Ringworld has the Dumbest Apocalypse – Something You Should Read

“But it’s still some mind-bending Sci-Fi”

People talk a lot about ideas that get stuck in their heads that they can’t seem to shake. I don’t mean like “oh, I forgot to turn the oven off” kind of thing, I mean more like bits of media, movies, books, games, songs, etc. that aren’t exactly earworms, but aren’t exactly… benign, either. Things that, for one reason or another, live “rent free” in your head, is I believe the modern way of putting it, though perhaps I have been misunderstanding the meaning of that particular aphorism for a while now.

For me, these things that live rent-free in my head tend to be moments in TV shows that traumatized me as a child, or particular quotes from a movie that I will repeat ad nauseam for no apparent reason. Sometimes they’re short stories that stick out from a collection, for one reason or another. Sometimes they’re entire conversations I have with myself trying to decide whether or not I love or hate an entire season of television. But this week, that thing that has been inescapably gnawing at me for the past… seven? years or so, is the dumbest fucking explanation for planetary extinction and the is the answer to one of the greatest questions in Larry Niven’s 1970 sci-fi classic, Ringworld.

The general plot isn’t particularly novel, with a set of heroes traveling to a strange planet (the titular Ringworld, which is an enormous ring covered in Earth-like ecosystems encircling a star), getting stuck there, and then having to find their way back out again. It’s been a while since I’ve read Ringworld, but I remember being entirely engrossed with its worldbuilding and planets and species when I read it. The complex intricacies of multiple kinds of species beyond humans, with fully-developed histories and even evolutionary explanations (that may or may not be biologically sound), plus totally batshit hard sci-fi scenarios makes Ringworld, to me, center itself in a unique and strange science fiction world. I remember, quite vividly, a scene in the book where the heroes travel to the home planet of one of the species and discover that the entire planet is being moved, along with several other planets and stars nearby, amid an enormous interstellar fleet of ships. For someone whose biggest sci-fi world up until that point had been Lego Star Wars, Ringworld came out of the gate swinging.

If I’m being honest, Ringworld is worldbuilding with some characters thrown in, which is mostly ok because that worldbuilding is so compelling, and is actually the primary reason I think people should read the book. Even in high school, I found the characters irritating, or irrational, or just poorly-written overall, and I remember thinking that the single female character in the novel sure felt like she just existed to be “eye candy” and as an excuse for the author to include the simple mention of sex. That one hasn’t aged so well. Nor, apparently, has Niven himself, author of the text; a cursory search reveals he supported the Vietnam war, Reagan’s bonkers Star Wars program, and, uh, disenfranchising latino populations via frightening them out of going to hospital by utilizing rumors about organ harvesting. Man, what the hell is it with old-school sci-fi writers being a bunch of hateful and imperialist pigs?

If you can stomach the man himself and the inability to pass the Bechdel test across all of its several hundred pages, then Ringworld is worth a shot. Maybe pirate a copy or borrow it from the library or something so you don’t have to give him any money, and then just skip the parts where “characters” have “dialogue,” because if I remember correctly, even the main character has about the same level of internal depth of that clip of Charlton Heston laughing. I didn’t care for any of the characters, to be frank. But the world, hot damn did I love it. I spent the whole book wondering who built the Ringworld, and why, and where they went, and why the people on the ring are humans and not some other space race, and why there are police stations floating around this enormous ring but nothing else seems to work, and then I got my answers and immediately decided I didn’t need to read the rest of the other books and their explanations, because I was better of coming up with my own conclusions than reading Niven’s dumbass canonical answers.

See, Ringworld feels like an exercise in knowing how much worldbuilding to show and how much to tease your audience with questions about. Who built the ring and Why they built it is largely unanswered because it doesn’t need to be answered for the story at hand. That’s great! Let me imagine it for myself or read the next book if I really care. Why and How they disappeared is, on the other hand, answered, but the answer is so disappointing that I’d honestly rather not have known, and just left the book wondering and imagining and coming up with my own answers instead. If you’re gonna come up with this super-cool high sci-fi world, don’t make the extinction of an entire species dependent on fucking unwashed dishes.

This is the thing that’s stuck with me for seven years, the thing that’s been nagging at me from the inside ever since I’ve read that damnable book. And it’s not a joke. I had to do a little research (I read the Wikipedia synopsis) of the book to make sure I was remembering it correctly, and for part of it, I was. I had forgotten this, but apparently, Ringworld civilization collapses because someone introduced a species of mold that breaks down the superconductors the planet uses. So far, so cool. Kind of a neat idea there, it’s got some ecological themes. That could lead to societal collapse, for sure. But they don’t explain where all the people went. And then the main character, Louis, who we are supposed to assume knows what he’s talking about, deduces that, perhaps, because the Ringworld civilization didn’t use plates or silverware, the mold also ate away at their metal tables and got into their food and killed them all. And then nothing more is discussed. End of story. No talk of the breakdown of infrastructure or logistical systems. Just dirty dishes. Civilization fucking collapses because they don’t wash their tables and they don’t use plates. If that is not the most fucking horseshit reason for an apocalypse, then I don’t know what is. Living during a pandemic, I can say that people don’t wash their hands half the time and we still aren’t all crawling off into a hole to die.

Look, my memory could be totally wrong about that, and the book says they did all die because the collapse of their technology lead to a devastating inability to produce or distribute basic resources. Or the sequels expand on it to talk about how, actually, it was political infighting and attempts to remove the mold only made things worse! Or there was a big rock that hit their planet and threw it off orbit for a little bit! Or something, anything that is better than what I remember. But you know what? I don’t care. I don’t care enough to ask why again. If this book were a restaurant, this is the equivalent of walking in, getting a four-course meal, asking what the dessert is, and being told that it’s chocolate mousse. Then they bring out a pile of actual dogshit and force-feed it to me for the next seventy-five pages. I would walk away confused, disgusted, and would not want to visit the restaurant again, simple as that. But at least I’d have the memory of the delicious opening dishes.

This entire post may not sound like I want you to read the book, but the funny thing is, I still kind of do! I do want other people to read it, mainly because I haven’t met a single other person who has, for some reason, and I’d like another person that I can complain to about the fucking banality of Niven’s answers. Or maybe duality is a better operative word there, because some of the answers to other questions in the book are cool! Teela’s backstory about her genetics and such is kind of interesting, and I’m not gonna spoil it here, even though it further emboldens my idea that she is literally just exists to be a plot device. Sci-fi writers, amirite?

Either way, I can’t decide how I feel about the damn thing at this point. Is the book any good? Sure, maybe. I love the worldbuilding. But is everything else about it any good? Fuck, it’s been so long, I really can’t say. But someone else can read it and tell me! Because I don’t know if I can go through that dumb fucking disappointment again. Read it and let me know in the comments! Or don’t! Maybe it’s better for all of us if we don’t.