A continuing series in which Our Bold Hero whines about something he's just barely capable of understanding. It's really pretentious, and almost certainly elitist. Hence this disclaimer.

Part I: The State of Sci-Fi

So I'm tired again today, an unexpected side effect of finishing Ringworld late last night and getting up early this morning.

The cover calls Niven's book a "legendary award-winning classic," and while I think that the ideas are interesting (especially considering that this book was written in 1970), I'm baffled by the poor writing that surrounds them.

I mean, Ringworld won the Hugo and the Nebula awards, two of the three most prestigious awards a sci-fi book can receive. But the characters are forgettable, awful, and often eerily similar. The main character's use of "tanj" as a futuristic expletive is frustrating.

And by the time I was halfway through the book, I stopped sympathizing with the characters at all: Niven can write ideas, but he seems to suck at writing believable emotions.

Am I wrong to want more from sci-fi than thin writing propping up impressive ideas? I don't think so. Anthony's God's Fires, while tending more towards historical fiction, had brilliant characterization, plot, setting, you name it.

Asimov was undeniably idea-oriented, but he got us to care in short stories like "Breeds There a Man…?." P.K. Dick did the same in Ubik, back before he went pink-laser crazy and died.

Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game is renowned because the main character is believable. In fact, his thoughts and actions are more important in that book than any futuristic technology.

So I know it can be done. As you can see, I haven't read any proper sci-fi written within the past twenty years, so maybe good writing is being done.

Or maybe cyberpunk prevailed, and sci-fi is dead as a genre. It's plausible but unlikely.

Probably, it's more of the same. There are a few luminaries writing well and a few thousand bored scienticians writing populist dreck.

In sci-fi, which went the opposite direction as mainstream fiction some years ago, leaning too heavily on ideas at the expense of other elements is an obvious problem.

The more sinister problem here is the acceptance of such flaws by the critical community. Readers and critics who reward sci-fi that succeeds in just one or two ways encourage a dangerous trend.

No wonder no one takes sci-fi (or writers of sci-fi) that seriously nowadays, if its best works could only be appreciated in some sort of parallel world. Separated from a mainstream tradition where many of them would be deemed mediocre at best.