nicanical

Larry Niven's Ringworld is about a massive artificial bracelet encircling a distant sun, and the motley crew sent to explore it. This solid premise is wasted by weak character growth, and the relegation of the titular Ringworld to mere MacGuffin.

The story starts slow, with the first third spent assembling the crew. Niven didn't need to spend a third of the story assembling the crew. Then, when the crew finally reach Ringworld, they just pass the time discussing Puppeteer machinations while jetting around on flycycles. The plot moves along on its own, as if by providence which . . . is actually close to the truth because the story features an interesting concept of luck (a concept that strips the characters of their agency though).

The writing is amateurish in parts: there are clumsy constructions (e.g., strange choices for metaphors); the coined expletive "tanj" is ridiculous and overused; and similar character voices with the omission of too many tags makes the dialogue hard to follow. Ringworld also dates itself through some stereotypes expressed.

I read somewhere that Niven wrote Ringworld to resolve loose ends, and tie his short stories together in anticipation of more novels. If true, it explains why the story feels like such an afterthought. This, fortunately, is somewhat mitigated by Niven's wonderful worldbuilding.

David Weber's On Basilisk Station is a nice piece of military sci-fi pulled down by too much exposition.

A lot of exposition isn't immediately a story's death knell for me. I like Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers and it has plenty. Working through Weber's exposition is about as pleasant as spooning mouthfuls of cement dust. Just swathes of gobbledygook.

Maybe Weber put extensive effort into crafting the setting and he included the dense expository passages out of excitement for his worldbuilding. Who knows? But have the courtesy to move that stuff into an appendix man. That's what Dune did. Follow Frank Herbert's example, not Neal Stephenson's.

Otherwise, the rest of story is well-paced and enjoyable. I like Honor, the main character. I like how the Fearless's crew comes together. I like how Honor exploits all the resources of her ship—the marines, the pinnaces, the weather probes (down to reconfiguring them into proximity sensors). The occasional views into the background political intrigue was a nice touch. I could have used more of it if Weber clearly telegraphed perspective shifts.

Carry On, Jeeves is a collection of P.G. Wodehouse's Bertie and Jeeves shorts. It includes the four from My Man, Jeeves, so it can stand-in as a starting point to the series if following publication order. I started with The Code of the Woosters, so my expectations were set by that that book. The shorts lack the room for situations to snowball as they did in Code, but they are still funny and charming.

My favorite stories are the last three:

• Fixing it for Freddie has a sweetness to it in addition to Wodehouse's humor;
• Clustering Round Young Bingo reminds me of Code: Bertie is called upon for his burglary skills and even Aunt Dahlia makes an appearance. There's also backstory on how Anatole comes to cook for her in Code;
• Bertie Changes His Mind is the only Jeeves story narrated from his perspective. There's mischievous fun in seeing Jeeves move behind the scenes.

Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles is a collection of simple yet thought-provoking stories all set in one retrofuturistic timeline where Earth colonizes Mars. The stories are light on the sci-fi; obstacles like travel to Mars and habitation and availability of resources once there are waved away by setting Mars up like Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom, with a breathable atmosphere and potable water.

Instead of wrangling technical hurdles The Martian Chronicles is similar to Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle in its exploration of themes like oppression, the role of technology, and man's tendency to destroy itself.

Bradbury seems to take a dim view:

Life on Earth never settled down to doing anything very good. Science ran too far ahead of us too quickly, and the people got lost in a mechanical wilderness, like children making over pretty things, gadgets, helicopters, rockets; emphasizing the wrong items, emphasizing machines instead of how to run the machines. Wars got bigger and bigger and finally killed Earth.

On Bradbury's writing style: it is clear and clean, with the occasional sense of whimsy with how serious events are written about deadpan and matter of factly. The near extinction of indigenous Martians, astronauts killing each other, Earth's destruction? So it goes.

Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel is a detective story fused with sci-fi. New York City detective Elijah Baley is paired with R. Daneel Olivaw (R. meaning robot) to investigate a murder in Spacetown—a delegation of Spacers just outside New York City, Spacers being the descendants of settlers from Earth's extrasolar colonies.

The murder investigation is sloppy but that's fine because it's really a frame for Baley and R. Daneel to discuss humanity's future: the paths leading to man thriving or declining. Asimov will feature similar reasoning in The End of Eternity, published three years later.

The story drags in the middle where Baley goes on Bible story tangents and also incorrectly fingers R. Daneel as the killer twice. Justification is given for Baley's error but he still emerges looking inept.

The twist reveal at the end is nicely-crafted, a good one, but rushed—Baley literally has a 45 minute window to summarize his case.