Orbitsville
★★★★★
With Ringwold and Rama kicking off the 70s, Shaw joins the party with his Big Dumb Object - Orbitsville - a Dyson sphere with a surface area of five billion Earths.
The plotting moves fast, jumping between milestone events without dallying with connective character building and back story. Nowadays, this would be a thousand-page book, but Shaw is focused firmly on creating a maximal sense of wonder lightly wrapped in a flimsy revenge plot that clunkily drives his characters’ motivations.
This pace means that, like much writing of the era, characterisation beyond the protagonist suffers, and Garamond himself comes across as a bit of a selfish ass - a stereotypical military man happy to sell everyone down the river for his agenda, with a nice but dim wife and a leadership style devoid of any attempt at emotional intelligence that today would get him sent straight to HR for an intervention.
But this doesn’t matter - we’re here for the shock and awe and Shaw initially delivers. Orbitsville is a wondrous object, shrouded in its origin mystery, and slowly unwrapped for the reader. However, revelations sadly peter out as we hit the second half of the book.
Orbitsville seems oddly empty - an infinite grassland with a smattering of aliens that aren’t worthy of a few pages and a complete lack of tech. Our cast is mostly interested in settling down to an agrarian lifestyle, ignoring all the puzzles that I’d be obsessed with. For explorers, they’re weirdly lacking inquisitiveness, mostly strolling over for a look, then deciding there’s ‘nothing to see here’ and going back home for tea.
To some extent, Shaw is deliberately setting this up - he’s creating a bland agrarian paradise to make a statement about the fate of human progress in a post-scarcity civilisation with a sidebar on the rapid decay of social structures, and I do like the thoughtful ending. But by undermining the expectations of the BDO Shaw is disappointing the reader who was sold the awe, complexity, and depth that Ringworld delivered so well. We’re left with social commentary but few answers, having barely scratched the surface.
