The Integral Trees and the Smoke Ring - Two Book Set

The State #2-3

by Larry Niven

Lot of 2 Del Rey Hardcover Books.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Fantasy, Science Fiction Fantasy, Speculative Fiction, Ebooks, Space Opera

Hardcover

Published January 1, 1987

About the author

Laurence van Cott Niven's best known work is Ringworld (Ringworld, #1) (1970), which received the Hugo, Locus, Ditmar, and Nebula awards. His work is primarily hard science fiction, using big science concepts and theoretical physics. The creation of thoroughly worked-out alien species, which are very different from humans both physically and mentally, is recognized as one of Niven's main strengths.

Niven also often includes elements of detective fiction and adventure stories. His fantasy includes The Magic Goes Away series, which utilizes an exhaustible resource, called Mana, to make the magic a non-renewable resource.

Niven created an alien species, the Kzin, which were featured in a series of twelve collection books, the Man-Kzin Wars. He co-authored a number of novels with Jerry Pournelle. In fact, much of his writing since the 1970s has been in collaboration, particularly with Pournelle, Steven Barnes, Brenda Cooper, or Edward M. Lerner.

He briefly attended the California Institute of Technology and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics (with a minor in psychology) from Washburn University, Topeka, Kansas, in 1962. He did a year of graduate work in mathematics at the University of California at Los Angeles. He has since lived in Los Angeles suburbs, including Chatsworth and Tarzana, as a full-time writer. He married Marilyn Joyce "Fuzzy Pink" Wisowaty, herself a well-known science fiction and Regency literature fan, on September 6, 1969.

Niven won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story for Neutron Star in 1967. In 1972, for Inconstant Moon, and in 1975 for The Hole Man. In 1976, he won the Hugo Award for Best Novelette for The Borderland of Sol.

Niven has written scripts for various science fiction television shows, including the original Land of the Lost series and Star Trek: The Animated Series, for which he adapted his early Kzin story The Soft Weapon. He adapted his story Inconstant Moon for an episode of the television series The Outer Limits in 1996.

He has also written for the DC Comics character Green Lantern including in his stories hard science fiction concepts such as universal entropy and the redshift effect, which are unusual in comic books.

http://us.macmillan.com/author/larryn...

Reviews

[Kathryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's not an easy concept to get your brain around at first (especially if you're like me, and first read this in middle school), but this book is set on a world that has no solid ground. Complete free-fall planet, with floating trees that are as big as moons, wandering lakes, and everything can fly. Strange STRANGE book, but it's fun to see Niven come up with a world with his own, heh, ground rules.

[SciFiOne · Rating 4 out of 5]

2002 Grade B
2022 Grade B

Touted as a "Stunning New Novel," it is indeed stunning, but not great. It is hard SciFi and Niven uses the movements of the characters to "build the world." The problem is it was never fully clear to me how the environment works, despite the drawings at the start, and thus, it was slightly confusing. It is still a stunning place. Another problem was the characters. They are humans stranded from a seeding ship centuries ago. They have reverted to various tribes. They are nasty to each other inside each tribe and war with the other tribes on contact. I realize this is Niven's way of moving the characters around the "world," but they are not nice people. There were also a lot of them with no specific stand out character to like. Sometimes, after a POV change, I had trouble figuring who was who.

Still, the book was quite enjoyable. I did speed read a little but not much.

Note. My copy is ISBN 0-345-32065-4, is just titled The Integral Trees, has a different cover, and is a 272 page paperback, published by Ballantine - Del Ray in 1985

[Greg Kennedy · Rating 1 out of 5]

The story starts off well, following the descendants of a group of humans who colonized a gas torus surrounding a former star. The description of the environment is top-notch, complete with wondrous life-forms and its own set of physical laws. But the characters are so totally flat and unbelievable that I still could not remember their names by the end of the book. I found myself becoming increasingly annoyed with Niven's invented swear words and random marriages between his characters.

In short, the book is a disappointment. It's saved only by the creativity of the world and the small amount of suspense offered by the backstory, but nothing about the characters is remotely interesting. He drops readers into the world and offers no explanation for why the humans lack not only knowledge of modern science, but the skills required to build a functional society (sorry, but I don't buy "the passage of time" as a good enough reason). Niven would have done well to take some time studying sociology and psychology instead of physics before starting in on this project.

[Kelldicott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant idea, just brilliant. I know some readers criticize Niven's tendencies towards recycling ideas, positing that he's simply rehashing his basic premise of creating an "oddly shaped world" thingy and thereby seeking success off the back of his huge bestseller, the sci-fi masterpiece "Ringworld", but "the Integral Trees" is equally graceful and luscious in detail, another heavyweight stunner of impressive imaginative scope. I loved it, and the sequel. Totally great, believable sci-fi, akin to Kim Williams' "Mars" trilogy or Arthur C. Clarke's "Rendezvous With Rama".

[Hien · Rating 2 out of 5]

Great world building here but there is no plot to speak of. The people here live on giant 100km long floating trees in a weightless gas cloud. The trees spin and provide artificial gravity. The reason the trees are called integral trees is because the two tufts of foliage on opposite ends curve in opposite directions (due to spinning in air) so the trees look like integral symbols. This concept would have made a good short story but there was not enough there to carry a full length novel.

[Kayleigh · Rating 2 out of 5]

The setting of this book, the environment and science behind it all, is absolutely wonderful and typical of the weird and wonderful places and people you get from this author. Unfortunately, the plot and the characterisation fall short of Niven's usual fare and some of the potential that this book had was lost. It's sad that I read this book's sequel first and felt that I'd missed nothing by starting on that one.

[Angella · Rating 2 out of 5]

I sort of liked this book until my favorite character (or the only character I felt any sympathy for) was forced to do something I couldn't forgive. Excellent world-building by Niven.

[Claus]

I read a lot of Larry Niven during my youthful years and I remember the books fondly.

[John Robertson · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Integral Trees and The Smoke Ring sequel by Larry Niven have been among my favourite books. The fascinating landscape of a habitable but planet-less atmosphere in orbit around a neutron star, having been stripped from a gas giant orbiting just beyond its Roche limit, intrigued me. The underlying plot was pretty simple, but it was captivating because of the peculiar “free fall” environment and the corresponding physics of the integral trees which are the setting in which the characters interact. I was especially taken by the fact that, as bizarre as the setting is, it seems entirely plausible from a physics and orbital mechanics perspective, like many of Niven’s novels’ delightfully unusual settings. Although I didn’t recognize it at the time, these novels would have been among several that gradually developed my taste for science fiction which has a healthy dose of real science embedded in or as background for the plot line.

[Carl Barlow · Rating 3 out of 5]

The world Niven creates here is fascinating and -as you might expect- well thought-out scientifically. However, for me he doesn't make best use of it. There is much vaster scope for description - the world is beautiful and wonderful but Niven seems to often forget this, getting distracted by principles of movement, burgeoning business empires, and steam engines. The plots of both books race along, but are not particularly involving and are even a little vague overall. Characterisation is the weakest point, with there being little difference between protagonists (and the cast is large) - all are mainly good-natured, pragmatic, and practical, with little other difference to make their interactions more interesting.

Readable, interesting, but no Hothouse.

[Zach · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Integral Trees and The Smoke Ring are both fairly short, inventive, imaginative sci-fi dragged down by flat, gullible characters and abundant sex that feels shoehorned in. Most of the characters show little or no conviction, so it's hard to find anybody to root for.

[Robert Sewell · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was an interesting idea, but Niven's style just doesn't grab me and suck me into his worlds. And I can't quite put my finger on it, but I think he got some of the physics wrong.

[Coleen]

WRONG BOOK---- NOT THE BOOK I READ

[Mike Smoller · Rating 4 out of 5]

I gave this novel such a relatively high rating due to its originality of concept. The story is heavily influenced by the setting: a gas torus, a ring of air around a neutron star.

[Kathryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This edition contained two books: The Integral Trees, which I finished reading the other day (and which I discussed at my Sci-Fi Book Club meeting last night, on July 10, 2012) and the sequel, The Smoke Ring. After some consideration, I decided to review the two books as a unit, since that’s how they are set up in the volume I read. I will also note that I really enjoyed these books, which contain both hard science, fascinating sociology, and a good plot.

As the story begins (in The Integral Trees), we are presented with a world system of a ring of matter surrounding a neutron star; what is important to remember about this ring of matter is that the atmosphere is totally breathable for humans, that one is usually in a state of free-fall, unless near a source of gravity (such as a tree), and that this system is populated by flora and fauna adapted to these conditions. Five hundred years ago a ship, Discipline, arrived, on a mission from the State to seed likely -looking worlds with algae to prepare them for human colonization in the far future. The crew deemed this system worthy of exploration and left the mother ship with several Cargo and Repair Modules (CARMS). The crew was a combination of normal humans and humans with modern bodies, but with minds implanted from other people; and the ship’s computer, Kendy, was also implanted with a human’s mind and memories. The computer remembers a mutiny, with the crew cutting off communication with the mother ship (he has edited his memories), and for five hundred years has been waiting for the mutineers (or their descendants) to contact him as he waits in orbit around the system.

The Quinn Tribe lives on the in tuft (towards the neutron star of Voy) of an integral tree, and is suffering from drought and famine; their Scientist (an honorific term, given to the one in the tribe who has the most knowledge of the old times) fears that the tree has moved too close to Voy. The Chairman (the leader of the tribe) sends a group to explore the tree towards the outer tuft; as the tree is a few hundred kilometers long and three kilometers thick, and the two tufts are on opposite sides of the tree, this amounts to a major exploration. It does not escape the notice of the members sent on the exploration that they are all either misfits, handicapped, or obnoxious to the Chairman, except for the Grad (another honorific term, denoting the Scientist’s assistant and eventual heir to the old knowledge), and that the Chairman might have sent them out simply to have them die and thus give the tribe fewer mouths to feed.

What happens to this exploration group, and to those people whom they come in contact with, is essentially the plot of these books; the second book starts fifteen years after the end of the second book, with many of the same characters from the first book and new characters born in the meantime (and those people whom they come in contact with in the course of the book.)

The first book was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1984 and the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1985. both books are great reading, and bring up interesting ecological issues. I am very glad to have read both of these books.

[Jason · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this book when I was in high school when I was riding my wave crest of discovery within the realm of NEW WAVE OF SCIENCE FICTION--authors like Moorcock, Ellison, Farmer, Spinrad, etc. I had read some of the sci-fi "greats" at this point but more than likely you would find me buried in a Moorcock novel or a short story collection of Ellison's. My friends were always talking about Asimov, Pohl, Heinlein &, of course, Niven.

"Have you read RINGWORLD? You haven't! Man, it's a classic! If you haven't read Niven then you know nothing about science fiction!"

It was comments like these which really turned me off from hard sci-fi--aka., "The Golden Age"--because it came across as elitist. There's nothing I hate more than someone ridiculing me because I don't care for the "Grandmasters of Science Fiction"--as if there's some hallowed hall one must make a pilgrimage to & devour every classic title found on its bookshelves. Once you make that pilgrimage, read all the necessary titles in order to be accepted into their group, then you were given silent permission by their "Order" to discuss science fiction with them on an intellectual level--never mind it's a genre that has spent almost a century being ridiculed for what it is: science fiction. So on one hand, you have the classic/contemporary literature elitists shunning science fiction for the crime of being an existing genre & on the other you have the geeksquad sci-fi elitists shunning you for not placing the likes of Asimov or Niven on the alter of worship. Is it any wonder why I avoid the science fiction "masters"?

While the "masters" are submerged in science, the "New Wave" authors are bathing in the metaphysical--but the two do converge in one area of science in many ways: sociology. Be that as it may, I find the New Wavers to be far more unlimited in their imaginations, while the Classical authors to be struggling against their limitations.

Enter: THE INTEGRAL TREES by "master of sci-fi", Larry Niven.

Having RINGWORLD bashed over my head by the geek elite, I decided to start somewhere else with Niven so I wouldn't be already pissed off at the man who I'm told to worship--which I was. I wanted to be fair. What I found was a novel that screamed at me that it wanted to be different. The story was a plot a reader could find in a young adult novel. It was trying to be "cool" in the presentation of it's world which, to me, just seemed to be a variation on the Ringworld structure--trees forming the "wheel around the star". The characters were cookie cutter & I found I really didn't care about them--not leaving any impression on me at all. Hell, you could almost find the characters & their world being ripped-off by James Cameron's AVATAR--if they had showed up in the movie, I wouldn't have been surprised. Despite all this, I finished the novel & wasn't anymore the richer for doing so.

Was it a bad novel? No. Was it a good novel? Meh. Did it's author live up to the hype of being a "master" of his chosen genre? That's for you to decide. As for me, I've got better sci-fi novels to read.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Integral Trees is good second-tier Niven, from early in the latter portion of his career, when his writing ability was just starting to fade. Call it his "Silver Age", if you like. In a fractional rating system, I'd give it a 3.6.

The story is set in the "Smoke Ring", which is another typical Niven Very Big Object - in this case, one that dwarfs even his Ringworld. Essentially, it's an inhabitable band of oxygen, other gases, water, and life which exists without gravity in a circle around a star. It's not stable in the long term, of course, but Niven worked out the physics and apparently it could remain habitable for thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years.

It's a fascinating setting. No gravity! Profoundly alien lifeforms! And, of course, some rather radically changed human beings for characters. The problem is that the characters aren't very memorable or interesting. This is not an uncommon problem for hard science fiction writers - and Niven is generally considered to be the foremost hard SF writer - but in the past, Niven was often able to avoid or mitigate this failing. And short stories, his strongest suit, tend not to need or require particularly strong characterization (in fairness to Niven, he has created some strong and interesting characters in his time - but not always!).

But the characters are just flat in The Smoke Ring. Part of the problem, I suspect, is the names. Niven has a weakness for long, exotic names - although fortunately he usually reserves them for secondary characters - and you can only read so many four to six-syllable names without having them all run together. Or at least, I can't. Names alone aren't the problem, however. The characters just aren't interesting, with the one exception of an entity that might not be considered a person at all.

Since it's hard to get attached to flat characters, the novel itself never really grabbed me (unlike, say, Niven's Ringworld). It's a well-told story, with lots of adventure, and I'll doubtless read it again. But it's not a favorite of mine. Niven has long been one of my favorite writers, and in some of his later books he did show that he was able to approach if not quite equal the heights of his "golden age" writing. But The Integral Trees is, sadly, second-rate.

[Devin A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

The biggest problem with writers today is lack of imagination. Larry Niven isn't taking any of that. Nivens books are stunningly creative. The Integral Trees is just one example of his astonishing imagination.

Niven's worlds are refreshingly strange. In Integral Trees we find ourselves visiting a race of evolved humanoids, designed to survive in the continual free fall of a deceased gas giant. They live in either semi-intelligent jungles or the massive Integral Trees. The trees provide artificial gravity in the form of tide. Does this sound like the kind of environment in a James Patterson book?

Niven's characters are just as, if not more creative than his world. Niven's tree dwellers are constantly barraged by "copsik" or slave runners, the hyper-intelligent ship Sharls Davis Kendy, and a variety of inventive space creatures. And the characters do not respond in the way one would expect. A woman take by the copsik runners, after a week in the slave barracks, has this philosophy. "We always knew they might come for us. Well, they did. If a chance to escape comes, I'll take it. But why struggle in a fight you can't win?"

And Mr. Niven's plots are just astounding. It shocks and entertains in every page. I can't reveal too much, as I hope some of you will read Mr. Niven's amazing books someday, but Sharls Kendy is a central focus point, and isn't as charitable as he seems.

Larry Niven's books are relentlessly different. Niven is a science fiction writer on par with Asimov and Clarke. We need more Larry Nivens.

[Darth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Re-read THE INTEGRAL TREES & THE SMOKE RING - I first read them in Jr high, and they were really my introduction to Larry Niven. I have been reading Niven ever since, and that was more than 20 years ago.

Now, I have read some others opine on the characters in this duology, and I cant say much in defense of them. They can be a bit wooden and one dimensional, but it is a lot like the book version of the AVATAR movie. Yeah, the characters weren't the strongest, but the setting was SO spectacular. For my money, this setting is even better than the RINGWORLD's partial Dyson Sphere.
I cant say I completely buy that the setting would be stable, but its plausible enough to work for me. Would real tides and the orbit of Goldblatt's World do more than is shown? Most likely, but maybe the author felt the forces involved were already more complex than some people were going to be able to follow.

A gas giant planet in close orbit to a neutron star bleeds its atmosphere into space - creating an inhabitable ring, rich in oxygen in the circle roughly at the gravitic midpoint between the bodies. Life develops, men come along and find it, and we come in and get a picture of what it might be like after 500 years of them living in this environment.

I have long thought of Larry Niven as the guy who took over as the godfather of sci-fi when Heinlein died - big shoes to fill, but most of the Niven I have read fills them shoes nicely, and this set is no different.

[Anja · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is very interesting. It is set in a world very different from our own so you must remove all our preconceived notions of how things should be in order to understand this book.

The Dalta/Quinn tree is dying, though they don't want to admit it. Their last hope lying in the final search party set out up the trunk that consists mostly of cripples. When a series of events take the group from bad to worse they lose all hope for their home tuft but instead hold out hope that the group may stay together and start over. They fight through many challenges physical and emotional that we never would have here on Earth. They even venture into space by accident!

I recommend this book to sci-fi lovers. I also recommend this book to anyone who wants a fast good read. Because it is so different from anything else it makes for a real page turner!

[Thomas Pfaff · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book while I was taking Calculus II. Actually I read it outside of the class in the evenings before class each night. Humorously many people commented on it, some thinking it was some nerdy extra-curricular calculus thing.

Integral Trees. I remember a delusional robot and tribes of people crawling all over trees that are falling apart as they fall into the atmosphere of an uninhabitable planet or so. A very neat idea. Niven's books tend to be drawn out but seem to have been so original.

Anyway, it's worth a read.

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Larry Niven is great! His settings are scientifically fascinating, and the plots are interesting from a human standpoint. This novel is set in a ring of atmosphere that has been stripped from a gas giant planet in orbit around a neutron star in a binary system. (The astronomers in my friends list will understand.) Anyway, it is about several sparsely-populated human societies which have developed there, in low gravitational fields.

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

A colony of humans marooned in a free-fall ring of breathable atmosphere surrounding a neutron-star.... As far as imaginative world-building goes, this book tops even Niven's masterpiece, Ringworld. The story and characters aren't half bad either, though I would have liked this novel even if they had been an afterthought.

[Benjamin Duffy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Niven's imagination builds a fantastic world, but the characters are forgettable, the plot uninteresting and the end off-putting. It's Ringworld writ small, basically, with its strengths less impressive and its weaknesses more pronounced. Having said that, it's a pretty short read and as such, worth it.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first half is a good novel, with an interesting premise, cool setting and great action.

The second half is a bad novel, set a couple decades later and following the least interesting characters from the first half, while being somehow too focused on both romance and personal finance.

Oddly, this is the same review I gave to Wuthering Heights. Three stars.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Classic old-school sci-fi: weird solar system, no gravity, humans have evolved prehensile toes... you get the picture. I think the book jacket says it all: "The idea is truly the hero." You won't get attached to any of the characters, but it's still engaging reading.

[TQM Doctor · Rating 4 out of 5]

A confusing book to get started with. So much so that it took me two tries to get into it. But once I started to understand this new universe, the story began to be much more enjoyable. Now I'm on to the next in the two-book series.

[Allen Garvin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strong scifi novel with interesting world & culture building, set in Niven's other, non-Known-Space continuum (World Out of Time, etc). Characters are a bit weak, but the slowly revealed history of the world is fascinating.

[Rob Springer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I might have given it more stars if I could have remembered more about it! I looked it up on Wikipedia. The worlds Niven creates are mind blowing, and this, and the Ringworld, are the two most amazing.

[Wetdryvac · Rating 1 out of 5]

Another elementary school late night read. I remember there being so many WTF moments in this book that my disbelief simply kicked in and stayed in. Not what I look for from a book. Need to re-read now and see if I was missing some reach of science on Niven's part.