Christmas 2010: I realised that I had got stuck in a rut. I was re-reading old favourites again and again, waiting for a few trusted authors to release new works. Something had to be done.On the spur of the moment I set myself a challenge, to read every book to have won the Locus Sci-Fi award. That’s 35 books, 6 of which I’d previously read, leaving 29 titles by 14 authors who were new to me.While working through this reading list I got married, went on my honeymoon, switched career and beca

This summer I have chose to re-read books I read or tried to read back in high school. I'm positive that books I read when I was 15, or 16 years old will read differently now that I'm in my 40's. The Integral Trees and it's follow-up book, The Smoke Ring were such books. I remember this book as a book about "space fairies." Humans live in this weird alien fairy type planet where they mutate into flying fairy-like creatures due to the low gravity environment. Well......I guess this book was sort

Fantastic worldbuilding clearly took all the time Niven was willing to put into this book- the characters are a clear afterthought. The real problem, though is a nightmare of anti-feminist bullcrap. The female "lead" (I'm putting lead in quotes as all the women in this book are very clearly portrayed as pets whose only opinions are those of their men) joined a sort of nun warrior class at 14, because that was the only way to avoid being raped (a woman can either make babies or join this separate...

In this novel, author Larry Niven constructs a believable world wholly unlike our own, without recourse to the supernatural or even the super-scientific, and populated by transplanted humans whose society has devolved into small, isolated, xenophobic, sometimes warring tribes. Although the Smoke Ring in which the story is set is alien in a great many respects, part of Niven's genius is his ability to paint a lucid picture of this setting with a minimum of words. This frees him to develop his cha...

A planet without ground, where the inhabitants are ruled by the whims of tide and wind. Not sure which is most fascinating: the unique setting, or the awkward delivery of the most mechanized sex scenes ever. Way to keep it systematic, Hard SF.

Storyline: 2/5Characters: 2/5Writing Style: 2/5World: 4/5Larry Niven is one of those grand masters of science fiction. Literally. Named the 2015 Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master, he's been a finalist for the Hugo novel award eight times for different works. In my quick (though surely inaccurate) count of published novels and collections, I got to the number 95. This is only my seventh Niven book (thus I've not even read 8% of his works), but I haven't loved any of them. I haven't even really l...

In short, if you're considering reading Niven for the first time, pick this book first. It's not a very long book at all (I read it as a teenager) so if find you hate him, then you don't endure much. :) You get the interesting/strange world premise, lots of interesting inter-human development, plot twists, and a small/manageable but not overwhelming dose from the science aspect of sci-fi. ***One of the first sci-fi books I read. I'm not really a sci-fi fan, but I picked this off my Dad's bookshe...

Imagine living with air, water, plants and animals - but No land. Welcome to the Smoke Ring around a far star. The thoughts of a man now inside a computer program in charge of the star-ship Discipline. . . It was taking too long, much longer than he had expected. Sharis Davis Kendy had not been an impatient man. After the change he had thought himself immune to impatience. But it was taking too long! What were they doing in there?  His senses were not limited. Sharis's telescopic array was power...

What a gem!I’m surprised I’d never heard of this book. The world building is on par with ringworld. I love these kind of far out stories mostly about exploring a far out world dreamed up by an intelligent, imaginative mind. Typically, the characters are left underdeveloped and there’s a couple of cringy moments but overall pretty cool. I love it when they put so much thought into the world that they include maps, diagrams and glossaries. Fun stuff.

Such a novel idea, the Integral Trees by Larry Niven, so fantastic in its conception. With Ringword awarded all the high accolades, this storyline again revolves around another ring, a ring around a neutron star, as a gas torus . . . how oddly interesting.I gave this novel 5 stars because of the super-charged, fascinating, mind-blowing storyline and characters. Definitely a great read!

The Integral Trees is a basic party exploration adventure story, but with a really fascinating environment to explore. Instead of colonizing a planet, humans colonized a kind of space ‘trees’ living in a gas torus within a binary star system. I was really drawn in by the amount of thought and creativity behind the description of the physical setting and its extrapolation to how native life would develop and humans would adapt. The characters were a little simple in comparison, but they made for

As a math major, reading this book prior to class often came with the burden of disclaiming, "It's not about math." And that's a little disappointing, actually, because I don't read enough books about math, especially fiction books. And The Integral Trees would make a damn good title for a math novel.But no, Larry Niven had to go and steal the title for his own nefarious purposes. It actually took me longer than it should have taken to realize why the integral trees were named as such—I admit I

This is an old favorite, mainly because the world Niven imagines is so unbelievably cool. Let me see if I can lay it out: a gas giant planet is orbiting a collapsed star a billion years after a supernova; the collapsed star is one of a binary with a normal star like the Sun. The gas giant's atmosphere has been slowly leaking away into orbit around the collapsed star, forming a ring of atmosphere through which the core of the planet orbits. This ring is dense enough to support life all the way ar...

Set in his "known space" universe. A fantastic series by one of the master writer's of SiFi. Very interesting colonization story. Very recommended

good classsic old-fashioned sci fi. and with a great michael whalen cover

I wish I could give this negative stars. Good ideas embedded in sickening sexism and mediocre writing. I couldn't get past the first few chapters.

The story here concerns the descendents of Earth travelers who, five hundred years earlier, chose to settle in an array of massive, free-floating trees that orbit a neutron star. During a particularly lean time, a small group is sent out to search for additional resources, and then an environmental disaster strikes...By this point in their history, the tree people have lost most of their technology, and scientific knowledge is limited, so (like Anne McCaffrey's Pern novels) this is a science fic...

Integrating the trees f(z) around the Smoke Ring C, we haveThe rest of this review is available elsewhere (the location cannot be given for Goodreads policy reasons)

Classic Niven. Interesting situations, cool science. The characters are interesting but not fantastic, certainly far less fantastic than the setting. The Integral Trees takes place in gas torus around a neutron star. There's air and water and plants and animals, but no ground. Everything and everyone is continually in freefall. The human colonists--who have, by the way, lost much of their technology and are only vaguely familiar with their offworld origins--live on the giant integral trees (so n...

The Integral Trees is a precursor to Karl Schroeder's Virga series, and the spiritual and intellectual forefather of Niven's magnum opus, Ringworld. It shares that sense of a vast, fantastical yet possible, limitless world where anything can happen... and populated with people very strongly reminiscent of JM Barrie's Lost Boys, or Brian Aldiss' Starship crew. It's a story we've read a thousand times before in some form or another... the outcast finds adventure, glory, wealth, gets the girl, resc...