VURT YOUR ENTHUSIASM (15)
By:
August 22, 2024
One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of science fiction novels and comics from the Eighties (1984–1993, in our periodization schema). Series edited by Josh Glenn.
THE INTEGRAL TREES | LARRY NIVEN | 1984
I haven’t read much of Larry Niven’s work, but The Integral Trees caught my fancy from the start: in a floating world, immense, bilaterally-symmetric trees — trees! bark and branch, wood and leaf — sail through a vast ring of atmosphere. It’s a hard-sf novel, and the physics and organismic biology are worked out in uncompromising rigor: the world is a torus of atmosphere torn from a gas giant locked in close orbit around a neutron star, the innermost layer of which, a cloudy, humid zone called “the Smoke Ring,” is dense enough to support life. The organisms Niven imagines evolving here ingeniously reflect the vagaries of freefall: everything that moves can swim or fly, and most organisms have an additional eye in the back of their heads (in freefall, danger comes from all directions). In this world, the integral trees offer rare purchase: up to 100 kilometers in length, they are locked in a tidal balance with the winds that circulate through the Smoke Ring; each end of a tree sports a crown of foliage (called “tufts”), which are windswept in opposite directions (hence the “integral” — each tree is shaped like an ∫). The horticulturists among you will ask, what about roots? On the leeward side of each tuft is a giant, twig-toothed hollow called a “treemouth” into which drifting moisture, planktonic plant and animal life, and all manner of detritus is swept, nourishing the tree.
Oh yes, and there are people — the descendants of a crew of human explorers marooned in the Smoke Ring, now marginally adapted to survive in tidally-tormented freefall, who mostly live in tribal villages they’ve established in the tufts of the integral trees. It’s a little post-apocalyptic society with the ground literally pulled out from under it, where the few remaining artifacts of interstellar space travel are precious, totemic, and magical. There is a story here, of savagery and domination, slavery and weightless sex — an entertaining melodrama, by turns ingenious and enervating, the sort of stuff you’d expect from an author who served as an advisor for Reagan’s “Star Wars” security fantasia. What brings me back to The Integral Trees is its ecological imaginary — the vividness of the living world Niven speculates. Each integral tree is a world, a landscape, with springs coursing through rifts in bark, and a variously three-eyed, tentacled menagerie erupting from holes or falling everywhere from out of the clouds.
As I write, I’ve been intermittently distracted by movement outside my window, the morning antics of a trio of squirrels chasing each other in and out among the limbs of a great oak tree as vast and all-encompassing at their scale as an integral tree. Think of the forces of destruction arrayed around them. And yet, they’re playing — a state of possibility that feels like it’s missing from Niven’s Smoke Ring. So there’s a sadness amid this rich imagining: despite the prehensile toes and long limbs they’ve evolved, humans aren’t of this world, but stuck in a restless, alienated apartness from nature — a familiar condition, which increasingly seems less an existential state than a peculiar superstition of modernity. Instead of the rhizomatic entanglement of the living world we inhabit, everything in the Smoke Ring exists apart, and wants to eat you; even the trees have mouths.
VURT YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Mark Kingwell on SNOW CRASH | Mandy Keifetz on THE GENOCIDAL HEALER | Matthew De Abaitua on SWAMP THING | Carlo Rotella on THE PLAYER OF GAMES | Lynn Peril on GEEK LOVE | Stephanie Burt on THE CARPATHIANS | Josh Glenn on DAL TOKYO | Deb Chachra on THE HYPERION CANTOS | Adam McGovern on KID ETERNITY | Nikhil Singh on THE RIDDLING REAVER | Judith Zissman on RANDOM ACTS OF SENSELESS VIOLENCE | Ramona Lyons on PARABLE OF THE SOWER | Jessamyn West on the MARS TRILOGY | Flourish Klink on DOOMSDAY BOOK | Matthew Battles on THE INTEGRAL TREES | Tom Nealon on CLAY’S ARK | Sara Ryan on SARAH CANARY | Gordon Dahlquist on CONSIDER PHLEBAS | Alex Brook Lynn on VURT | Miranda Mellis on STARS IN MY POCKET LIKE GRAINS OF SAND | Nicholas Rombes on RADIO FREE ALBEMUTH | Adelina Vaca on NEUROMANCER | Marc Weidenbaum on AMERICAN FLAGG! | Peggy Nelson on VIRTUAL LIGHT | Michael Grasso on WILD PALMS.
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