In this bi-weekly series reviewing classic science fiction and fantasy books, Alan Brown looks at the front lines and frontiers of the field; books about soldiers and spacers, scientists and engineers, explorers and adventurers. Stories full of what Shakespeare used to refer to as “alarums and excursions”: battles, chases, clashes, and the stuff of excitement.
Today we’re going to take a look at one of the single most interesting books I’ve ever read, The Integral Trees, set in a peculiar solar system whose most habitable area is a torus around a neutron star, where people live among floating trees and jungles, surrounded by all manner of strange creatures. To make matters even more intriguing, the spaceship on which the original colonists arrived is still lurking in the system, with ideas of bringing this world back under control of the totalitarian State.
By the 1980s, Larry Niven was well along in a productive and popular career as a science fiction author, and could have easily been resting on his laurels and writing sequels to earlier works. But while sequels were part of his output in those years, he was also looking for new ideas—one of the most audacious of those ideas was the Smoke Ring, which became the setting for two novels. The first was The Integral Trees, serialized in Analog magazine in 1983 and published by Del Rey in 1984. My copy came to me via my then-new membership in the Science Fiction Book Club, and featured a beautiful and evocative cover by Michael Whelan, featuring a lean and elfin woman with prehensile toes, hovering in mid-air. The sequel, The Smoke Ring, was published in 1987.
About the Author
Larry Niven (born 1938) is a prolific and prominent American science fiction author. I have reviewed his work in this column before, looking at the seminal book Ringworld, the books A Mote in God’s Eye and The Gripping Hand, which he wrote in collaboration with Jerry Pournelle, and his short story collection, Neutron Star. Those reviews contain biographical information about Niven, with the review of Ringworld containing not only a more extensive biography, but also a description of the Known Space universe in which many of his stories are based.
The Smoke Ring and Other Strange Environments
Science fiction thrives on stories set in strange and exotic environments. Between these environments and the futuristic technology, characters can sometimes be overshadowed. But that isn’t a problem when the setting is fascinating in its own right. Our robotic probes have shown that all sorts of interesting environments exist within our own solar system—worlds with different gravity, different temperatures, and different chemical compositions—places that would present unique challenges to explorers. And in the realm of science fiction, even more exotic settings can be imagined. In the early days, some of those settings were downright preposterous. There were tiny asteroids with breathable atmospheres, comets that brushed the Earth and broke off chunks of the planet, and Earth-like environments in even the furthest reaches of the solar system. But as science fiction became more scientific and our knowledge of other worlds increased, those environments grew more realistic.
Science fiction authors tend to enjoy challenging the ordinary and coming up with ever stranger new worlds. They have created giant technological environments like Niven’s own Ringworld and Arthur C. Clarke’s Rama. And even keeping within the bounds of scientific possibility, they have created some exceedingly peculiar natural environments. One of the first of these I encountered was the high-gravity planet Mesklin from Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity; over the years Clement created many a strange world. Larry Niven has followed in Clement’s footsteps and become a master of strange environments himself. If you’d like to dig into this topic a bit further, you can find an engaging article on the other worlds of science fiction here in the online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.
The Smoke Ring, the setting of The Integral Trees, is perhaps Niven’s greatest achievement in worldbuilding. It is set among his stories of the State, a totalitarian government dedicated to spreading humanity throughout the stars with slower-than-light ramships that scoop hydrogen out of the void and use it as fuel. They use human beings as tools, copying their personalities, then using them to guide their ships, as well as freezing prisoners as “corpsicles,” utilizing them as involuntary explorers.
The strange world of the Smoke Ring was discovered by Discipline, a ramship piloted by Sharls Davis Kendy, a human personality transferred to a computer, who serves not only as ship’s commander, but also as the political officer and representative of the State. It was crewed by rebels that the State hoped to rehabilitate. They found a star orbited by a unique system. That system is centered on a neutron star, Voy, orbited by a former gas-giant planet, Gold, whose atmosphere has been stripped away by the gravity of Voy, and trails in the orbit in the form of a giant gas torus. In the center of that torus, there is a ribbon of breathable atmosphere, rich in life. The ramship is equipped with organisms that can be seeded to terraform unsuitable environments, but they find the flora and fauna here surprisingly compatible with life from Earth. While the Smoke Ring is full of free-floating forests and ponds that exist as spherical globes, the humans are attracted to large trees that look like mathematical integral symbols, whose midpoints center in the torus, but which are long enough that their outer and inner tufts have tidal forces which simulate the gravity humans find comfortable. The native animals are strange—most of them are able to fly, and most exhibiting trilateral symmetry that allows them to see in all directions at once.
Kendy’s plans to plant a colony for the State are dashed, however, when the still-rebellious crew flee in the eight Cargo and Repair Modules, or CARMs, that allow operations beyond the ship. In the centuries since the crew escaped and struggled to establish colonies throughout the Smoke Ring, Kendy and Discipline have lurked behind Gold, patiently plotting a way to reestablish the power of the State.
The Integral Trees
The Quinn tribe is in trouble. They live in the tuft at the end of a gigantic integral tree, where tidal forces provide a comfortable low-gravity environment. But the tree they live on passed close to the planet Gold, and since then the tree and its ecology has been deteriorating. They don’t realize it, but their tree has been slowly falling out of the Smoke Ring toward Voy. The Chairman of the slowly starving tribe has decided to send a team of hunters and explorers up the trunk. He has picked people he feels are expendable, like the hunter Clave, who angered him by leaving the Chairman’s daughter for the two young sisters Jayan and Jinny. There is the young and inexperienced Gavving, who has just survived a battle with a swordbird that killed one of his hunting companions. There is the legless woman Merril, and Jiovan, who lost one of his legs in a hunting accident, as well as sour old Alfin, who suffers from a fear of heights. But the tribe Scientist does not feel this mission is a forlorn hope, because he has sent his assistant, the Grad Jeffer, along with a precious computer and data cassettes.
The team makes their way up the trunk, aided by the fact that the tides decrease as they climb to the center of the tree. They find new flora and fauna, but as they reach the center, they’re attacked by warriors from the Dalton-Quinn tribe which inhabits the far tuft of their tree, warriors who are celibate women pledged to service. During the battle, the tree fractures apart, and the survivors of the battle float away, clinging to a large piece of bark. It turns out integral trees have a means of surviving falling from orbit, sacrificing the inward part of the tree to gravity to save the rest. This means that the former Quinn tribe is doomed, and the members of the expedition must now become the tribe, with Clave as Chairman and Jeffer as Scientist. It becomes apparent that the previous Scientist expected something like this, which is why he let Jeffer take his computer. Gavving acquits himself well in the battle, killing two of the enemy. The only survivor from the other tribe is Minya, who was not happy with her celibate life and, seeing it as an avenue toward acceptance, proposes marriage to Gavving.
The survivors harpoon a giant moby, or air whale, and it tows them toward a cloud where they hope to find some water. Inside the cloud is a zero-gravity jungle, inhabited by the Carther states, a tribe even taller and leaner than the Quinns. Before they even have a chance to adapt to this new situation, the jungle is attacked by warriors from London Tree, a very large tribe who have a functioning CARM. The Quinn tribe is separated, with some staying with the Carther group and the rest becoming “copsiks,” or slaves on London Tree. As the slaves are adapting to their new and unpleasant life, it turns out the jungle also has a means of propulsion, and soon the tables are turned on London Tree, as the Carther warriors swarm aboard their tree, and with help from the Quinns, take control of their precious CARM. As the tiny Quinn Tribe struggles to learn how to control the CARM, they encounter the malevolent Kendy, and their lives hang in the balance right up until the end of the story.
Final Thoughts
The Integral Trees is an exciting book whose setting is the best part of the tale. The idea of living in an environment where there is no ground is genuinely fascinating. And if the characters are overshadowed by the environment, in this case it is not because they are poorly imagined, but simply because the setting is so creative and compelling.
And now it’s your turn to talk: If you’ve you read The Integral Trees, I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts. And I’m also interested in hearing what other books that you have read with fascinating science fictional settings.
