all the main character says his relationships with his bondsister and brother are mutual, it just always feels one way.

K: Exactly. The bond-sibling thing was definitely not really thought through as well as it could have been — he mentions that high ranking children were often bonded to other high ranking children to try and create alliances. Okay, fine. But then to foster this ‘bond’, they all have to grow up together, so if they’re from far-flung locations, two of the bond-siblings have to come live with/near the other one. Okay, fine. Except -their- other bond-sibling presumably also needs to grow up near them, and that person’s other bond-sibling would need to grow up near them — even if eventually this turns into a closed chain, as you said, it really doesn’t make sense that suddenly the parent of child Y is responsible for some number n children where n>5 just due to all these bond-relationships.

J: Yea! And what happens if your bondsister and bondbrother both die, especially as children? Oh well, too bad for you.

K: Right. It really just didn’t make sense. Especially since Silverberg seems to go back and forth about how close the bond-siblings really are. Is there constraint between them or not? At times it’s suggested that these function as intimate friends and there is no such thing as self-baring between bond-siblings. But that’s clearly not true; the only set we see are incredibly formal with one another and for all they’re supposedly so close they keep secrets and completely flip out as a result of the ‘selfbaring’.

J: And it doesn’t seem to me he knows his bondsister any more than he knows his wife or that particular woman he was keeping on the side. But while I’m talking about her again, let me just say I’m sick of random suicides! Meant to like.. teach the main character something? Or something? Though it doesn’t seem to have worked in this case. He’s still ready to share some dope with whoever he can coerce into it.

K: Yes, he pretty much writes it off as a character weakness in her. He feels bad about it, but he seems pretty able to rationalize it in his head with ‘if only he’d known she was so fragile, he could have saved her’. Except, uh, you should have known that dude. You’ve known her for years and you were just inside her head.

J: Seriously. Maybe ‘I’ is exactly right. It was always only about him, and the drug isn’t so much about sharing with other people, it’s about making sure he shoves his worldview down everyone’s throat. Like, you think I’m only a younger son of a septarch, but I’ll make myself the most important person on the planet.

K: He definitely has that attitude. And not in a humble, messiah sort of way, even though it seems like he’s being cast in that role. Or rather, he’s making quite an effort to put himself in that role. But I’m sorry, dude, you can’t make yourself a martyr just because you think you’d be an awesome one.

J: *laugh* Yea. Exactly.

K: Getting back to things that didn’t seem particularly well thought out. I started to wonder very early on if this concept would work in a language which has a wider variety of personal pronouns. English has a very limited set, which is why people are constantly trying to invent new ones. But a language like Japanese, where I can think of 7 words for ‘I’ off the top of my head, all with their own nuances — how the heck would you even really translate this?

J: ‘One’ is a particularly interesting pronoun. I was reading a nonfiction book right after this and the author used ‘one’ and then in the same sentence used ‘my’ meaning.. yea, he was really the ‘one’ he was talking about. I wonder what languages it was translated into. I don’t know an easy way to check that. Wikipedia and ISFDB didn’t tell me, except that it seems to have been published in French. Mais le francais a ‘on’, alors c’est facil. In fact I think the French use ‘on’ more often than we use ‘one’, so maybe it didn’t even seem so weird.

K: It would probably have been more striking if Silverberg had omitted the whole ‘one’ business and gone with what showed up very briefly during Kinnal’s abortive visit to Glin — which is to speak without even mentioning yourself at all. Not even the copout ‘one’.

J: Yea, ‘one’ is definitely a copout. There are ways to use it where it isn’t a direct substitute for ‘I’, but mostly he didn’t do that.

K: Not at all. So in the end it didn’t really matter that they weren’t using one particular word, they were still referring to themselves directly.

J: It was actually jarring to me when they had no problem with ‘you’. It seemed to say.. hey, there’s a self, right there in front of me.

K: Yes! I noticed that too. More evidence of poor followthrough in the concept, or was it meant to be some kind of commentary on how an individual could acknowledge the existence of other people, just not themselves?

J: I don’t have faith it was meant like that. I feel like he thought ‘Let’s not use I’ and then stuck to that as he built up this society around it, without really thinking through the ‘we’ and ‘you’ at all.

K: I’m inclined to agree.

J: In the end, I think it’s a pretty forgettable book. And the title doesn’t help either. Unless I start thinking of it as the Menopause Book, I’m not going to remember it.

K: Ha ha ha. Yes, the title is pretty poor. There really didn’t seem to be much changing going on. No matter how many times we were told that Kinnal was shocked by the use of ‘I’ or was being a daring rebel, I never felt convinced he was any different than he always was. And in any case, I can feel the plot of this one already slipping into the plot of Left Hand, so little does it stand out in my mind on its own merits.

J’s Take on A Strange Stirring

A Strange Stirring by Stephanie Coontz looks at The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan and the effect it had.

It seemed like a good idea to actually read The Feminine Mystique first, so I did that. K and I also discussed it.

And, actually, a lot of what Coontz says are things I noticed about the book. It’s repetitive, check. It’s got a very limited audience, check. It’s very dated when it comes to autism and male homosexuality, check. Though it didn’t surprise me when she also said that Friedan was aware it was leaving out working class and non-white women. Friedan does make a small mention here and there that shows she’s aware of them.

It did surprise me some to hear that Friedan had actually been an activist in civil rights before writing this book. Coontz goes into some detail about how she hid some things, exaggerated other things, and downplayed still other things, and says part of the reason might’ve been McCarthyism. If you were too much on the left (or once walked into a coffee shop where someone on the left used to work), then you could be labelled a Communist and blacklisted, or arrested, or well, all those other fun things. Sidenote: while reshelving books in our library storage, I ran across a government publication from 1951 that listed all the organizations it suspected of being communist. Quite a list! I was kind of surprised the ALA wasn’t on there.

Coontz also confirmed for me that Friedan had no love for lesbians. Her main theme was that women becoming fuller people would help men and women love each other better and parent together better.

I did like hearing how different women, and some men, reacted to The Feminine Mystique. For some, it changed their lives. For some, it let them understand their mothers better. For others, it had very little effect at all. Which is all pretty much as I’d expect, but was still interesting.

Coontz also discussed the equal opportunity employment act and some of the reactions to the idea of women being allowed to apply for any job they wanted. Some of the quotes were quite amusing. Here’s one: “[…] the personnel officer of a major airline raised the horrifying prospect of what might happen ‘when a gal walks into our office, demands a job as an airline pilot and has the credentials to qualify.'”

Probably the most interesting chapter to me was the last one. It’s also the most depressing. I know women still aren’t equal in a number of ways, but she laid out quite a lot of ways I hadn’t even thought of. She explains different mystiques in play now. The “Hottie Mystique” where young girls want to dress and look hot. And the “Supermom Mystique”, which I think we’ve started to move past. At the very least, people are very aware of it and I feel like my generation is more laid-back in general. And the “Career Mystique” which affects men and women both. That career is more important than family. That you have to put in more than 40 hour workweeks or you’re not committed. And all sorts of other crap! Seriously. I need to move to Europe.

I kind of wish the last chapter was the start of another book entirely.

I’m not sad I read it, but I’m more than ready to go read something more fun. And very glad I read Beauty Queens by Libba Bray in between The Feminine Mystique and this. It was a great break, but still in theme. And you should totally read Beauty Queens. Srsly. Go read.

Nebula Project: Ringworld

What follows is a spoiler laden discussion of the book Ringworld. Beware if youâ€™re worried about such things.

On his 200th birthday, Louis Wu is recruited by an alien to join an expedition to an unknown destination. The reward is the plans for a spaceship drive beyond anything the human race has yet invented. He and the other recruits soon discover their destination is Ringworld, a sort of modified Dyson sphere which consists of a single ring spinning around a sun. Louis, his girltoy, and two aliens soon crash into Ringworld and must try to discover just what it is, who made it, and how they can escape.

K: Up for discussion is Ringworld by Larry Niven, winner of the 1970 Nebula award. This book was also apparently popular enough to spawn a franchise, but I think before we even get into discussing the plot or the details, we have to start by looking at the massive massive genderfail/misogyny that pervades this entire novel.

K: I was so astounded by it that I really am not sure where to begin.

J: This is another one of the books I’d actually read before. This one I believe I read in junior high, maybe early high school, when I was just blowing through things in the SF section of the local library. My memory of it was really limited to ‘hard science fiction, some aliens, a ringworld, boring’. So it surprised me when it was actually readable. But I also hadn’t remembered there being women in it! Or.. women-like objects, more accurately.

K: Yes, that’s really a perfect description. They certainly weren’t fully realized characters with agency or any sort of purpose. In fact, the “main” female character in the book, Teela Brown — it seems in the end her entire reason for being in the book was her complete -lack- of agency. Things just happened to her (and thus to our far more important male or apparently-male characters) without her knowledge, consent or even interest. Now, given that she was a completely rubbish female character to begin with, apparently on the trip because our protagonist couldn’t go without sex for a couple months without being tempted to rape one of his alien male companions (Oh yes, very funny joke, Larry Niven. Ha ha.). She has no training, no brains, no abilities beyond spreading her legs.

[At least I never slept with Prince Adam.]

J: But occasionally surprises the main character with how smart she is! At infrequent times. And just when she disappears, (and he thinks she’s dead), another woman comes in to have sex with him. Because we wouldn’t want him to go without.

K: The magic hooker with the unpronouncable name! Does she have a heart of gold? I’m not sure we actually saw enough of her to decide, but I’m leaning toward yes. At least the hooker was apparently a few hundred years old, a far more appropriate age for our 200 year old “hero” than a 20 year old ingenue whose great-grandmother he slept with. There’s no other way to describe that situation except gross.

J: And if their whole characterization wasn’t enough, he also goes and sells whatshername the first girl to the Ringworld guy! Rather than, you know, convince him that he doesn’t own her. Just.. oh, it’s easier if I sell you to him. ‘Okay!’

K: I was completely baffled by that. Now, we do have some evidence (see: magic hooker) that the Ringworld society wasn’t exactly egalitarian prior to the collapse of civilization. But it’s extremely telling that Niven’s take on the collapse of even an unequal civilization is that their first step is to make women literal property. Why? Seriously, why? He doesn’t even attempt to dress it up with the idea of a dowry or a bride-price, or explain why, and no one questions it. It’s just: ‘oh, women are slaves? Ok, well, here, let me sell you to him’.

J: Oh, he makes a lot of leaps without any good explanation to back them up. (‘He’ being kind of both Niven and the main character here.) Oh, no metal to mine, so clearly civilization cannot re-emerge. There’s bacteria in your gut! It could mutate! (And there was no other bacteria anywhere? Not.) You’re lucky, therefore you have no free will. Nessus might be male and take a female mate, or he might be female and take a male mate, or he might be male and take a male mate. But never once does it cross his mind that they might both be female.

K: Yes, let’s talk about the aliens for a bit. We have three species represented here, if we don’t count the Ringworlders as a fourth. And apparently Niven gets props from many for coming up with detailed and very different alien societies. I can see that to a certain extent, but once again his big issue is gender relations. Nessus (the puppeteer) implies that reproduction for his species requires three. Okay, fine. Except that one of the three involved is ‘property’ and nonsentient. Er, okay, fine. I don’t like that, but if you want to have a species where that is the case I can see how it might be interesting to explore. Not that it is explored or anyone comments upon it. Because ha ha, silly us, our other alien species, the catlike Kzin, -also- have a second sex which is nonsentient. And in both cases, as far as the reader is concerned, we are told that the aliens we see are analagous to males, implying (or in the case of the Kzin, flat out stating) that the nonsentient sex is the female one.

K: Once is interesting, twice is a trend. And given the fact that Niven made no effort to then contrast the human race with these aliens by making the human females dynamic, intelligent and interesting, it just smacks of a lack of interest in portraying females at all. The only reason the human females weren’t completely nonsentient is because obviously everyone knows that’s not the case. (Though apparently they aren’t quite up to male standards either.)

J: It’s bizarre too. Because Nessus says their only options to not breed are surgery or abstinence. I mean.. couldn’t you have sex with one person and not the both required? Not that we have any clue how any of it is accomplished. Because while he doesn’t shy away from nice human hetero sex scenes, he’s extremely vague about the aliens. And you’re right that we’re supposed to surmise that the nonsentient puppeteer is female, because Louis doesn’t ever imagine otherwise. Like if he had thought Nessus and the Hindmost both female, he would’ve had to imagine the nonsentient one as male and he couldn’t do that. And if both of those races are used to females being nonsentient, they should’ve been treating whatshername (I keep wanting to call her Trillian, for reasons I can get into later.) like crap. And Louis should’ve been all ‘What’re you doing, guys? She’s as sentient as me.’

J: Not that I want Nessus or the Hindmost to actually be female! Because /then/ we get the characterization of kzinti as male and warlike and fierce and strong. And the puppeteers as female and cowards and manipulators.

K: I didn’t entirely get the problem with the puppeteers and breeding. Nessus also says that abstinence causes its own problems and remarks that no race can go without sex for very long without it causing issues. And after he said that, I waited for Louis to contradict him, since humans have long practiced a lifetime of celibacy with no issues at all. Except he didn’t. Instead, Louis decides he may as well agree to bring along a completely unqualified 20 year old, since she’s eager to bed him and then he won’t have to be deprived. He even reflects on how stupid he was in the past for going on his solo ‘sabbaticals’ without taking along a woman in stasis he can wake up whenever he gets the urge.

J: Gah, yea. I’d forgotten he’d thought that. Like the human race wouldn’t have developed a very nice realistic sex doll he could’ve brought instead. The doll could’ve seemed just as sentient as he wanted. Which I’m guessing is not very. Was there also something in here about men only being able to reproduce until they’re in their 40s or 50s? Showing a clear lack of understanding of human reproduction!

K: There was indeed, though I think it was 50s or 60s. In any case, I can’t explain it, since even in 1970 I can hardly believe anyone thought that was true, since there were countless examples of it being untrue.

J: If the boosterspice made you sterile after you used it once or a few times, then sure, but.. that’s not stated.

K: Because that might confuse people into thinking our virile hero is impotent somehow! When of course he’s not. Every woman ever wants to sleep with Louis Wu. Though it’s never exactly explained why.

J: Why was he randomly called by his full name here and there? I can’t take his full name seriously in any case. After the titles of the first two chapters, I couldn’t take anything seriously! Which is when my mind started going down the Hitchhiker’s path. For those playing along at home, the first two chapters are: Chapter 1 – Louis Wu | Chapter 2 – And His Motley Crew

K: Ha! I did not actually notice that at all. Anyhow, I started equating Teela to Trillian fairly early on, but then gave it up. As underused and underdeveloped as Trillian is, she’s an astrophysicist, beautiful -and- smart. At least in the books. Teela is just a scream machine, someone for Louis to shake his head at, who conveniently disappears for the last third of the book so they can solve the problem of how to get out of the Ringworld.

J: Oh, Teela gets to be part Trillian and part Heart of Gold.. speaking of women with a heart of gold. :> And then we had a two-headed alien. So I really started to wonder how much Douglas Adams was using Ringworld to riff off of.

K: That is actually a good question. One which I’m not qualified to answer, but I can’t imagine it wasn’t something he had read and was aware of when writing Hitchhiker’s.

J: Didn’t Arthur Dent also meet Trillian at a party? But anyway.. the other reason I couldn’t take Louis Wu seriously as a name is that he was trying too hard to be Chinese without being Chinese. It was.. well, weird, but also racist. We first meet him he’s altered his true appearance and wearing clothes to make him nothing but a caricature of what a Chinese man is supposed to look like. Dressed up for his party? Or does he always present himself that way except when he’s off exploring ringworlds?

K: From the very brief introduction we have to current Earth society before we leave the planet, it sounds to me like extensive costuming and colorizing is typical of the present society. Teela, for instance, looks not at all like her presented appearance at the party. I do wonder why this seems to be a relatively common future trope (we last encountered it to this extent in Babel-17) — but maybe I’m just out of touch, since I do not like jewelry, perfumes make me ill, and I have way better ways to spend my money and time than worrying about cosmetics. I guess if modification was easy and cheap I might well use it to remove some weight.

J: The book that comes to mind is Westerfeld’s Uglies series. I think when a society is decadent and bored, they supposedly start playing with cosmetics, clothing, accessories, etc. If it was cheap and relatively safe and painless, I might do a few things. But why look like a boring old stereotype of a Chinese man? At least try to look like someone in particular, or be, y’know, different. Horns, wings, fur. Or if you felt that ideally reflected the you inside, then.. why remove it all to make a space trip?

K: I wasn’t entirely sure about that either, except that they weren’t going to be able to bring their cosmetics with them on the trip, and I’m sure real astronauts aren’t allowed to wear such things(?), so perhaps it’s something he included without even thinking about it.

J: Hrm. Maybe.

K: Now, the technology was interesting. Aside from the various poorly explained youth serums (the boosterspice, and then the Ringworld equivalent which somehow gave you ’50 years of youth’ per dose.) We have the transporter booths, the puppeteer equivalent, moving sidewalks — and then Louis mentions using a typewriter. What?

J: Did he? I don’t remember that. What kind of threw me was ‘intercom’ also including video. Since to me ‘intercom’ is very specific. Unlike ‘comm’, which I take more generally, to cover a wide range of possibilities.

K: Video intercom isn’t unheard of, so that didn’t really pop out at me. And I had to laugh at the moving sidewalks (slidewalks!) because really, that idea is so impractical. They can’t even keep the elevators working in subway stations. They can’t even properly plow the sidewalks we have. Can you imagine municipalities trying to keep miles of conveyor belts working? Outside? And yet… it’s such a popular idea. Like flying cars.

J: Bunch of lazy people. :) That reminds me though.. that he thinks teleporters will homogenize the planet. Moreso than television or other communications technologies. Like there wouldn’t be a backlash against, say, the Louvre being turned into a Walmart.

K: Yeah, it’s pretty clear now that increased communication and consumerism is what’s going to homogenize the planet. Transportation may come later but it’s not going to be at all essential.

J: If anything, it may have the opposite effect. If I can teleport anywhere I want, am I going to go to Dunkin Donuts? No. I’ll go to whoever I think is the best donut place on the planet. The number of Dunkin Donuts then won’t be based on ‘well, the closest one is a mile from here’, but on how many are needed to keep up with demand.

K: That’s an interesting point. I hadn’t thought of that, but it’s very true. We put up with a lot of mediocre stuff because of convenience, but this would really change the nature of convenience in a fundamental way.

J: There is just so much in here I wish Niven had been concerned with exploring instead of the stupid Ringworld. What’s Earth like? What are the colonies like? What are the alien societies like? Not that I want to read the other books to find out. I think they’d just tick me off.

K: And there’s no real guarantee that they focus on the information you want. I think here again, he got interested in the idea of a Dyson sphere and wanted to figure out how to improve it. I can’t fault him for the thought experiment. It’s just the execution which is so unfortunate, because it completely takes away from the fact that the idea of a ‘ringworld’ is actually interesting. But he didn’t really explore that either, because as soon as we get there our characters are mostly trying to escape!

J: And I’m still confused why the place is full of humans. The explanation is supposed to be that the people who made the ringworld also wandered by Earth and half-heartedly terraformed it, brought some chimps and Neanderthals with them and.. what? We evolved from those Neanderthals or we descended from the ringworld engineers? And where do the dinosaurs come into it?

K: I suspect the history may be better fleshed out in future books, but yes, the impression I got was that Niven was saying we were somehow evolved from the pets of the Ringworld humans. So we were distantly related to them, but not -them-. I don’t know where the dinosaurs come in.

J: And none of these other alien races had run into humans on any other planet other than the ones who wandered there from Earth? Only Earth humans managed to make a go of it.

K: Well, I think the Earth thing was somewhat meant to be speculation. Because really it doesn’t make a -whole- lot of sense. Earth is supposedly 200 light years away from Ringworld, and no one ever encountered these Ringworld humans before, so presumably most of their empire was away from ‘Known Space’ which is the area local to Earth, roughly 70 light years across according to the book. So the odds that Earth, so very distant, was really part of it? Dunno. It seemed like an awfully silly coincidence, but as it was never properly followed through with in this book I can’t say either way.

J: Also the arrogance. Oh, these people can’t fly the cities anymore. They think we’re gods. So they’re uncivilized and backwards and barbarians and such a shame their civilization fell.

K: Shoddy reasoning was all over the place. There are lots of leaps of logic that are only barely supported by the available facts (ex: the whole Earth terraforming business). Like, they all happily conclude that people invented the floating cities before the development of the life extending serum, because people who don’t live long lives are more likely to be reckless with the life that they have. Um, what?

J: Yea, bizarre. And how is living in a floating city any less safe than flying around on cycles or in spaceships? When it comes to the luck thing, I could buy that a very lucky person would be reckless and careless. I couldn’t buy that she couldn’t empathize with people. That ‘I’m blind’, ‘But can you /see/?’ thing was just weird. And why would her luck have to drag her all the way to the ringworld to teach her how to uh.. be in pain? She couldn’t burn her feet on Earth? And I refuse, I refuse to believe this guy who now /owns/ her is the best possible person in the world for her and isn’t she so ‘lucky’ to have been united with him.

K: Niven (through Louis) flat out questions her humanity at several points in the book. I found it fairly hard to believe she was -that- distanced from the normal human experience. And yes, I strongly object to the manner in which she was disposed of by finding that random dude and then… randomly sleeping with him. And even more randomly being sold to him. The whole subplot of Teela’s luck was just weird and confusing.

J: And he’s really old. So she hasn’t even traded in for a man closer to her own age. :P

K: After reading this, I have to wonder why this universe became such a favorite that it spawned so many sequels, prequels and spinoffs. There is so little to recommend it. The basic idea– I’m just not sure how you can rescue it from all of the fail.

J: I don’t know.. the only redeeming quality I can see is that the two aliens were interesting. Although not entirely well-rounded.

K: They aliens were interesting, sort of. The puppeteer moreso than the Kzin. I have a prejudice against cat aliens.

J: I didn’t really read him as a cat. Even though he did say kittens at one point, I think. I guess I pictured more that big Looney Tunes monster. Whose name Google now informs me is Gossamer.

K: I can’t say whether or not I would have immediately read him as a cat, though I’m sure that his felinity was mentioned. But really I spent the better part of the 90s seeing those Man-Kzin War books being promoted at the bookstore when I went in to buy something else, so I have the cover images burned into my brain.

J: Ah. Well, I don’t have trouble with cat aliens per se. They do seem to be all over the place though.

J: Maybe you can explain something to me. It’s probably physics. So at the end, they pull the ship up the mountain and it’ll go down the hole in the middle and out into space, yea? It that because centripetal force is going to erm.. propel them that way? And then what’re they doing? Hanging out in space? I just.. why couldn’t they just take off again? Why did they have to go ‘down’ and through the hull?
s/It/Is

K: The problem was, to put this in the terms of technobabble from other series, all their impulse engines were burned up by the sun, but their hyperdrive was contained within the hull rather than fastened outside of it. So the only way they could move was by turning on the hyperdrive, which would have caused massive destruction if they tried to do it inside the ring instead of out of it. Now, I don’t recall an explanation for how the hyperdrive worked, but presumably it works on the same basic principle as most FTL drives and warps local space allowing the ship to escape Einsteinian space and enter a dimension where the speed limit isn’t the speed of light. Doing this on top of a planet or planet-like structure is probably a very bad idea.

J: I was just trying to picture a bunch of different alternative escape plans. But I couldn’t think of one that’d work. So I guess I get it now. And they must’ve landed near the one spot they could escape through because Teela was lucky and it was in her best interests to get Louis as far away from her as possible.

K: Hahaha. Yeah, that must be it.