The Smoke Ring

This book is set in the fascinating world of the Smoke Ring, a free fall environment that is able to support life. In the distant past, a group of humans settled there and adapted to the rich and varied environment.

World building is the strength of this novels. The world of the Smoke Ring and the Integral Trees (massive plants within the smoke ring) is fascinating. The character development was okay -- really, pretty decent by sci-fi standards. However, I was less happy with the pacing of the plot. The novel book seemed intent on making up for the rushed plot in The Integral Trees that by having an amount of plot that seemed thin given the time spent on it.


But overall, it was an enjoyable read.

Mediocre conclusion to a mediocre trilogy. The idea of huge trees in space, and an extremely-long duration mostly-failed empire, could be good, but the actual stories and characters were bad to mediocre throughout. Niven is great at coming up with concepts behind worlds (Ringworld even more so than The State), but bad downstream from that. Skip. (Also a pretty bad audiobook; narrator speaks words quickly but with large gaps between words, so it isn't as intelligible at 2x as many others at 3x.)

East takes you Out, Out takes you West, West takes you In, In takes you East. Port and Starboard bring you back.

Fourteen years after the events of "The Integral Trees" and the founding of the small community of Citizens Tree, Kendy, the A.I. on the on the spaceship Discipline decides that it is time to make a move and stats trying to influence the future of the small communities of humans scattered about the Smoke Ring. Kendy can't remember his crew leaving the ship 500 earth years ago because he has inexplicably wiped that part of his memory, but he assumes that they mutinied against him. However the records left by the crew in their early years in the Smoke Ring seem to suggest otherwise.

The pacing of the story doesn't really work show more for me. I thought it dragged in the middle, then finished in a rush, I was a bit bored by the interminable descriptions of Admiralty and logger technology and the final revelation of how the Discpline's crew came to live in the Smoke Ring came as a bit of an anticlimax, so overall I didn't enjoy it quite as much as "The Integral Trees". As for East takes you out, even after reading the explanations while studying the maps and diagrams at the beginning of the book, I still haven't got my head round the way directions work in the Smoke Ring, but that's probably down to me rather than the author, as I have always had really bad spatial awareness. show less

Having read the first book in this short series (The Integral Trees) and another of his works (Ringworld), I have to say that his ideas are brilliant and imaginative. That being said, the plot and his writing is a bit bland. But the concepts behind the writing was enough to capture my imagination and look beyond the somewhat tepid character arcs.

I did not enjoy this as much as [b:The Integral Trees|939740|The Integral Trees|Larry Niven|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1383249816s/939740.jpg|7420631]. In this story, the Citizens Tree people discover a more advanced community living elsewhere in the smoke ring. It seems to have possession of the original library of the ship that brought their ancestors to the system, and naturally the Citizens scientist is eager to access it.

As before, the characters are simply there to serve the action. It says a lot that the most intriguing is a computer program descended from a long-dead State official. By the final section of the novel, I had pretty much lost interest.

The Smoke Ring gave thought-provoking scenarios about the word "civilized." I would have enjoyed the plot more if I read the previous book, "The Integral Trees."

like it's predecessor, Integral Trees, I istened to this book for awhile; it never really gelled in my mind and I had better things to do then listen to "Charlie Brown's teacher." Put this one in the category of "did not finish." While the teaser held promise, it never developed.