Bigger than worlds
I re-read The Ringworld Throne at the weekend. I seem to have lost my copy of the original Ringworld, and I don't own the first sequel The Ringworld Engineers. Throne is the 2nd sequel, with Ringworld's Children to be published later this year.
I've always loved this series, not because of the characters, nor even the plot, very much, but because the concept of the Ringworld is just so beautiful. It's a compromise on the Dyson Sphere, which is a construct that completely encloses a system's sun and maximises the extraction of energy from said sun. But as well as giving a mind-bogglingly massive land area on which to live, it renders the stars completely invisible and presents a real problem for creatures who require some period of night.
Niven's Ringworld concept rests on the premise that if you take all of the material within a system and mould it into a giant ring, not only do you get a thicker, more protected, underside, but you still get a mind-bogglingly huge area in which to live, whilst still being able to see the stars during the night created by the "shadow squares."
The original Ringworld was a high concept in search of a plot, because the events that take place in the novel seem hardly to do the size of the thing justice. It's almost as if the Ringworld is so huge that he couldn't picture any meaningful story that could take place there. In the same way, book jacket illustrators have never been able to render the concept in a convincing way. They either show you way too much detail for the scale of the thing, or show a concept of it from a huge distance away. Plenty have tried. You can spend a fun few minutes on the innernet looking at some of the concepts.
One clue to illustrators would be this: if you're far enough away to see that it is a ring, you're too far away to see any details.
But the great thing about Niven, it seems to me, is that he has always been willing to respond to criticism, and fans with too much time on their hands. The first sequel, Engineers, seemed to be about responding to criticism along the lines of, "How does the Ringworld maintain a stable orbit? Likewise the shadow squares?" So he invented an entire plot based around a need to repair the systems that kept the Ringworld stable, and looking further into who built the Ringworld and why. So the 2nd and forthcoming 3rd sequels follow on from that. In response to correspondence he not only improves on an original concept, but gets a whole franchise going - ker-ching.
Niven's ideas have always been too big to film. Imagining what his aliens look like, for a start, is going to be very subjective, and rendering them on screen without causing hilarity surely impossible. But hark at me, I thought that all the hobbity bits in Lord of the Rings were just silly, but that didn't stop people raving about it.
A film of Ringworld would have the same problem as the novel. It would take too long to introduce the Ringworld, because of trying to build it up for maximum impact, and it wouldn't have anything to do with it once you got to it, because everything happens in the sequels. No, like many things, it cries out to be a long-running television series. Episode 1, the recruitment of Louis Wu and companions; Episode 2 the visit to the Puppeteer's home world(s), with the climax being the first sight of the Ringworld. A double episode to launch the series, we're 90 minutes in, and we see the Ringworld. Episodes 3 - 148 the subsequent unfolding of the plot, with flashbacks to explain Protectors and other bits and pieces.
The various peoples that inhabit the ring are introduced slowly, ranging from human-like city people to giants who eat grass, hunters who eat nothing but red meat, amphibians who eat fish, tiny-brained vampires who... well, you know, and Ghouls, who eat the dead of all species. And inter-species sex is the basis for most diplomacy. The introduction of each type would eat up a 45-minute episode.
(Better than Ringworld, because they have a better story and characters, are the two books, The Integral Trees, and The Smoke Ring. Here, people don't live on a ring or a sphere, they just float around in an orbiting gas cloud on giant trees. Totally impossible to film, as well, but a great radio series.)
I've always loved this series, not because of the characters, nor even the plot, very much, but because the concept of the Ringworld is just so beautiful. It's a compromise on the Dyson Sphere, which is a construct that completely encloses a system's sun and maximises the extraction of energy from said sun. But as well as giving a mind-bogglingly massive land area on which to live, it renders the stars completely invisible and presents a real problem for creatures who require some period of night.
Niven's Ringworld concept rests on the premise that if you take all of the material within a system and mould it into a giant ring, not only do you get a thicker, more protected, underside, but you still get a mind-bogglingly huge area in which to live, whilst still being able to see the stars during the night created by the "shadow squares."
The original Ringworld was a high concept in search of a plot, because the events that take place in the novel seem hardly to do the size of the thing justice. It's almost as if the Ringworld is so huge that he couldn't picture any meaningful story that could take place there. In the same way, book jacket illustrators have never been able to render the concept in a convincing way. They either show you way too much detail for the scale of the thing, or show a concept of it from a huge distance away. Plenty have tried. You can spend a fun few minutes on the innernet looking at some of the concepts.
One clue to illustrators would be this: if you're far enough away to see that it is a ring, you're too far away to see any details.
But the great thing about Niven, it seems to me, is that he has always been willing to respond to criticism, and fans with too much time on their hands. The first sequel, Engineers, seemed to be about responding to criticism along the lines of, "How does the Ringworld maintain a stable orbit? Likewise the shadow squares?" So he invented an entire plot based around a need to repair the systems that kept the Ringworld stable, and looking further into who built the Ringworld and why. So the 2nd and forthcoming 3rd sequels follow on from that. In response to correspondence he not only improves on an original concept, but gets a whole franchise going - ker-ching.
Niven's ideas have always been too big to film. Imagining what his aliens look like, for a start, is going to be very subjective, and rendering them on screen without causing hilarity surely impossible. But hark at me, I thought that all the hobbity bits in Lord of the Rings were just silly, but that didn't stop people raving about it.
A film of Ringworld would have the same problem as the novel. It would take too long to introduce the Ringworld, because of trying to build it up for maximum impact, and it wouldn't have anything to do with it once you got to it, because everything happens in the sequels. No, like many things, it cries out to be a long-running television series. Episode 1, the recruitment of Louis Wu and companions; Episode 2 the visit to the Puppeteer's home world(s), with the climax being the first sight of the Ringworld. A double episode to launch the series, we're 90 minutes in, and we see the Ringworld. Episodes 3 - 148 the subsequent unfolding of the plot, with flashbacks to explain Protectors and other bits and pieces.
The various peoples that inhabit the ring are introduced slowly, ranging from human-like city people to giants who eat grass, hunters who eat nothing but red meat, amphibians who eat fish, tiny-brained vampires who... well, you know, and Ghouls, who eat the dead of all species. And inter-species sex is the basis for most diplomacy. The introduction of each type would eat up a 45-minute episode.
(Better than Ringworld, because they have a better story and characters, are the two books, The Integral Trees, and The Smoke Ring. Here, people don't live on a ring or a sphere, they just float around in an orbiting gas cloud on giant trees. Totally impossible to film, as well, but a great radio series.)
posted by Anonymous at
Monday, March 15, 2004
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