Book review: Ringworld Throne
Larry Niven's Ringworld Throne (1997).
Most implausible part: the idea that 1000-year-old City Builder electrical devices would start working again if you just replace their wires. Um, imagine burying a lightbulb for a millennium, then digging it up and plugging it in. Would it work? No! Nobody would engineer a lightbulb with a vacuum seal that's 500 times better than needed for the product's expected lifetime. Despite what we see in Indiana Jones movies, the only mechanism from Ancient Egypt that was still working when a tomb was opened was King Tut's curse-and the agent of that curse was bacterial spores, not anything created by man.
Our hero, Louis Wu, claims to be bothered by the billions of deaths he authorized in order to save the Ringworld (but very few actually died). Yet when he finds out that his sex partner Sawur was killed by a plague brought by a "traveller" (very likely himself), he seems merely miffed that he can't yiff her again. Wu deliberately leaves a open pathway to the Tree of Life, so he can turn Tunesmith into a protector without asking if he wants to become one; yet Wu seems to have no reaction at all when he learns that Chime (a throwaway character) followed that pathway first and died from eating T-o-L.
Best comical line: Tunesmith (who as a protector looks like a stereotypical E.T.) sees Hindmost the Pierson's Puppeteer surrounded by thousands of puppeteer holograms. He says, "I want to talk to your leader".
In this book Niven makes at least 21 attempts to describe the sound of a puppeteer's voice. Here are the Top Ten Descriptors for Puppeteer Vocalizations:10. a warbling, whistling music with overtones in subsonic bass.9. whistled chords of programming music.8. music from hell.
7. sang like a bronze bell.6. snorted like an angry horn section.5. … as if a clarinet had sneezed.4. a pipe organ cried in pain.3. squeaked like a smashed piano.2. screamed like the world's biggest espresso device tearing itself apart.1. the song of an orchestra being gunned down by terrorists
Most implausible part: the idea that 1000-year-old City Builder electrical devices would start working again if you just replace their wires. Um, imagine burying a lightbulb for a millennium, then digging it up and plugging it in. Would it work? No! Nobody would engineer a lightbulb with a vacuum seal that's 500 times better than needed for the product's expected lifetime. Despite what we see in Indiana Jones movies, the only mechanism from Ancient Egypt that was still working when a tomb was opened was King Tut's curse-and the agent of that curse was bacterial spores, not anything created by man.
Our hero, Louis Wu, claims to be bothered by the billions of deaths he authorized in order to save the Ringworld (but very few actually died). Yet when he finds out that his sex partner Sawur was killed by a plague brought by a "traveller" (very likely himself), he seems merely miffed that he can't yiff her again. Wu deliberately leaves a open pathway to the Tree of Life, so he can turn Tunesmith into a protector without asking if he wants to become one; yet Wu seems to have no reaction at all when he learns that Chime (a throwaway character) followed that pathway first and died from eating T-o-L.
Best comical line: Tunesmith (who as a protector looks like a stereotypical E.T.) sees Hindmost the Pierson's Puppeteer surrounded by thousands of puppeteer holograms. He says, "I want to talk to your leader".
In this book Niven makes at least 21 attempts to describe the sound of a puppeteer's voice. Here are the Top Ten Descriptors for Puppeteer Vocalizations:10. a warbling, whistling music with overtones in subsonic bass.9. whistled chords of programming music.8. music from hell.
7. sang like a bronze bell.6. snorted like an angry horn section.5. … as if a clarinet had sneezed.4. a pipe organ cried in pain.3. squeaked like a smashed piano.2. screamed like the world's biggest espresso device tearing itself apart.1. the song of an orchestra being gunned down by terrorists