As part of my goal to read all the Hugo Award winning novels, two nights ago I finished reading Ringworld by Larry Niven. It also won the Locus and Nebula Awards so if I ever go down those rabbit holes I already have one in the bank. Like most of these award-winning SF novels from fifty-plus years ago, Ringworld is “a product of its time.” Now in 2022, it receives well deserved criticism for its portrayal of women, criticism that I agree with but mostly won’t rehash because smarter people than me have already written better than I could about it. Instead I want to focus on only one of the female characters, Teela Brown, and highlight Niven’s interesting high-concept ideas surrounding her, and his idiotic description of another character’s relation with Teela.
This will include spoilers for Teela’s story arc in the novel. It is only one of many plot lines so the book will not be spoiled if you continue reading. But that’s the warning.
Early in the book, Teela is recruited to the party being sent to explore the titular Ringworld because she is lucky. The beings putting together this party, how do they know she is lucky? Earth has implemented universal population control via birth lotteries and Teela is the descendant of five consecutive birth lottery winners. The head of the party, the alien Nessus, believes Teela will bring good luck to the entire exploration party and wants her onboard. Niven does a good job throughout the novel showing the reader that Teela actually is lucky. After their ship first crashes on the Ringworld, she hops out the airlock without any spacesuit or breathing apparatus. Of course the atmosphere is perfect for humans. In a building where another character Louis (more on him in a bit) had to climb ten flights of broken escalators, Teela accidentally engages the escalators by tripping and grabbing the handrail as she feel forward. Her forward moment on the handrail turned on the escalators and up she went. They never were broken and Teela’s random luck figured it out.
This concept of being lucky is debated a lot among the other crew members. Sometimes they feel Teela is stupid and naive because she’s so lucky she’s never been hurt and never developed defense mechanisms. Sometimes they talk about her luck running out or her luck saving them depending on the outcome of any situation. They retroactively apply her luck to fit their narratives which feels like something people would do but also seems pretty dumb. If luck is some intangible force in Niven’s universe, people with a lot of it will not succeed every single instance. Maybe the characters in the story are not the best and brightest. Eventually however Louis finally realizes the danger of bringing along a lucky somebody. What’s lucky for Teela may not be lucky for those around her. And as a mysterious force, nobody will know the end goal of Teela’s luck. If she truly is the luckiest person in the galaxy and has some unknowable unstoppable destiny, bad things will happen to those who inadvertently get in her way.
That’s what I enjoyed about Teela. What I did not enjoy was her supposed boyfriend and crewmate Louis. Due to age-retarding drugs Louis is two hundred years old. Teela is only twenty. Niven wants to make the reader think Louis has actual feelings for Teela instead of seeing her simply as a hot piece of action. Personally I would rather Louis treat Teela simply for sex instead of as an actual relationship. I can deal with a scumbag. I can’t deal with idiots. I teach high school students and we have so little in common I cross the street to avoid them if I see them in public. I’ve literally hopped off subways and waited for the next train because I saw a student get on. And somehow I am supposed to believe a dude has enough in common with a girl literally one tenth his age, a girl he repeatedly called naive due to her inordinate luck, that he actually cares for her? Maybe it’s because I have been expanding my horizons and have started reading real romance books (Call Me by Your Name was lovely) and now expect more realistic relationships. Maybe it’s because Ringworld is a product of it’s time where main characters had relationships simply because they were the main characters. Or maybe Louis is just a complete moron and even after two hundred years of living he still has the mentality of a twenty year old.
Either way, this whole insane relationship drained much of my enjoyment of Ringworld. The big ideas about the Ringworld and how civilizations fall are interesting. Luck as a force than can be harnessed is also great. The megastructure SF elements are awesome. But this nonsense with Teela and Louis really bummed me out. The ladies at Hugo, Girl said it best when they claimed they would have rather read another book like Foundation with basically no women than this portrayal of women.
The Keasy Depot 