Crit

First Graf: Ringworld

SINCE 1970, LARRY NIVEN HAS written four books and a number of articles concerning the Ringworld: an Earth’s orbit-diameter ribbon made from disassembled planets and populated by its builders with all manner of adaptive species, each with its own culture and agenda.

Who built it? Why? And what caused its civilization — one vastly superior to 29th century Known Space — to fall so abruptly? These questions are at the core of the eponymous first novel, where two humans — 200-year-old Louis Wu and his 20ish inamorata, Teela Brown — join the aliens Speaker-to-Animals (a Kzin, something like an ironic feline wookiee) and Nessus the Puppeteer (a three-legged, two-headed galactic captain of commerce) in an exploratory mission to the mysterious structure.

Neal’s bias: Classics, especially for those with a heavy worldbuilding fetish, although Ringworld and The Ringworld Engineers also stand alone fairly well. I enjoyed the first two novels immensely;The Ringworld Throne I thought better the second time (but was close to the Eight Deadly Words on first read) and Ringworld’s Children largely for how The Master integrates (the technical term is “retcons“) the latest cosmological theories on dark matter and the like. Four rockets. Check ’em out.

In the nighttime heart of Beirut, in one of a row of general-address transfer booths, Louis Wu flicked into reality.

His foot-length queue was as white and shiny as artificial snow. His skin and depilated scalp were chrome yellow; the irises of his eyes were gold; his robe was royal blue with a golden stereoptic dragon superimposed. In the instant he appeared, he was smiling widely, showing pearly, perfect, perfectly standard teeth. Smiling and waving. But the smile was already fading, and in a moment it was gone, and the sag of his face was like a rubber mask melting. Louis Wu showed his age. …

?, Writ

The Shape Of Time

WHEN I WAS YOUNGER THAN I am now, I used to think Time was arranged in neat little blocks as on the calendar. The “bottom of the month” felt like the bottom of the month, and I delighted in each month’s miraculous invert midnight flip; individual weeks swayed as a rope bridge over sequential chasms whose walls were the weekends.

A ghost of that image still brushes my mind whenever I think about calendars, specifically my “place” “on” them. But Time no longer seems to come in boxes; instead it flows away from everything I see:

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Life

Pithyism #Billions & Billions

RETRIEVING THE MORNING NEWSPAPER AFFORDS a fine slice of the constellations marching overhead, thereby demonstrating that sometimes you can do two things at once.

Writ

Prosatio Silban’s Table Tips: Place (A Literary Amuse-Bouche)

SOMEONE ONCE ASKED PROSATIO SILBAN his thoughts on “presentation;” i.e., how a dish should look when it leaves his kitchen. The Cook For Any Price thought for a moment before replying.

“I suppose it depends on your notion of what the food’s for,” he said. “In ancient and epicurean Pormaris, more than elsewhere in the Uulian Commonwell, cooking is an art like music, painting or courtesanry. There, the current fashion is to pile the food as vertically as the ingredients and imagination will allow. Perhaps they think it accents the dinner setting.

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Torah

Weekend Holydays

Apples and honey
yesterday. Tonight, candles.
This Jew’s dance card’s full.

Life

He’s Not With Us

THERE ARE MANY REASONS TO be annoyed, flabbergasted, enraged, amused, resigned or cynically justified by the actions of the idiot in Gainesville who wants to burn the Quran. Here is mine:

(First, though: I use the term “idiot” strictly as a measure of accuracy, not of my own admitted scorn and disbelief. Funk & Wagnall tell me “idiot” is derived from the Greek word “idios,” which means “one’s own.” Use in a technical philosophical sentence, a la Philip K. Dick: “Two worlds there are: the idios kosmos, or private world; and the koinos kosmos, or shared world.”)

One who believes that his actions affect no one else is living in his own little world. One who further believes that he is exempt from those actions’ consequences is living even littler. Most people grow out of that world around the time they quit wearing diapers. I don’t know what his excuse his — nor do I care, except as cautionary tale — but I am grateful that he provides a polar opposite to something most of the rest of us aspire to be. For providing a spectacular “bad example” — one that’s truly exemplary for its inbred viciousness, fear, and willful stupidity — I thank you.

Now please. Go away.