The Ringworld Engineers

I guess I'm just not a fan of mystical/science fiction. This work - - and its related series - - came highly recommended to my by a friend. I only made it through the first 8 or 9 pages before hitting the "delete" button.

Read this one based on the recommendation from a couple of coworkers - what a mistake. It was a boring book. I appreciate the work of screenplay writers even more now. As the source material a.k.a. the books are actually too long, too crappy, too irrelevant to begin with. No wonder I don't read fictional material anymore there's plenty of it and every kind of media so you don't spend hours upon hours of your life to soak up some garbage. Just waste two hours of your life and watch a good movie.

Thought the Ringworld concept was good, but the author's writing style was, in my opinion, sadly lacking. Poor character development muddled plot, and a lot of razzle-dazzle science catch phrases that may have played when the book was published in the 70's but no more.
I was really looking forward to reading the book, and I'm told his later stuff was much better, but this left me dissappointed

I loved Ringworld when I read it 35 years ago. It allowed me access to the wonderful world of Larry Niven's Known Space. And I devoured every book I could and purchased every new one that came out. Last ones dealing with the Puppeteer Worlds migration.

So when I saw this was coming out as a graphic novel, I was excited. Like another reviewer, I enjoy graphic novels and expected the magnificent world of Louis Wu to translate into colors and images that met my expectations from 30+ years ago. They way Niven describes Louis and Teela's cosmetic alterations, the Kzinti's' magnificence, the majesty of the Puppeteer home world.

All muted in black and white cartoons. No depth. No majesty. No translation of those feelings of grandeur. Remember the description of the Arch as they traveled? The colors they saw from their flycycles? Nothing. Details lost in a poor adaptation of a great novel. I'm sorry but as a long time fan of Niven's tales, I find this graphic novel adaptation to be a HUGE letdown in so many ways. Color and depth of detail are needed for this novel. Shame on the editors for letting this go to print.

This is supposed to be a "classic" sci-fi novel. But, the author's writing style is very juvenile. After reading about 1/4 of the book, I decided that the lack of details and plot development was too disappointing to continue.

Such an interesting concept that is left largely untapped. It's a fantasy version (less scifi) of Rendevous with Rama without the need for scientific rigor or meaningful characters. I wanted to enjoy it but just got annoyed.

Very interesting concept that is not supported by good world-building. Lackluster character development and an unlikable protagonist keeps me from enjoying this otherwise fun sci-fi scenery tour.. Author has some serious problems with women..

I don't understand how this book became a classic beyond a very interesting concept. The story itself is not very compelling, the science proves shoddy over and over under any examination and the characters are one-dimensional, unless they are female, in which case they have no dimension. Niven relegates all females into the role of bimbo, sex-slave, or vegetable. In fact, the main character is 200 years old and manages to have sex with every woman he comes into contact with. Do you get the feeling that someone is projecting? Niven seems to reveal himself to be a sad, sexist nerd who had one solitary good idea and just really lucked out.

This was a piece of garbage, Furry Cats, and other booring creatures that only made me regret buying a book written many years ago.... Sorry folks I read a book a week of Science Fiction and this was a waste of a week.... To bad there is so much junk out there. Right now I'm reading "Nomad" and it's close to being a waste of the week..... Large object flying toward Earth, but tied in with love story...... Blzzzz Out......

1. I thought this was a novel, not some cartoon. 2. It is too small to view on my Kindle, 3. It is, of course, in black and white on the Kindle 4. If possible, I would like a refund. 5. From what I can tell, it is not serious science fiction, just some juvenile comic book story.

character development takes way too long. writing is very confusing with some sentences not making any sense. 'action' doesn't start until the middle of the book. ringworlders are a major letdown by being little goblins. after that i stopped reading and just flipped through the book.

I read Ringworld 30+ years ago and enjoyed it very much. I was excited when I saw that "Ringworld" was going to be available for my Kindle. I even pre-purchased it almost a year ago.

What I got was a was NOT the novel I expected. What I got was a black and white comic book that was impossible to read on my Kindle.

I echo the comments of others who said "Shame on the publishers for submitting this to Kindle readers."

If you want to read a classic science fiction novel, find a printed copy of this title. Don't buy the kindle edition.

I thought that I was buying the original Ring world but instead I got a comic book that only covered a small fraction of the original novel. I will not buy the future parts of the novel. The original "Ringworld" was an epic novel that I read in a single sitting and I wanted to reread it. As far as it goes the cartoonist did a pretty good job of presenting visualizations that matched the text.

I LOVE comics and graphic novels. As a medium it's perfect-you get great stories matched with great artwork. Not so in this case. Using Manga to adapt a setting so vast and imaginative as Ringworld was doomed to failure. Lines are too simplistic, facial expressions too exaggerated, and although I love the black & white format it simply doesn't work for Ringworld. It doesn't do it justice. A world so insanely big as to circle around a star deserved full-colour, full-sized (not Manga-sized), two-page spreads as often as possible so we can all marvel at its beauty.

Ringworld is in my all-time Top Five and to see this adaptation was disappointing on every level. Credit where credit is due though: the script is actually all right, even if it's too quirky and goofy at times.

To see Pupeteer become the Jar-Jar equivalent of the Known Universe was extra painful.

Verdict: skip this and stick to the images Niven himself planted in your head.

This was very, very poorly done. I am a huge fan of Mr. Niven, this is a dishonour to one of the classics of sci-fi. Please, if you enjoyed the original, do not fall for this. I wish I'd waited and not pre-ordered.

It is kind of strange that it took me so long to get around to reading this book. I've read everything Niven and Pournelle wrote together, and liked it all. I had certainly heard of Ringworld, so that should have been a clue I would like it. I was even a huge fan of the Halo games in the early 2000s, which borrowed heavily from Niven's books for inspiration.

Thus, while I should have read Ringworld sooner, I hadn't. I read The Magic Goes Away in 2012, and my memories of it weren't as good as the review I wrote then, so I tended to shy away from Niven's solo work. This was a mistake.

Ringworld is an amazing book, the hardest of hard sci fi, written by a genuine master of the craft. If you haven't read it, you need to. Go click that affiliate link and buy it now. Or go to the local used bookstore, which will assuredly have a copy on hand. Do it. You won't be sorry.

My introduction to Niven's Known Space was the short story "Fly-by-Night" in There Will Be War Volume X. I found the setting interesting and well done, so I picked up Ringworld on a whim for my birthday.

First, we must Louis Wu. Thanks to boosterspice, Louis is 200 years old, and still fit, trim, and vigorous. Louis is also celebrating his birthday in every time zone around the world sequentially thanks to cheap teleportation. He is also bored to tears. Cheap transportation has blended every city and culture around the world into grey homogeneity, and an unusually long life doesn't leave one many surprises, even less so in a world that is just one big city with quaint historical neighborhood names like Moscow, Marrakesh, and San Diego.

Niven took some interesting scifi ideas, and extrapolated what life would really be like if they were true. And this is just the first chapter. We also meet some truly alien species. You think you know what they are like, until you start to see the world through their eyes. And then you see the kind of worlds they create for themselves. Even after hundreds of years of contact, trade, and warfare, misunderstandings abound.

Louis, xenophilic for a human, sets sail for the eponymous Ringworld with a Kzin, a giant cat with a warrior culture that fought humans unsuccessfully for almost four hundred years, a Pierson's Puppeteer, a two-headed coward that speaks human languages like a phone sex operator, and Teela Brown, the luckiest woman who ever lived. The four of them routinely puzzle one another, because they are all so different as to be almost incomprehensible.

Hilarity of course ensues.

And then, we get to the Ringworld itself. Ninety-three million miles in radius. The mass of Jupiter. Six hundred million miles long and million miles wide. It has the surface area of three million Earths. You could put trillions of people on it, and they would never see each other. None of the pictures I've attached to this post do it justice. Niven does it in words; everyone who sees it in the book has a hard time wrapping their minds around its scale. It is just too different from our experience [or even the aliens' experience] to readily grasp.

When Bungie made their Halo games, the ring was scaled down to something that would look good on screen. I think they made the right choice for what they were doing. If Niven's ring were accurately represented, players wouldn't be able to tell what it was. It is too alien, too weird to easily process. A novel really is a better medium for this idea, for exploring what it means.

There is a lot of exploring to be done. Ringworld is Niven's best known novel, and now that I've read it, I see why. Niven uses his unique style to extrapolate what it would really be like to build such an artifact as the Ringworld. This is hard scifi at its best. I'm sure I will pick up the others in due course, but even if you have no interest in such things, read this one. It is worth it.

I got this book from Audiobooks (not the store's Audible). The narrator was Patrick Cullen. the store says the narrator is Tom Parker. The voices sound very similar if not the same. It's a bit too deep for me. It reminds me of the old radio shows that were before my time. But I got used to it after a few chapters.

I love the idea of a Ringworld. I also enjoyed the characters Louis Wu, Teela Brown, Speaker to Animals, and Nessus (the Puppeteer). Some reviewers criticize the book for having characters that don't develop. But Teela Brown's character did grow. The other characters where older, already developed, so they really didn't have much room to grow.

I love the science parts of the book. I just wish Larry would have explained the terminology for those of us who haven't had a science class in many years. Since I was listening to the book on my phone while doing other things, I couldn't just stop listening and look things up. When I finally did look them up, it explained so much.

Ringworld was more for enjoyment than suspense. It was easy to guess what was going to happen next.

I was a bit disappointed with the last chapters, with how things turned out. I felt like I was reading Larry's sexual fantasy, but it wasn't the fantasy I had hoped for. Still, it was overall a great story. It definitely is a classic.

Larry Niven's Ringworld is a science fiction classic. Niven took the idea of the Dyson Sphere and developed his own superstructure-- the Ringworld. This gigantic artificial ring encircling a sun-like star contains a flat inner surface habitable to humanity. A billion miles in circumference and a million miles across internally, an race known as the Pierson's Puppeteer's discover it but as too afraid to send out an exhibition. This is a game-changer in science fiction. Niven backs up his Ringworld concept with actual science (hard science-y facts!) and has lots of intricate details describing the world contained within and how it came to be. This is the impetus for dozens of future authors to pick up their pens. It's even the whole focus of the Halo video game franchise.

But, to quote Clark Gable as Rhett Butler, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."

Our protagonists all fit into cute little stereotyped boxes and contain almost non-existent emotional ranges. There is no passion or awe to these adventures. In almost every case, the character's responses to their titanic and dangerous experiences is dull surprise. Niven frequently excuses himself by having the character explain they don't understand the magnitude of what they are experiencing. But… all four of them?

I also have a love-hate relationship with Niven's prose. While I really appreciate the subtle humor (at times, I felt like I was reading Hitchhiker's Guide again), I got frustrated. As with most hard science fiction, our characters developed theories for the world around them and debated these at length. This is a great way to communicate complicated scientific theories. But, as a reader, I was bored. Don't tell me-- SHOW me. Niven touched on a ton of groundbreaking and innovative ideas but I lost interest quickly as our characters just TOLD us everything. Even then, he never really delves into these ideas long enough to gain traction. When discussing this with friends we were firmly split down the middle between people who wanted longer, more detailed explanations and people who wanted shorter explanations with more examples and showing.

Okay, it sounds like I just vented for this whole review and didn't like this book at all, but that's not true. I appreciate what it has done for science fiction. I think Niven captured my mind and encouraged me to mentally explore some new ideas I hadn't spent a lot of time exploring. And this certainly made for a great book club discussion. But in the end… Well, I'm glad I read it. It helped me realize that I am just not into this sort of science fiction. And now I understand quite a bit more about foundational science fiction concepts. I am certainly a more well-read reader of the genre now; I am grateful for this experience.

After a couple of failed attempts, finally I managed to finish this book. I must say it left me with a hollow feeling -- the story just isn't very interesting.

I admit that the Ringworld concept is a fantastic imagination. I understand Niven and other authors constructed a "Known Space" universe centering around it, but I have not read (and probably never will) other books. But based on this book alone, it is quite inconceivable that a civilization that build the Ringworld -- which is a completely manufactured world several millions as large as earth! -- and apparently obtained a means to prolong their life, even indefinitely, can go extinct. It is also quite implausible that a hoofed animal and a blood-thirsty feline beast can evolve to be so much more technologically advanced than humans -- don't they need opposable thumb to manipulate objects, etc? But I understand, this is fantasy so let's suspend our earthly experience for the moment. But the characters are cardboard ones, devoid of personality. And the story just kind of ends, with no climax or anything. I don't now, not my cup of tea.

This is the first time I've read Larry Niven. Although I enjoyed the tale, I was expecting a bit more than it delivered (3.5 stars). Also, this book is now almost 50 years old, so that's always a consideration in a review. Overall, I enjoyed the book, but I will give it a guarded recommendation. For a synopsis, take a look at the book jacket.
First, the positives: I like Larry Niven's tongue-in-cheek humor. His characters are colorful and unique. The story contains an imaginative sci-fi world and environment, and there are plenty of twists and turns. But, Niven tends to explain the plot through sometimes tiresome dialog rather than let the story play things out. And as many have said, his attitude toward women is plainly sexist (maybe Niven's timeframe?).

Louis Wu has been kidnapped. Not that his life was all that great to begin with. After his last trip to the Ringworld the human authorities want him badly. They've told no one about the advanced new drive technology he brought back, or about the woman he came back with. She disappeared. Another puppeteer is taking him and his kzin companion back to the unusual world beyond known space.
When they get there, they find the Ringworld in danger. It's begun to wobble. In about a year it will wobble into the sun. It's a race against time to find the answers to save the world, and get out from under their puppeteer kidnapper.
Larry Niven takes us back to the Ringworld in Ringworld Engineers. A few physics errors from the first book get solved here. Louis Wu meets more of the Ringworld inhabitants and learns a hard lesson. You can't save everyone. Sometimes the best you can do, at the end of the day, is save as many as you can. A great sequel, every bit as engaging as the first.

Larry Niven tells a story about four people so at odds with each other, it seems impossible that they should get along at all. Unfortunately, they'll need each other if they are to survive. The world they find is nothing like what they expected. As the crew suffers one calamity after another, Louis Wu will have to use all his wits to find a way out. It seems that it is much easier to get to the Ringworld than get back off of it alive.

Premise: Louis Wu is bored on his 200th birthday. He's seen and done a lot in his long life. Now, however, he's bored, so when an alien named Nessus from the reclusive species known as puppeteers asks him to come on an expedition past the edge of known space, he quickly decides to go. Louis, Nessus, a Kzin called Speaker and a girl who Louis met at his party will comprise the team to explore the anomaly spotted on long range scans, the anomaly called the Ringworld.

Ringworld is not really about the Ringworld. I mean, yes, about half of it takes place there, and it is the iconic idea that lasted in the sci-fi consciousness and made the book famous. However, the book is really about the four main characters and how they reflect 'futuristic' and/or alien ideas about life, love, sex, destiny and humanity. You can find out nearly everything you need to know about the Ringworld by reading the back of the book, though.

The descriptions of the Ringworld are great, and some of the adventures that the characters have getting there and on the Ringworld are interesting. On the other hand, I have somewhat mixed feelings about some of the characters. The conflicts are interesting, and following Louis as he pieces together Nessus and Speaker's secrets was enjoyable.

Teela is brought on the expedition because Nessus believes that she is lucky. She is a frustrating character, because her apparent incompetence and naivete is necessary for her plot arc. It all makes a certain amount of sense by the end, her resolution is either the most satisfying or the most frustrating, and getting there is annoying.

Between her and Prill (the only other major supporting female character) I am left with the sense that in the world of this book women are as much an alien species as kzinti or puppeteers, if not more so. As a female-type person, I find that frustrating unless it's extremely well handled. It's not enough to make me wholly dislike the book, but it was a repeated annoyance. There is one piece of extremely problematic narration that caught me off guard late in the book that I found actually quite offensive, though.

Still, there were a lot of intriguing moments here, and I enjoyed the setting overall.

The narrator of this audiobook is superb; pace, punctuation, pronunciation, and inflection to produce the author's tone are all exactly as I would have placed them when reading the book.
As for the book itself, Larry Niven is a master of creating rational aliens; there is always an internal consistency to the history, world, culture, biology, and psychology of each of his species. Also, his slightly cynical and slightly sarcastic approach to world governments and bureaucracies is just cynical enough to be real, without overstatement or apology.
I'm not sure that Larry Niven holds my interest now as he did 40 years ago, but that's more because I can create my own adventures now, and couldn't when I first read these books. But for the person looking for a new world that's as real as the old one, but without the pain, Niven never fails.

I read this book at 18 and now again at 64. Of course the genius of the book is the structure of ring world that part gets 5 stars. The ideas like the puppeteers Teela Brown are good too. However, I found the 60s sex stuff almost PC and irritating almost enough to stop reading the thing so a 1 star for that part.
Also the ring world inhabitants were not exciting at all... nor the Kzin.... The story gets about a 2 overall mostly a disappointment--and is a slog to get through. OK writing for the most part with infrequent flashes of talent. His style is almost tedious. I remembered it as much better...18!!
I could see plot holes right and left without trying. You grow older you see more flaws. Still worthwhile? Barely.

An insane Pierson’s Puppeteer alien, Nessus, appears on Earth, on Louis Wu’s 200th birthday, to recruit a motley crew of travellers to accompany him/her to an artificially constructed world, three million times the area of Earth, Ringworld. The investigation party is ultimately made up of Nessus, Louis Wu, a young female human, Teela, and a vicious, carnivorous Kzin named Speaker-to-Animals, who cannot be trusted to betray the rest of the party.

Niven’s writing is of the classic travel-adventure style, which I love. There isn’t much, if any, social commentary to be extracted from this novel but it is a buffet of technological imaginings that makes classic Sci-Fi literature so much fun to read. However, Niven’s writing does suffer from the overt sexist treatment female characters typically received during this era; in this case 1970. In spite of this, we are treated to an almost Utopian view of the future of life on Earth, where most of our current economic, technologic, and environmental concerns are dealt with in such a way that Humans enjoy long lives of leisure that are only limited by one’s ability to stave off a kind of destructive boredom that comes with living too long and experiencing too much. This is what causes Louis Wu to sign on to Nessus’s adventure without hesitation. Teela and Speaker-to-Animals require more persuading but eventually sign on, too. The travel-adventure portion of the story treats the reader to astronomical descriptions of historical and technological events that tease of so many other potential stories. Finally, when the travellers reach their destination, they are met with still more mystery and disaster, shifting their goal from one of discover to one of survival.

Again, the plot is straight forward of travel-adventure stories with an astronomical flavour. A deftly combined mixture of description and action pulls the reader along, leaving one wanting more at the end. I will definitely add the rest of Niven’s “Known Space” titles to my reading list.

Written almost fifty years ago, Ringworld is hard sci-fi at its best. Our “Big Dumb Object”, the Ringworld itself, is so vast, so like and yet unlike Earth, that Niven can go on for pages describing the wonders of his creation, including sideways hurricanes, mountains that are higher than the atmosphere and what the horizon looks like when your planet’s surface goes all the way around the sun (hint: the natives call it the “Arch of Heaven”). Our narrator is the 200 year-old Louis Wu and in the first 50 pages of the novel, Niven does a fine job of fleshing him out and making him come alive, strengths and weaknesses, follies and foibles. Where Niven comes up short is in his description of alien cultures. The Puppeteers and the Kzin are shallow caricatures, stand-ins for human traits - the Puppeteers represent caution, the Kzin aggression. As for the cultures of the Ring natives, not much is shown. Their power grid has been destroyed, plunging the Ring into barbarism. Louis Wu and his crew pretend to be Gods (i.e. Engineers) to get what they want from the natives.

As for the two female characters, again Niven comes up short. Louis Wu’s companion, the 20 year-old Teela Brown has been selected for luck and this leads to some very interesting philosophical takes on the nature of luck and what that means for free will. Teela herself remains an abstraction and perhaps this is consciously done for a larger narrative purpose but even Teela’s physical attribute are vague. Her face is “oval” (aren’t most faces?) and her breasts are “conical”. Other than dark hair, Niven doesn’t give us much else to work with. And then there is Prill - a member of the Engineer race that helped build and maintain the Ring. She is a starship crewman who returned to the Ring after a voyage at relativistic speeds only to find the power grid down and civilization in ruins. Prill’s job aboard her starship? She was the (sigh) “ship’s whore” trained to sexually pleasure the mainly male crew. Her talents are so well-developed that she can turn a man into a out-of-control lustful beast with just a few strategic caresses. There’s a sexism here that was probably hard to detect five decades ago when Niven was writing, but stands out like a red flag today.

The ending is abrupt but satisfying and Niven leaves plenty of room open for sequels. AsLouis Wu says on the final page: “There’s no end to the ways a culture can go. And the room… the Ringworld’s so big…” Niven will return and flesh out his creation ten years later, when he writes The Ringworld Engineers.

This is classic SiFi that has aged well. It is the second time reading it for me, the first being long ago. The story line and characters are complex and imaginative, yet with self-effacing humor. The overall setting is that region of the galaxy called by the author "Known Space", i.e. settled and explored by several races of intelligent creatures including humans, in some far future time. Distinctive characteristics of representatives of these races and the misunderstandings and conflicts that arise from these characteristics make for much of the flavor of this story and others which the author has written. The author takes special delight in setting off the Kzin (analogous to Klingons in the Star Trek stories, but meaner and more prone to sudden violence) against the humans and setting the humans off against the Puppeteers (analogous to the Vulcans, but cowardly and more humorous). The human race in this time and setting has finally reached the state where they have decided to renounce warfare, not for any moral or other high-minded reason, but rather more practically (as the author says in another book), because they finally realized that they were so very, very good at it. This last may be the authors' comment on the cold-war era in which he was writing, and in which I grew up. After all, we are very, very good at it.

If you have not read this book, and you enjoy science fiction and / or fantasy, you definitely need to read this book as soon as you can get your hands on a copy. This book has won awards, and deservedly so.

This book is set in the distant future, and humanity has advanced and has met alien races. One of these races has discovered a very large structure out in the far reaches of space, and requests one of their own, as well as two humans and another alien to travel there and learn what can be discerned from this structure. What the travelers end up finding is beyond what any of them even could have comprehended.

The main characters are all deeply developed, and the settings where the story takes place are all wonderfully described. You can truly picture all of this happening in your mind's eye.

I cannot wait to read the second book in this series!

Orignally posted at FanLit

In 2850 AD, Louis Wu is at his 200th birthday party and thinking about how bored he is. The world has become homogeneous -- everyone on Earth uses the same language, everything is available everywhere, and all the cities have lost their unique flavor. Life is dull. That's why Louis Wu is a perfect candidate for the alien Nessus (a Pierson's Puppeteer) who wants to take a manned spaceship to explore a strange phenomenon in space.

Nessus also recruits a Kzin named Speaker-to-Animals who is a feline alien from a warlike culture, and the beautiful 20-year-old human woman named Teela Brown that Louis Wu has been sleeping with. She's so silly that at first it's not clear what she offers the mission other than good looks, "conical breasts," a giggle soundtrack, and sexual gratification for Louis Wu (this is something I hate about science fiction written by men in the 1960s), but later we discover that Nessus knows that Teela Brown has lucky genes and he thinks having her along will make the voyage lucky.

When the group stops off at the Puppeteer planet, they learn about their mission. They will investigate the Ringworld. Photos from space show that it looks like a blue ribbon arranged around a star. It's about the size of the Earth's orbit around the sun and it's obviously artificial. The living area inside the ring provides about three times the Earth's surface area, there's gravity due to the ring's centripetal force, and day and light cycles are created by shading the sun with huge panels. (Find the physics of Ringworld here.) The mission seeks to discover who created the Ringworld, why they created it, and whether they're friendly or threatening.

Ringworld is a high concept novel and I generally love high concept novels. Ringworld has big ideas in a grand setting. Images of Ringworld will stay with me forever. Unfortunately, the characters are dull and the actual action in Ringworld would fill only a few pages. While I wanted to explore and experiment on Ringworld, the characters were usually discussing, bickering, arguing, and philosophizing. Some of this was interesting, such as the discovery that the Puppeteers were covertly performing genetics experiments on other species, the contemplation of what factors might make civilizations rise and fall (cycles of culture and barbarism is also a theme in the last Niven book I read, The Mote in God's Eye). But much of it was teachy as characters spent too much time explaining evolution, genetics, meteorology, geology, and the physics and mathematics of the shape of orbits, velocities, heat transfer, and tensile strength. Worse, some discussion topics that started out interesting became repetitive and tiresome, especially the philosophical discussions about Teela's luck which kept coming up and lasting too long.

I love Larry Niven's big ideas and I know he can write really exciting science fiction even if he can't write decent female characters. Ringworld is a great idea that gets obliterated by dull characters and too much talking. (Yet it won the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and Locus Award.) There are several prequels and sequels to Ringworld in Larry Niven's RINGWORLD and KNOWN SPACE universes. I listened to Blackstone Audio's production which was nicely narrated by Tom Parker.

There was a recent announcement that they are turning this 1970 novel into a mini-series (now that mini-series are popular again), so I pulled this book off the shelf. It fell apart after reading the first few pages, but I was hooked, so I ordered a new one. I can say I enjoyed it more the second time around.

It’s probably been over ten years since I first read Ringworld. It remains very readable and fun, and shows the power of the mystery story to hold up over time no matter what genre. The basic story of Ringworld is a mystery/adventure about a guy recruited to investigate a semi-abandoned ring of land one millions miles wide and a circumference of one Earth orbit.

While fussy readers have spent years pointing out potential mistakes to the author, which he felt compelled to correct, they never did get after him about the main character’s terribly dated dialogue. But here’s the thing about good writing: the aliens’ dialogue is sharply reflective of the character and culture they belong to, so it still reads sharp, clever and often funny.

Twenty-three years after Louis Wu, Teela Brown, the Kzin Speaker-to-Animals and the Puppeteer Nessus set out on an exploratory mission to the Ringworld, Louis Wu and Chmeee (formerly known as Speaker-to-Animals...he earned his name after his original voyage to the Ringworld) are kidnapped by the Puppeteer Hindmost and once again find themselves on the Ringworld. This time they are looking for an advanced piece of technology that allowed the builders of the Ringworld to construct such a massive edifice. But upon reaching the Ringworld the reluctant explorers make a startling and unfortunate discovery...the alien structure has been knocked out of its stable orbit and in roughly a year's time the structure will hit its sun and be destroyed. And so, Louis Wu, Chmeee and Hindmost begin to search for an answer to a seemingly intractable problem, how do they save a structure as vast and complex as the Ringworld from being destroyed?

The Ringworld Engineers was, in many ways, what the previous novel wasn't. While the previous novel did a reasonable job of introducing such an amazing structure to the reader, the story lacked the sense that the Ringworld itself was absolutely necessary for the novel to proceed. It was a fun, adventuresome story, but felt like it could have been set about anywhere in the galaxy and didn't necessarily have to take place on the Ringworld...a structure that holds so much promise for allowing the author's creativity to flow. With the Ringworld surface three million times the surface area of Earth, there is so much room for so much to happen! In The Ringworld Engineers, the author unleashes this creativity. We get to learn much about the Ringworld's history, cultures, and construction, all while we are taken on a riveting journey to save such an incredible structure.

The caveats with this tale are few. I would highly recommend reading Niven's The Protector before reading this story. While The Protector is not technically part of the Ringworld series, it does provide some necessary background. Also, Niven can be a bit jerky with his writing at times, one moment something is happening, and then, in a flick of a character's eye something else appears to be happening, it can be a bit disconcerting at times but doesn't detract from the flow of the story too much.

So, while the previous novel was enough to make me want to pick up the next book in the series, this novel has me eagerly anticipating its successor. I look forward to picking up that novel soon...

I decided to re-read Ringworld over vacation, for it had been years since I read it. The novel has always reminded me of Rendezvous with Rama: the exploration of a vast alien artifact. Obviously, with many differences, but nonetheless, a "similar" feel. In both cases, the mystery of the novel is the mystery of the artifact: how it was created and why was it created and what the heck happened?

Louis Wu, a 200-year old human, is approached by Nessus, a Puppeteer. Nessus asks Wu to join a crew that will explore an ancient artifact. Along with Nessus and Wu, Teela Brown--a young woman who for a time is Wu's lover, and Speaker-to-Animals, a Kzin, join the expedition. The novel itself is basically the exploration's vessel crashlands, they seek to find an escape, and learn a bit about the ringworld and other things. Much of the novel deals with interspecies differences and how they approach those differences along with the effect of Teela's and Louis's age difference. This greatly simplifies the plot, but that is the essence of it. What matters in this novel is the exploration and character interactions, which is what has made it a classic. The world is richly developed, retaining its mystery despite several hundred pages. Wu, Teela, Speaker-to-Animals, and Nessus are given lots of room be themselves and interact. I found Nessus the most interesting, for he has as much mystery--as do the Puppeteers in general--as the ringworld. I found Teela to be the most uninteresting primarily because she is too one-dimensional, I think--as if Niven was over emphasizing her youthfulness and boxed her into that pattern.

Still, this is a novel well worth reading. It is deserving of its classic status.

Ringworld: it's bizarre, outlandish, humorous - and in the end it's a fun romp through the mind of Niven.

Louis Wu, a 200 year-old human is trying to get the most out of his birthday. As his birthday ends in one part of the world he travels to another (via teleporter) to continue his celebration. Along the way he teleports to somewhere unknown, where an odd 2-headed, 3-legged cowardice of a creature named Nessus persuades him to join his mission. Louis caves in easily because he is sick of the monotony of life. Two more characters are recruited; an attractive, ditzy but incredibly lucky lady named Teela Brown and an easily aggravated, highly impatient feline-ish character named Speaker-To-Animals. Together, under the leadership (or hindship) of Nessus they set out to discover what the Ringworld is. What they discover is almost beyond imagination.

When I read about this book I often see it classified as hard sci-fi. I have a hard time calling this book 'hard' sci-fi because much of it seems to be way out of the scope of reality. This book has ships that travel faster than light speed (WAAAAAAY faster), teleporters, alien races moving entire planetary systems, and much more. When I think of hard sci-fi I think of books like Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson - something that actually seems somewhat plausible.

Also, I found much of this book to be quite humorous, however when I read other reviews it doesn't seem like most people find it quite as funny as I did. I found myself laughing out loud on a number of occasions but perhaps I'm like the guy who dresses up in green, and starts hissing and laughing at the silver screen during a Snake's on a Plane showing.

At any rate, this book is as bizarre as it is fun. I highly recommend checking it out!

This is one of those books that's on everyone's must-read sci-fi list. It had good science to it.

Ringworld is like a strip of a Dyson Sphere and the book does a good job of explaining how it could exist, what it would need, and what could go wrong. And these all weave well into the plot.

The problem is that I had trouble connecting with the characters and the stakes. And for me, that is a necessity to make any novel a good one. Characters + setting = plot. This book was setting first. Then it added characters. Then Niven needed something for the characters to do, so he threw in things that would equal a plot. So, I'm not impressed with it as far as a founding sci-fi trope.

Louis Wu is two hundred years old and has seen many strange things out amongst the stars. When a Puppeteer (a species characterized by two heads, three legs and a startling degree of pathetic pusillanimous-ness) named Nessus approaches him about a mission to a strange star system beyond known space, Louis Wu can't help but agree to join the timorous alien. So Louis Wu, Nessus and two others, a twenty year old human woman named Teela Brown who tends to be quite lucky and a Kzin (think eight foot tall, bipedal tiger) named Speaker-to-Animals set off to this strange star system. What they find there would boggle any engineer's mind: A world, not spheroid in shape like any ordinary planet, but an artificial construct that is wrapped entirely around its parent star...a Ringworld. After numerous attempts at contacting the inhabitants of the Ringworld the four intrepid explorers manage to end up (crash) on its surface. Their subsequent exploration of the Ringworld's surface leads them to many unusual wonders and quite a bit of harrowing danger. Can these four explorers figure out what happened to the civilization of those who created the Ringworld and manage to find a way off of its surface?

Niven's Ringworld is an audacious piece of speculative scifi. The engineering talents to create such a structure would be enormous...and obviously well beyond anything we can currently accomplish or will likely be able to accomplish even several centuries from now. But the story of Ringworld, while the structure itself would be a wonderful discussion for engineering students, is not really about the structure, but is more about four explorers trying to survive in an unknown and, at times hostile, environment. And that's primarily where I think Niven went wrong with this story. If you had picked up these four characters and placed them on Planet X a thousand light years from the Ringworld the story could have been much the same. I kept wanting more details about the amazing environment and technology and society that these amazing engineers built...and while some of this popped up occasionally, it wasn't near enough to sate my curiosity about a world so enormously vast it would be impossible to see it all in ten lifetimes.

However, the sheer brilliance of the Ringworld concept makes this story worth four stars...and worth picking up the sequel in the future.

The thing that surprised me the most about Larry Niven's Hugo and Nebula winning sci-fi novel was not that it was published over forty years ago. It was that I could *hardly tell* that it came out in 1970. And the only reason I say "hardly" is because a few times the story talks about "tape" as a sound recording medium. Niven's futuristic vision was so far-reaching that his book could have easily been written today. It's envisioning has stood the test of time. I have never read a book so very scientific, but Niven's marvelous characterization and creative plotting keep the non-scientific reader (uh, me) so entranced that he suspends the need to completely understand! That being said, the sheer science of his work has so riveted a score of science enthusiasts that at one gathering fans who had believed that he discerned a flaw in Niven's imagined Ringworld stood in the halls of their hotel chanting "The Ringworld is unstable. The Ringwold is unstable." The narrative reaches toward the mythopoeic and feels real. I am *most glad* that unlike the original readers who had to wait 15 years for the sequel, I was able to start my journey through The Ringworld Engineers moments after completing the original. And I'm delighted that I have 2 additional sequels and then 4 prequels awaiting me. I highly recommend Ringworld, a story of 2 humans and 2 aliens on a quest to explore a safe harbor for their respective species as an exploding inner galaxy rushes toward them. Highly recommended.

This book was published in 1970 and here I am listening to it in 2014. I realize that my perspective is completely different now from those readers that picked up the first run of the book. I've probably read or watched things that were influenced directly by this novel. Some things that are now tropes or cliches were revolutionary over 40 years ago. But, I only have my own perspective and although I did enjoy this novel, I am only going to give it a 3/5.

This was a slow listen for me. Many audiobooks I've listened to lately I can't stop listening to. I find moments to thrust the ear buds back into my ears. For this one, I stopped midchapter quite a few times. The pacing was too slow for me. I guess I've been conditioned to enjoy fast paced entertainment, but it wasn't that things weren't happening. It was that I didn't really care about the things that were happening. And I didn't care about the people the things were happening to.

I had a problem with the way women and sex were portrayed. This is one thing from the 70's that didn't translate to modern times. Another thing was the pace of the writing and the amount of explanation. The science of the science-fiction was interesting, but so much of it was explained. I wanted to see the science in action instead of just facts. It didn't flow for me.

I did enjoy the aliens. They were unique and each had their own culturally based views. I was familiar with the Kzinti though because I'm a Star Trek nerd. Yes, I have watched Star Trek: The Animated Series (my dad had old tapes from when it showed on Nickelodean). I also spent way too much time on the Star Trek wiki, Memory Alpha, when I was younger. The Kzinti Empire almost even made it back into Enterprise, but this is all beside the point. The first few chapters I was trying to figure out if this story somehow took place in the Star Trek universe.

Overall, I am glad I listened to this book. It was an educational experience in sci-fi of the past. And I was entertained. This novel gets a 3/5 from me.

In my efforts to expand my repertoire of classic Science Fiction I came across Ringworld. Just the description of the Ringworld itself on the back of the paperback sold me on this book. A few days later I was finished with it and figured I would share a few of my thoughts on it. I will try to refrain from any spoilers.

To me this book was about the sense of wonder involved with exploration. Whether it was exploring the reaches of the Ringworld, the mind of a two hundred year old man with the body of a young adult, or the social interactions of beings from three different worlds. Also The puppeteers were a very interesting concept to me. Much different than any other aliens I'd seen portrayed in other Science Fiction, I would like to know more about their race in general.

There are only two negative things I will say about this book. I found that frequently the descriptions of what was going on were misleading or vague enough that I truly had no idea how to picture in my mind what was happening to the characters, and ended up having to just accept whatever the outcome was and move on.
Also as some other reviewers mentioned. All female characters in this book are represented in a rather one sided fashion.

I picked this up and read it because I was going through a list of "Best Sci-Fi books of all time." In most ways, I think the accolades are deserved.

A group of travelers begin a quest in the distant future to explore an unknown object light-years away. Through a magnified view there appears to be a perfect ring, millions of times the size of Earth, moving throughout the universe. The exploration crew is assembled by a large, multi-headed alien named Nessus. Part genius and part cowardice, Nessus' race, the Puppeteers, is almost contradictory in nature, and faces possible extinction through overpopulation. Along with Nessus is an eight-foot tall, alien with orange fur named Speaker-to-Animals. He's named so because he is an ambassador to the human race. He's a ferocious warrior, and his race is despotic. Picture him like a massive, talking Bengal tiger, one part Klingon and one part scholar. The two other crew members are humans: Louis Wu, at two hundred years old, an experienced traveler of the universe, is wise even beyond his years; and Teela, a 20-year old woman who has uncanny luck. The first half of the novel covers their journey to the Ringworld, and the second half concerns their crash-landing and subsequent exploration.

In my opinion, this novel's strength is in the descriptions of the Ringworld and characters. The depth through which author Larry Niven goes to describe the Ringworld is amazing. I truly felt that I could see the landscape, and appreciate the immensity of deserts that stretched further than all of the land on Earth. Additionally, each of the characters possesses rich depth that could easily be the topic of another novel. Nessus, in particular, is profoundly interesting because of his culture's technological advances. Speaking of the technology, that's the major flaw in this novel.

There are countless references to technological advances that simply aren't fleshed out well enough. It's as if Nevin felt that a reader should just take his word for it without description. It wouldn't be so bad if this weren't a sci-fi novel, and if numerous parts of the storyline didn't absolutely hang on the importance of the technology, but details are insufficient enough to cause confusion. There are several other aspects, however, that are simply brilliant. The passages where Niven details the deeper interactions between alien races are sociologically deep in ways that would take eons to fully appreciate. Concepts like an alien intelligence genetically tampering with another world to breed for luck or passivity are terrifying (eugenics on steroids).

Overall, it's a great sci-fi novel that succeeds in character development, but fails in technology development and has a few weak plot points. Niven would have done well to get help from the Ringworld architects to break down how half of their gadgets work, and help from Teela to describe her luck.

Like RINGWORLD this novel starts out with a big idea, but a completely different one from RINGWORLD: what if the human race had subdivided into dozens of subspecies, all retaining human intelligence and all recognizing the others as equals? The size of the Ringworld and the lack of hostile environments allow this to take place. What's more, Louis has been humbled by his addiction and is no longer arrogant and condescending. He now takes honor and ethics seriously and is open to what the Ringworld has to teach him.

If Niven had rewritten RINGWORLD and put these ideas in it, he would have had a masterpiece. Instead we have two books which are both flawed but are quite impressive when you put them together.

The flaws in RINGWORLD ENGINEERS?

The Hindmost is nowhere near as interesting as Nessus was; he's just a paranoid villain with no likeable touches.

Chmeee/Speaker-to-Animals regresses from the nobility he showed at the end of Ringworld, dumping Louis in a desert after a minor disagreement. After that he basically disappears from the story, and good riddance.

Niven never explains how the "lucky" Teela from RINGWORLD came to a tragic end (he sort of explains it two novels later).

As in RINGWORLD, Niven loses interest just when you expect him to spring a fascinating solution. The heroes travel through the alien headquarters, full of advanced technology, and we are told nothing about what they saw, even though it's been their target for most of the novel. Sir Arthur Clarke wrote a whole novel on this situation!

I think the vignettes of the various human species are fascinating (and much better than the stereotypical "natives" in RINGWORLD) but they impede the forward drive of the novel. Likewise the tiresome sex scenes -- I just skipped over them, but that meant losing connection with the story.

So basically for these two novels, the pair is greater than the sum of the parts.

Larry Niven's Ringworld is certainly a classic of sci-fi (as is most of the early Known Space material) by virtually anyone's definition. Louis Wu and his companions return to the Ringworld in this sequel. Compared to the original, this followup novel can only be regarded as a disappointment. Louis Wu has become an addict. Specifically, he is addicted to a machine that stimulates the pleasure centers of his brain and spend days/weeks/months continuously under its influence. He is not a happy camper when he and Speaker to Animals is kidnapped and taken to the Ringworld by a Pierson's puppeteer. The puppeteer wishes to acquire some valuable technology from the Ringworld and wants to use Wu's and his companion's knowledge to find it. Upon arrival at the Ringworld, they realize that it is no longer stable and that if something isn't done it will crash into the star that it orbits within a few years.

There's certainly a lot to like about this novel. Niven certainly knows a fair bit of physics, and he seamlessly weaves this knowledge into his story to give the whole Ringworld an aura of plausibility and level of detail unmatched by anyone not named Arthur C. Clarke. Louis Wu has his share of human weaknesses and is, in some ways, not a very likable main character. Niven also creates an interesting dynamic between the three main characters during the first half or so of the novel. None of the three trust each other, but they all need each other if they are going to get what they want (which is largely mutually exclusive of the others!) and survive. There is also the mystery of Ringworld hanging over the whole story: who built the Ringworld? Why? Can it be saved? Should it be saved?

There are several serious weaknesses in this novel that prevent it from rising to more than a middlin' work in my view. First, and most importantly, the justification for large parts of the story is weakly wound together at best. The characters easily transition from deeply mistrusting each other to working together for the common good at the drop of a hat. Louis Wu rapidly transitions from junkie to worldsaver. I get the sense that Niven had a plan for the story in his mind and tried to shoe-horn everything into this idea. He really needed to step back a bit and put the big picture into perspective. Second, I have to agree with some of the other negative reviews about `risathra'. Niven seems obsessed with the idea of sex between infertile hominid species and spends large tracts of the text on this. I don't see how this advances the story in any way. I'm not interested in speculations as to how to different hominid species might have sex. Third, there really isn't a log `new' in this novel, it really ties together the previous Ringworld novel and several of the other Known Space tales. It is `more of the same'. Each of the early Known Space works was uniquely interesting and different, even if they were tied together with a common thread. The Ringworld Engineers has more of the common thread and less of the uniquely interesting and different.

Bottom line - this is a decent novel, but probably a worthwhile read only for serious LN/Known Space fans. A step below his earlier works.

Ringworld is strange and sometimes enjoyable. The worlds and aliens can be quite confusing at first to keep straight. Louis and Teela’s relationship is downright bizarre and a little creepy since he’s 10 times older than she is and had a relationship with her great-great-grandmother. For people who like sci-fi, it’s probably a great pick.

An entertaining book, with colourful characters, but which seems to fall a bit short in its aspirations. I have not read the following books, which allegedly have taken the series to different heights. The background ploy of galactic level manipulation and obscure grand motivations for civilizational expansion is gripping but at the end more a suggestion than a theme fully explored. Alien species are interesting and delivered cleverly to drive both plot and raise emotional states.
Despite eminent qualities, the first installment does not lure me to continuing reading. We are left with an imprecise promise of adventure spent on a scenario of post civilizational decay i.e. more of the same stuff.
Worth a relaxed read over the Summer holidays.

For a book published in 1970, it holds up quite well. Niven kept things simple, but never failed to deliver the fantastical elements that permeate science fiction. My only gripe is the whole luck thing in regards to people being genetically engineered for luck. That's where things got a little wonky for me, but beyond that I felt like it was a solid read. Not the greatest writing I've ever seen, but it is not a deeply literary work anyway.

As for the Ringworld concept, a blend between a space habitat and a Dyson sphere is really intriguing. The idea of something so massive is really hard to picture, but the sheer immensity proves to be contained in the pages so well that I couldn't help but feel a sense of awe. The story itself isn't much to behold, but from a purely intellectual standpoint it works. Don't expect to be emotional involved like Harry Potter or anything like that.

This is the first of the ring world series of books, and all of them are entertaining and fun to read as a whole set. These are stay up all night reading books good, with compelling characters, an excellent story line, and an awesome plot to go along with it that unfolds over the book and subsequent books in the series. This first book covers the discovery of the Ring World by Louis Wu, Speaker to Animals, and the puppeteer Nessus. While the puppeteer does what they always do (which is leave much of what they know out of the picture because they fear fear) the team is eventually put together with Louis, Speaker, Nessus and Teela Brown who was born lucky (more on that back story is worth reading in the other books).

The crew suffers some of the more typical things that can go wrong, like crash landing on the planet, with some exploration and the search for a way off the planet takes up the rest of the book. Unfortunately this book does not cover much of the people's that inhabit ring world (that comes in other books), but this does set down some of the information for other books that happen in the N-Space group like the man kazin wars and others. So there is a nice continuity throughout the book, and it delivers much entertainment for your reading dollar. This was a well enjoyed book, and read often when restarting the series.
Ring world caused quite the engineering stir when it first came out, as engineers and scientists tried to work out the fundamental dynamics of how something like that would work in real life. That is part of what makes the whole Ring World series compelling, is that real people tried to work out how the ring world works, and why it makes such a compelling read. This is one of those things you "want to find" when you go exploring the galaxy.

Five of five stars, as it was a stay up all night reading the book, compelling and thoroughly enjoyable.

"Ringworld" certainly has a few very big subjects. I think it is probably the best novel that is pure Niven. Larry does a good job here. Perhaps the problem is that Niven picks subjects here that are too big. Let me see . . . The entire milky way is about to be blasted by radiation started from black holes that are swallowing the center of the galaxy. Then, there is the Ringworld, which is so large that one cannot comprehend how large it really is. (I am sorry. If I go for a walk, I might cover several miles, but I only comprehend the world for. about, a 100-yard diameter about myself. The rest of the world is there, but at a lower level of comprehension. The Ringworld is many millions or billions or more times larger than the Earth. Niven knows about this and tailors his story accordingly.

I think Niven does as best as anyone can, given the size of the subjects that he tackles. And, I was satisfied with the huge amount of information with which our heros return to human space. I think the ending works satisfactorily.

The critics about how Niven writes this story should be sentenced to screen 10,000 compounds, each, in a laboratory for superconductivity and for predicting how to achieve superconductivity at higher temperatures. The task is a lot less fun than you think it is. Quite a few of the critics do not seem to understand how science really works.

Also, Niven's attempt at showing how evolution might proceed on a monster ringworld is very, very, good!

Buy the book. Read the book

Ringworld is a very good piece of science fiction. The premise involves the exploration of an artificial world, created in the shape of a ring by a technologically advanced civilization that appears no longer to be present. As the ring is built with a radius of approximately 1 AU, the surface area is thousands of times that of Earth or any other known planet.

The puppeteer and kzinti races introduced in the book are both quite imaginative, as is the very idea of the ringworld itself. Where the novel is less strong is in the character development. The main characters often seem to be portrayed merely as typical members of their races. Their individuality within their races is barely explored, and this makes the characters lack a certain depth.

Also a minor nitpick about this hardcover edition (the 1977 Holt, Rinehart, and Winston book club edition) is that there are a relatively high number of typographical errors present in the text. It only amounts to perhaps ten throughout the novel, but it does distract from the story and make the book seem less professional and well-polished.

Overall, I do recommend this book. It uses a number of original elements that kept me engaged in the story from start to end. Just don't expect to empathize with the characters, as they are pretty boring in and of themselves.

One of the greatest adventure/sci-fi novels ever written, if you can take concepts that are extremely out there. Still, much of what you will find herein has a solid scientific basis. In other words this is a novel more in the tradition of Arthur C. Clark, but writ large. A sprawling tour of a far flung future that is, at the same time, written from a rather personal perspective and never really strays from four key characters; at least in direct interaction.

It is unapologetically complex and intricate, and does not cater to those who only seek prose or etc. If beautiful and/or easy to read writing is what your after this isn't for you. Nor however is it a novel for those who easily get tripped up by some of the rather odd sci-fi conventions that arose in the late 70's and early 80's, a time when such concepts as "psychic abilities" were popular fare.

But if you are looking for an otherwise solid sci-fi tale with an adventure that, in scope, dwarfs most other novels ever written then you'll be right at home with Ringworld. And I do mean dwarfs, as the movie is still considered by many to be too expensive to make, despite the release of Avatar and a writing style and plotline that almost lends itself to being adapted to the big screen.

RINGWORLD has become Larry Niven's most successful novel, winning the Hugo and Nebula awards upon its release in 1970. It follows the multitude of stories in his Known Space universe written in the late 1960s (collected in NEUTRON STAR), and tells of the discovery of a massive ring-shaped world around a star 200 light years from Known Space.
The novel opens with the 200th birthday celebration of Louis Wu in the mid-2800s. This is an era so far ahead of Niven's earlier short stories (Beowulf Shaeffer lived in the mid-2600s) that puppeteers are only a faint memory and the fusion drive has been replaced by the reactionless engine for which the Outsiders were charging a trillion stars in the story "Flatlander." Entering a transfer booth, Wu is diverted to a hotel room in which the mad puppeteer Nessus offers the job of exploring the Ringworld, which the puppeeters have just discovered in their retreat from the Galactic Core explosion. Louis Wu and Nessus are joined by Speaker-to-Animals, a Kzin ambassador, and Teela Brown, a ditzy young woman who seems to be incredibly lucky.
After briefly visiting the puppeeter exodus (which is in a form that will surprise those who formed their impression of its appearance from NEUTRON STAR), Louis Wu and company arrive at the Ringworld, hoping only to reconaissance and return to Known Space. A crash landing forces them to explore this remarkable world, 93 million times the size of the Earth, and treat with its shocking inhabitants. The luck of Teela Brown seems to have a large influence on their travels, and the travelers are drawn into a quest much larger than they foresaw.
Characterization in RINGWORLD isn't perfect. Louis Wu and Teela are annoyingly obsessed with sex, and Speaker-to-Animals and Nessus are unconvincing as aliens. Nonetheless, the real main character of the novel is the Ringworld itself, one of the most ingenious concepts in science fiction. A million miles wide and over 100 million miles long, its scale defies human imagination
RINGWORLD is built upon the Known Space short stories Niven wrote from 1966-68 and it's absolutely necessary to read the collection NEUTRON STAR to have any idea what's going on in RINGWORLD. It's worth it, the Known Space stories are Niven's best works, many are award-winners.
RINGWORLD is an excellent cap to the Known Space short stories and a highly entertaining adventure. I'd recommend it to any fans of science fiction who have enjoyed Niven's short stories in that universe. However, be aware that the two sequels it spawned are very poor indeed.

I ready this book first when I was in high school, and I must say that it blew my mind then. The main point of this book is not really character development or relational development but a pure exploration novel. The Ringworld is the point of this book, and the most enjoyable, exciting, and complex physical character I have ever read. As the four characters explore the ancient, but technologically advanced ruined civilization, they gain insight into a future that is both fascinating and horrifying.

I do want to note that the only female character, Teela Brown, is an underdeveloped idiot compared to the others. Although sexism in this manner often makes books nearly unreadable to me, Ringworld itself is so fascinating and amazing that it more than make up for it. Once again, this is not a book about characters. This is a book about an ancient, but futuristic marvel.

Buy the book and go on an adventure of a lifetime.

The concepts that Niven uses in this novel are very interesting - I suspect that is the main reason most people have read it. The physics and nature of the Ringworld itself are unique in the sci-fi genre and highly worth being familiar with if you are a sci-fi 'geek.' The vastness and the scope of the artificial world known as Ringworld are endless fodder for discussion and imagination.

But one of the other major concepts in the book is more rational than physical, namely the nature and use of 'luck.' Not a topic that is visited very often by any writers, I really liked Niven's idea of it for this storyline. It is an interesting idea that luck plays such a large role for the characters (one was genetically bred for their luck!?!).

The characters are likable and very unique. Their uniqueness is also consistent throughout the novel, which was nice, and their cooperation (or not) is important for the adventure they are on. The neat little tools and gadgets in the novel are also cool to imagine.

Admittedly, the writing is a bit stilted and choppy. Regardless of this, readers of the Foundation series as well as those who enjoy McDevitt's work will appreciate this book.

I have always liked Larry Niven, and find a lot of his work fun and entertaining to read. This book was no exception as the ring world is something that would be personally fun to explore, much like finding a dyson sphere to go along with it, but if there is not enough material to make one, then a ring world is your next best thing, and this book does not disappoint from any viewpoint. This was one of those stay up all night reading books.

The book moves the two main characters 20 years into the future from the original book, ring world, where Louis Wu has become an addict to an electrical stimulation system, and Speaker to Animals has prospered and earned his full kazin name. What is cool about the book is not just how both the main characters revert back to how they acted in ring world to a great extent, but how the story spends more time describing the characters, peoples and customs of the folks who live on ring world. Even the puppeteer is authentic in how he acts/reacts to the events happening in the story line. You also find out what happened to Teela Brown in this story, and not to do a spoiler, it is interesting to find out how niven ties all these elements together into a very fascinating book.

Rated this book five of five stars, because the story was compelling, it was entertaining, and it was interesting to go back and revisit the characters 20 "book years" after the original ring world.

The premise of this book holds so much potential but the execution just didn't work for me. Of course, I've heard of Larry Niven and his Ringworld series for a very long time but had never gotten around to reading any of it until recently (45 years after original publication). Niven's characterization of technology holds up well, as most successful and prolific sci-fi writers are exceptional "forward-thinkers". But I never really got comfortable with the tone of the book. At times I was reading it as a light-hearted, almost humorous story, in the vein of Douglas Adams but it didn't really feel right. So, I'd start to take it more seriously, like I would Asimov or Clarke, but that didn't work either. And, most disappointingly, the story just peters out before the end. With other series by other authors, such as those already mentioned, I can't wait to pick up the next book in the series but with this one I feel like...maybe, I'll read the next one at some point...maybe not.

I did not choose to read this book; a client is reading it, and I need to keep pace. I figured it won a Hugo so how bad could it be? I would never have guessed.
Other posts have really said it all: the characters are cardboard and so is the dialogue. Often I could not tell (even after re-reading) who was speaking, but - honestly - it did not make the slightest difference. As for the plot - there was none. A "puppeteer" - a creature with two heads not seen by human in many years - chooses two humans and a semi-savage cat-like creature (by far the most interesting character, partly because of its schizoid presentation - sometimes chasing rabbits to guzzle them down leaving blood all over its face, sometimes perfectly reasonable.) The two humans are a 200 year old man of uncertain occupation and a 20 year old very beautiful (of course) girl. Their goal - to reach the Ringworld - an artificial star-circling construction millions of miles in diameter which the puppeteers have stumbled upon. They want more knowledge of it because it stands in the track of their inter-galactic migration to escape the effects of a sort of smaller Big Bang which will come their way (and Earth's) in 20,000 years. However, by nature puppeteers are extremely fearful, even though they have been completely manipulating both the human and kzin (cat-like) races for centuries. So to deal with this extremely important matter they rely on one of their species whom they regard as on the edge of madness, two humans - one bored out of his skull (Louis) and the other with the depth of a pot-hole (Teela - she has been chosen because she is "lucky" (no -really) butshe only comes along because she is in love with Louis although they have about as much in common as Queen Elizabeth and I) - and Speaker (the cat-like creature) who would half the time be ready to tear the throats out of his companions. (And I don't blame him; if I had to live with such boring creatures who do little but prattle about things that they understand (if at all) badly, I'd want to off them, too.)
Anyway, they zoom off in a super spaceship that will be the reward provided by the puppeteer if the mission is successful (though at what is never quite clear.) At about page 250 or so, it occurs to Louis that their is a reason that the puppeteers are thus named - they are master manipulators. This was a question I asked myself on page 3, as would any normal person.
Anyway, after a long and boring voyage, they more or less crash into Ringworld, and they have to find someone or something to help them get their ship moving again. (Heard this plot before?) So they travel hundreds of thousands of miles in little ships, at one point idiotically deciding to go straight through the most gigantic possible storm rather than going around it. They discover the inhabitants of Ringworld are humans - rather unlikely as they evolved thousands of light years from earth. They have regressed from being highly civilized and technologically advanced because (our foursome theorizes)some self-generating space neo-bacteria (which does not trouble the voyagers) made them sick, and their flying cities (no kidding - right out of Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe) faw down and go boom, destroying the cities below them. Some of the civilized people who were away return much later, but all but one of them either become idiots (no kidding) or more or less die of boredom. The one who remains - a sort of cosmic super-whore (no kidding) named Prill - lives in a flying city/police station that was luckily self powered, pretends to be a god to the natives who provide her with food. The ships of our intrepid four out of all the millions of square miles available manage to fly into the police station's equivalent of a drunk drivers holding tank - their ships immobilized within an enormous space. Thus, they have accidentally found (presumably) the only civilized being left, Prill, who eventually allows the three of them (Teela has disappeared though her ship is still there, most likely dead - but we know better) into her city, just before they die of hunger and thirst. (Louis's main complaint since the crash of their ship is that he can't get any coffee. Deep, man.)
Anyway, they continue to blather and prattle about how to get their ship going again. Louis figures out a way, though he does not explain it to anyone. It involves getting some wire that had been used by the civilized ringworlders to hold in place vast black plates far, far above the ringworld to provide day and night - a good thing since killer sunflowers that function like gigantic ray-guns (I do not joke) have evolved and overrun millions of square miles over which the four must fly, but only at night when the sunflowers don't see them. The wire was broken when the spaceship had flown into it, millions of miles of wire falling to the ground. So, to ground our party must go. Teela shows up with one of the uncivilized ringworlders, a muscle-bound hero with a large sword (get it?) He is called Seeker because he is on a quest to reach the giant arc - a kind of visual illusion. Teela who now loves Seeker, despite the fact that he is somewhat of a moron, does not disenchant him. She no longer has any feelings for Louis. Snap, just like that.
Anyway, getting the wire involves a battle with the local groundling natives who attack them en masse because - because they do. The puppeteer loses one of his heads, but Teela makes a tourniquet and he is brought back to the flying police station, where his medical kit automatically takes over and keeps him alive until he can get back to the ship where he has a supply of other heads. (Cool. I liked the same idea in one of the OZ books I read when I was eight.) Teela and Seeker elect to return to the ground and stay on Ringworld - the author implies heavily that they will regenerate the civilization.
Anyway, after a longish and tedious journey, they find the crashed ship. Louis uses the flying police station, one of the small individual ships held by it and the wire to drag their spaceship up to the top of an enormous, thousands of miles high mountain called the Fist of God (for no particular reason.) Louis has correctly surmised that it is a kind of vent into space, too high for the Ringworld to lose its atmosphere, and our heroes tumble out into space pulling the ship to which they will return with them.
Anyway, the story just stops. Puppeteer will apparently go home and be allowed to mate with his leader, Prill and Louis have "the start of a beautiful friendship" and Speaker realizes that he does not want to bring his civilization either the truth about the puppeteer manipulation of their evolution or the plans for the supership because it will just cause his kind to become enraged and attack the puppeteers and be destroyed. What the puppeteers will do is unclear because the material out of which Ringworld is made is impervious to the radiations that are on the way. Humans will use the new supership to develop a mass migration to another part of space or they won't. Speaker will have to do some fast talking one would guess. Nothing is resolved.
Anyway, many of the other reviews have spoken of the author's bad writing getting in the way of his interesting ideas. As far as I'm concerned, the ideas are even lamer than the writing. What I have not told you is that (I swear) it is Teela's "luck" that controls all that happens. You see, for five generations her ancestors have won the Earth lottery that allows people to have extra children. Thus, (I hate to tell you) she is genetically lucky, luck said to be a kind of power than an individual has or does not have. This makes about as much sense mathematically or in common sense as George Bush's foreign policy, well maybe a little bit more. The book is filled with "Big Ideas" that are "beyond"/in contradiction to anything we now know about physics, math, psychology or most anything else. It is filled with what Woody Allen once called "heaviosity."
Anyway, most of science fiction has always been about a certain kind of wish fulfillment for power. Just think: you could have luck and control everything. Most of the good or great science fiction tamps down on this tendency or at least manages to write about it in exciting, vivid ways. Neither is true here. This is the bad stuff, popular but bad. Badly written, ill-conceived and just downright dull.
(As Mr. Monk would say, "Of course I could be wrong, but I don't think so.")

The Ringworld is a masterpeice of engeneering on breathtaking scale. Four individuals are sent on a mission to discover it's secrets and find out what kind of place it could be for them.
Louis, an old man kept young by drugs common on earth in his time is an eccentric jack of all trades becomes the pivotal force behind the mission. Teela, young, nubile, and exceedingly lucky, luckily stumbles into the right place at the right time to be included in this mission. Speaker-to-Animals, a large, tiger-like alein of a feirce race of warriors is a Diplomat to earth, and is also requested to join. Then there is Nessus....the puppeteer, a strange alien who's entire civilization is based on cowardace is given the job of leading this mission because of his insanity. He's not quite as cowardly as befits any sane puppeteer, and so is considered quite mad by his peers.
They find the Ringworld, and must navigate it to learn it's secrets, and survive long enough while doing so to escape this strange world of wonder. Along the way, they must also learn thier own personal interworkings.
The story was excellent. I would have hoped to learn more about the Ringworld, and it's people, but I suppose that's what the sequals are for!

Sometimes when I read a science fiction novel I feel frustrated that the author is so in love with the world they created that not enough effort is put into creating an interesting story and set of characters to go with it. With "Ringworld" the problem is reversed. The Ringworld is a fascinating concept - a ring around a star with the landmass of a million Earths and space for a trillion inhabitants. Niven does his best to match that concept to characters who are equally fascinating, but in the end I felt cheated that we had not been shown more of the Ringworld.

That's not to say that this is a bad book at all. It's just that the tale of inter-species intrigue and bonding that makes up the story is less compelling than the setting in which it takes place. Like most people I was intrigued enough by Ringworld to read the sequels, but unfortunately the more I learned about Niven's vision of Ringworld the less wonderful it seemed. Ironically, the best thing to come out of this book may be the "Man-Kzin Wars" series, where Niven opens up his universe to short stories by other writers.

Niven has a strange way of managing to blend hard science fiction with some wacky humor. Or maybe it's just me. I dunno. In any event, Ringworld seems to accomplish this. The Ringworld is an intermediate between planets and the Dyson sphere, a theoretical structure put forward by Freeman Dyson as the preferred body to live on by what would probably be considered a Type II civilization. (If I remember correctly, the theoretical Type II civilizations can harnass the energy of stars, and a Type III civilization can harness the power of entire galaxies. I don't remember what Type I was, but I'd guess that the Ringworld would be about 1.5. To give you some idea, I think the scale puts the most technologically-advanced civilization on Earth as something like Type 0.6.). In exchange for the design plans for an ultrafast hyperdrive, along with the prototype, the puppeteer Nessus has humans Louis Wu and Teela Brown and kzin Speaker-to-Animals explore the Ringworld. The four become marooned on the Ringworld, where civilization has long ago toppled into barbarism. With some ingenuity manage to escape, except for Teela, who stays behind of her own volition.
One thing that is never satisfactorily explained, though, is how it is that the Ringworld engineers and inhabitants, all slight variants of humanity, arrived there. There is some vague speculation that they might have been taken as pets or such from Earth by another alien species, but no real explanation. This is explained in _The Ringworld Engineers_, but since Niven hadn't originally intended to write the sequel, it seems odd that he didn't wrap up this question in Ringworld.

Ringworld is the flagship story of the most engaging and poorly marketed sic-fi saga that I'm familiar with.

Loving Ringworld, when I discovered that it was actually part of a larger saga called 'Known Space', I went about trying to understand what were all the stories and in which order I should read them. Little did I realise that this would be an enormous task that is still partially unfinished. Part of the complexity is that Larry Niven is not the author of all the books.

Building on a variety of excellent pieces of research, I have pieced together the following work in progress and ask those who perhaps might be able to help to comment on this post. Currently, I am working my way through the 27th Century and will be making updates as I go along.

I feel strongly that reading the saga in chronological order is the way to best enjoy the Known Space saga, Ringworld is the first book that I would recommend to start with and then go back to the chronological beginning in 1975.

Chronological Reading Order - Known Space Saga
------------------------------------------

20th CENTURY

Nr 1 - after 1975 "The Coldest Place" (Tales of Known Space: The Universe of Larry Niven)
Nr 2 - after 1975 "Becalmed in Hell" (Tales of Known Space: The Universe of Larry Niven)
Nr 3 - 1989 "Wait it Out" (Tales of Known Space: The Universe of Larry Niven)
Nr 4 - 1996 "Eye of an Octopus" (Tales of Known Space: The Universe of Larry Niven)

21st CENTURY

Nr 5 - 2042 "How the Heroes Die" (Tales of Known Space: The Universe of Larry Niven)
Nr 6 - 2099 "The Jigsaw Man" (Tales of Known Space: The Universe of Larry Niven)

22nd CENTURY

Nr 7 - 2106 World of Ptavvs
Nr 8 - 2112 "At the Bottom of a Hole" (Tales of Known Space: The Universe of Larry Niven)
Nr 9 - 2113 "Intent to Deceive" (orig. "The Deceivers") (Tales of Known Space: The Universe of Larry Niven)
Nr 10 - 2123 "Death by Ecstasy" (orig. "The Organleggers") (The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton)
Nr 11 - 2124 - 25 "The Defenseless Dead" (The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton)
Nr 12 - 2125 "Phssthpok" (Protector)
Nr 13 - 2126 "ARM" (The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton)
Nr 14 - 2126 The Patchwork Girl
Nr 15 - 2127 "The Woman in Del Rey Crater" (Flatlander)
Nr 16 - 2135 "Cloak of Anarchy" (Tales of Known Space: The Universe of Larry Niven)

24th CENTURY

Nr 17 - 2341 Protector, 2nd part, rest of the book
Nr 18 - 2341 A Gift from Earth
Nr 19 - Thousands of years ago: "Jotok" by Paul Chafe (Choosing Names (Man-Kzin Wars VIII))
Nr 20 - 2366 "The Warriors" (Tales of Known Space: The Universe of Larry Niven)
Nr 21 - 2366 "Telepath's Dance" by Hal Colebatch (Choosing Names (Man-Kzin Wars VIII))
Nr 22 - 2366 "Echoes of Distant Guns" by Matthew Joseph Harrington (Man-Kzin Wars XII)

2367-2433 First Man-Kzin War - ending with the signing of the MacDonald-Rishaii Peace Treaty

Nr 23 - 2367 "One War for Wunderland" by Hal Colebatch (Man-Kzin Wars X)
Nr 24 - After Angel's Pencil, "Misunderstanding" by Hal Colebatch and Jessica Q. Fox (Man-Kzin Wars XIII)
Nr 25 - 2373 "The Colonel's Tiger" by Hal Colebatch (Man-Kzin Wars VII)
Nr 26 - 2375 "Madness Has Its Place" (Man-Kzin Wars III)
Nr 27 - 2382 "The Trooper and the Triangle" (Man-Kzin Wars XII)
Nr 28 - 2384 "Choosing Names" (Choosing Names (Man-Kzin Wars VIII))
Nr 29 - 2391 "The Man Who Would be Kzin" by Greg Bear and S.M. Stirling (Man-Kzin Wars IV)

25th CENTURY

Nr 30 - 2400 (est.) "Two Type of Teeth" by Jane Lindskold (Man-Kzin Wars XIII)
Nr 31 - 2402 "Trojan Cat," by Gregory Benford and Mark O. Martin (Man-Kzin Wars VI)
Nr 32 - 2404 "A Darker Geometry" by Gregory Benford and Mark O. Martin (Man-Kzin Wars VII)
Nr 33 - 2404 "Galley Slave" by Jean Lamb (Choosing Names (Man-Kzin Wars VIII))
Nr 34 - 2406 "Catspaws" Chapter 1 (Man-Kzin Wars XI)
Nr 35 - 2408 "The Corporal in the Caves" by Hal Colebatch (Man-Kzin Wars X)
Nr 36 - 2410 "Slowboat Nightmare" by Warren W. James (Choosing Names (Man-Kzin Wars VIII))
Nr 37 - 2410 "The Children's Hour" by Jerry Pournelle and S.M. Stirling (Man-Kzin Wars II)
Nr 38 - 2419 "Windows of the Soul" Paul Chafe (Man-Kzin Wars IX)
Nr 39 - 2367-2419 "Pick of the Litter" by Charles E. Gannon (Man-Kzin Wars XIII)
Nr 40 - 2413-2420 "Tomcat Tactics" by Charles E. Gannon (Man-Kzin Wars XIII)
Nr 41 - 2419 "Deadly Knowledge" by Hal Colebatch (Man-Kzin Wars XIV)
Nr 42 - 2420 "The Asteroid Queen" by Pournelle and Stirling (Man-Kzin Wars III)
Nr 43 - 2420 "His Sergeant's Honor" Hal Colebatch (Man-Kzin Wars IX)
Nr 44 - 2421 "In the Hall of the Mountain King" by Pournelle and Stirling (Man-Kzin Wars V)
Nr 45 - 2425-2428 "Music Box" by Hal Colebatch (Man-Kzin Wars X)
Nr 46 - 2427 "Three at Table" (Man-Kzin Wars XI)
Nr 47 - 2430 "Grossgeister Swamp" (Man-Kzin Wars XI)
Nr 48 - 2433 "Catspaws" Chapter 2-15 (Man-Kzin Wars XI)
Nr 49 - 2391-2435 "The Survivor" by Donald Kingsbury (Man-Kzin Wars IV)
Nr 50 - 2435-2439 "The Heroic Myth of Lt. Nora Argamentine," by Donald Kingsbury (Man-Kzin Wars VI)
Nr 51 - 2435 (est.) Treasure Planet by Hal Colebatch & Jessica Q Fox
Nr 52 - 2437 "A Man Named Saul" by Hal Colebatch and Jessica Q. Fox (Man-Kzin Wars XIV)
Nr 53 - 2438 (est.) The Marmalade Problem" by Hal Colebatch (Man-Kzin Wars XIV)
Nr 54 - 2440 "Iron" (Man-Kzin Wars I)
Nr 55 - 2440 "Inconstant Star" by Poul Anderson (Man-Kzin Wars III)
Nr 56 - 2445 "Pele" Poul Anderson (Man-Kzin Wars IX)

2449-2475 Second Man-Kzin War

Nr 57 - 2449 Heritage" by Matthew Joseph Harrington (Man-Kzin Wars XIV)

2491-2495 Third Man-Kzin War

Nr 58 - Between the Third and Fourth Wars: "Hey Diddle Diddle" by Thomas T. Thomas (Man-Kzin Wars V)

26th CENTURY

2500-2505 Fourth Man-Kzin War
After 2505 "Bound for the Promised Land" by Alex Hernandez (Man-Kzin Wars XIII)
2514-2590 "Ethics of Madness" (Neutron Star)
2554 "AQUILA ADVENIO" (Man-Kzin Wars XII)
2559 "Cathouse" (Man-Kzin Wars I)
2559 "Briar Patch" [sequel to Cathouse] (Man-Kzin Wars II)
2566 "At the Gates" by Alex Hernandez (Man-Kzin Wars XIII)
2570 "Zeno's Roulette" by David Bartell (Man-Kzin Wars XIII)
2578 (est.) "Lions On The Beach" by Alex Hernandez (Man-Kzin Wars XIV)
After the Fourth Man-Kzin War
After the Fourth Man-Kzin War "War And Peace" (Man-Kzin Wars XI)

?-2575: Fifth Man-Kzin War

27th CENTURY

2600-2618: Sixth Man-Kzin War

During the Sixth War: "Leftovers" by Matthew Joseph Harrington (Man-Kzin Wars XIV)
After the Sixth War: "Prisoner of War," by Paul Chafe (Man-Kzin Wars VII)
After the Sixth War: "Destiny's Forge" by Paul Chafe
After the Sixth War: "Independent" by Paul Chafe (Man-Kzin Wars XII)

2637-57 Juggler of Worlds -- Chapters 1-5
2641 "Neutron Star" (Neutron Star)
2637-57 Juggler of Worlds -- Chapters 6-8
2645 "At the Core" (Neutron Star)
2637-57 Juggler of Worlds -- Chapters 9-10
2644 "A Relic of the Empire" (Neutron Star)
2637-57 Juggler of Worlds -- Chapters 11-12
2645 "Flatlander" (Neutron Star)
2637-57 Juggler of Worlds -- Chapters 13-16
2646 "The Handicapped" (orig. "Handicap") (Neutron Star)
2637-57 Juggler of Worlds -- Chapters 17-18
2647 "Grendel" (Neutron Star)
2637-57 Juggler of Worlds -- Chapters 19-29

2650-52 Fleet of Worlds - Chapters 1-38
2637-57 Juggler of Worlds -- Chapters 30-34
2651 "The Borderland of Sol" (Tales of Known Space: The Universe of Larry Niven) - Already covered in Chapters 30-34 of Juggler of Worlds
2637-57 Juggler of Worlds -- Chapters 35-36

2650-52 Fleet of Worlds - Chapters 39-42
2637-57 Juggler of Worlds -- Chapters 37-50

2654-55 "Procrustes" (Crashlander)
2655 "Ghost" (Crashlander)

2637-57 Juggler of Worlds -- Chapters 51-56

2656 "Fly-by-Night" by Paul Chafe (Man-Kzin Wars IX)
2657 "The Soft Weapon" (Neutron Star)

2658-60 Juggler of Worlds - 2nd part from chapter 57 to "Epilogue"
2670 Destroyer of Worlds
2685 "The Color of Sunfire" (Bridging the Galaxies)

28th CENTURY

2780 Betrayer of Worlds

29th CENTURY

2830 "There Is a Tide" (Tales of Known Space: The Universe of Larry Niven)
2850 Ringworld
2878 The Ringworld Engineers
2882 The Ringworld Throne
2893 Ringworld's Children
2892 "Peter Robinson" by Hal Colebatch (Man-Kzin Wars X)
2893 Fate of Worlds: Return from the Ringworld
2895 "String" (Man-Kzin Wars XII)
2899 "The Hunting Park" (Man-Kzin Wars XI)

30th CENTURY

2965 "Peace and Freedom" by Matthew Joseph Harrington (Man-Kzin Wars XII)

32nd CENTURY

3105 "Safe at Any Speed" (Tales of Known Space: The Universe of Larry Niven)

THE DISTANT FUTURE

12263 "Teacher's Pet" (Man-Kzin Wars XI)
22750 Wavefront of lethal radiation from core explosion reaches Known Space

This is a story set around a thousand years in the future, in which Nessus, a member of the cowardly race known as Pierson's Puppeteers approachs Louis Wu, a human who is in the midst of celebrating his 200th birthday, Teela Brown, a young woman who is the daughter of 5 generations of winning gamblers, and Speaker to Animals, a member of the ferocious, carnivorous Kzinti race of aliens, and persuades them to join him on an exploration mission to the Ringworld - an enormous artificial world in the shape of a spinning ring, about the size of the Earth's orbit, with a sun at the centre. (The Ringworld is, as Niven gives due credit, a variation on Freeman Dyson's idea of worlds in the form of complete hollow spheres surrounding suns).
The one thing that I find annoying about this book is Niven's irritating lack of respect for religion and indiginous cultures. At one point he describes his Ringworld as a world that is filled with "nothing but savagery". All of the indiginous inhabitants of the Ringworld are drowned in superstition and naivity. (It should be pointed out here that Niven apparently realised this sin, because he makes up for it by reversing the trend in the next two Ringworld books - in particular Ringworld Throne).
Even his idea of depicting technologically advanced alien species such as the Puppeteers and the Kzinti as races whose entire culture is based on their herbivorous/carnivourous nature I find crude and naive. Still, as implausible as Niven's aliens may be, there is a considerable amount of amusement which one can derive from reading about them, and so Niven has actually done a good job.
In fact, this is indeed one of the very best science fiction novels I have ever read. Niven's characters are vivid, and his vision of the Ringworld is profound and breathtaking. Could the Ringworld ever be built? Probably not. Aside from the gargantuan scope of the project, there are aspects of the Ringworld which make it a near, if not complete physical impossibility. As its mass is only that of the planet Jupiter, its collosal width and breadth would mean it would have to be extraordinarilly thin. So to withstand the stresses of the phenomenal spin (which would be heterogeneous, due to the presence of the two Great Oceans) required to emulate gravity on the inner side, the tensile strength of the foundation material would have to be millions of times that of any known material.
(Note that I am not an engineer, so if my reasoning is wrong, please let me know).

Ringworld. Niven's solution to one heck of a population problem for a species that was so advanced it was scary. Thousand-year old technology built this masterpiece perfect...or did it. That is what Louis Wu: 200 year old space-worn traveler, Teela Brown: 20 year old walking rabbit's foot, Nessus: A two headed, three footed Pierson's Puppetter whose species likes playing God, and Speaker: an 8' tall Kzin with orange fur, and a 'sharp' smile. They are drawn together by fate to gather more data about Ringworld, a ring built around a star, billions of times Earth's surface area, to collect data and determine whether it is habital or just a worthless space artifact. The puppetter's need the world, due to a core explosion's radioactive wave, which will reach them in a hundred years (destroying everything). As they explore it they discover that something went terribly wrong here once, something they weren't supposed to find out about. Do they, and with their ship wrecked by an old Ringworld defense system, will they ever leave to tell others the secrets of Ringworld. Niven answers these questions in his masterpiece: Ringworld

Ringworld won the Hugo and the Nebula Awards for best science fiction book of the year. It also spawned a series of sequels. The book deserves it - the idea for the Ringworld itself is ingenious. A ribbon surrounding a star, spinning for centripetal force (i.e. gravity), will have a huge surface area and would support life just as a normal planet (albeit without seasons). Niven has this world invented by an ancient alien race and sets 4 people out to explore it. Only 2 of the 4 explorers are human. The alien explorers are Niven's second great invention. One is a "Puppeteer," a herbivorous race whose defining characteristic is its cowardice (they won't do anything unless it's completely safe). The other is the "Kzin," fierce, enormous tiger-like carnivors that fought multiple wars with humankind in the past. The intrepid travellers arrive at the Ringworld, but find no evidence of activity. They blunder into some automatic defense systems (taking their spaceship for a meteor), and are consequently marooned on the ring. The story basically follows the quest of the explorers to escape the Ringworld that has apparently suffered a collapse of civilisation.
This exploration itself is not really that important; there's little in the travel and exploration that is particularly exciting or inventive. For adventure through exploration, Clarke's Rendevous with Rama is much better. Instead, the development of the Puppeteer race and the conflict between the three races of the exploration party contains the bulk of the interest. In addition, there are some neat but plausible scientific dodges that make Niven's universe believable and open to countless additional opportunities (hence, sequels are likely to be just as good as this book).
Unfortunately, the Kzin race is much more standard (think feline Samuri and you have the basic idea). The main human character is interesting, but his (young, nubile, and female) companion is not. Niven invents the idea that luck is a hereditary trait (inherited by this young woman), and allows the 4 travellers to be tossed about by the whims of her so-called luck/fate. While it's convenient to move the plot along, it adds a sense of artificial contrivance that the book would do better without. She could have been useful as the voice of inexperience (therefore someone to whom the reader could relate) who needed various scientific or social themes explained; instead she is uninterested and flakey, so serves no purpose (except to move the plot).
I do recommend this book. The 3-star level is less than it deserves. It doesn't quite make it to 4-star status, in spite of its ingenious inventions, mostly because the plot feels linear and contrived in spite of the wonder. It is reminiscent of Farmer's "Riverworld" series, but much more plausible and better written.

I remember picking this book from the library and thinking "Oh! This must have been the basis for the game Halo." After reading it, however, I realized that this book was also the basis for other video games, such as the Wing Commander series of games and (for at least one interesting plot twist) Master of Orion 2. (I won't put any spoilers in this review, but the twist has to do with an odd trait that you can add to your custom race in MOO2.)

The book was a fun read with a few "deus ex machinae" to get around potential problems before they ever come up, but if you are willing to suspend disbelief enough to imagine a world that is 93 million miles in radius, I don't think you'll have much problem with some of the other plot work-arounds.

All in all, a fun book that is sure to fire the imagination, but not really that much of a hard sci-fi (i.e., "this might happen in our future") novel.

I always called Larry Niven Mr. Bog, because he had some big ideas in his
novels, like moving the planet Uranus in order to move the Earth before the
sun turns into a red giant. But no idea was bigger than Ringworld, a ring
built around a star with 3 million times the surface area of the Earth.
Just the idea is enough to send the mind spinning. And when a Puppeteer
sends Louis Wu and Kizinti Speaker To Animals to the Ringworld to discover
who built it, the adventure is on. Probably Niven's best known work, he
won one of his several Hugos for this masterwork. This is essential
science fiction reading from a master of hard science fiction. Don't want
to give too much away, but Ringworld brings together a lot of loose ends
from Niven's Tales of Known Space.

The first thing about "Ringworld" is that it is a highly readable book; it was so engrossing and smoothly-written that I finished it in a twenty-four hour period with no trouble.

The second thing about "Ringworld" is that its universe is a deep one. By which I mean it is full of gadgets and quirks, a society that has evolved profoundly from the present, alien species with histories of their own, and many generations of fictional technological development. All of this is explained in a wonderfully absorbing manner (if you like that sort of thing, which I do), both by way of introduction to the novel and throughout, while still leaving a sense there is a great deal more to be learned about this fictional world.

The third thing - the best thing - about "Ringworld" is its characters. There aren't many of them - just four, for most of the novel, and one of them is pretty flat - but they do a great job of carrying the story. The three fully-dimensional characters are wonderfully described, and the tension among them is the true motivator of the book.

But this tension is never resolved, and the ending of the story is flat, and that is the fourth thiing - and the worst thing - about the book. The end is certainly satisfying in the sense of resolving the ostensible, plot-level, conflict of the novel, but it is approached too gently, without any major obstacles near the end of the book. Worse, the true conflict and the emotional content of the story are left to hang. Perhaps these are resolved in the sequels; certainly the writing and the sci-fi are interesting enough to merit additional books.

This book is awesome. A known hard sci-fi classic, deserving of that title.

What it is not, however, is a "story" in the classic sense of the word. It shares kinship with old sailor's tales and travel chronicles: "This is where I've been, such and such were its weirdnesses and wonders, and the people there lived so and so."
It is entirely about the world the characters live in, and the incredible artificial habitat they discover on a recon mission. The characters themselves are unimportant, just agents to show you the wonders.

For what it is, it's great though. Not as sophisticated or philosophical as a Stanislaw Lem, as smart as an Asimov, or as well-written as a Gibson, but Niven's book clearly has a place between those.

I've been very much looking forward to finally reading Ringworld. I first spotted it some 20 years ago, but never actually got around to reading it. My hopes and expectations where high when I started reading it.
Partly I'm thrilled by the book. It containes some really amazing technical and sociological concepts. I cannot imagine how anybody can think that this book is based on just one concept: the ringworld itself. Sure, that's a magnificent imaginary leap into the unknown (and certainly was in 1970). But next to that there's this other subplot line, that turns out to be the mayor drive of the story: the actions and chances of a person breeded for luck. How that affects others and herself. And the magnitude of the idea that a cowardice alien race out of fear "improves" at least two whole races (two whole planets) genetically to better fit in their own plans. And how this wonderfully backfires on them. But also on the others. And then there are the nice technical gadgets in this book, ways of transportations, methods to immortallity, ways to build houses, cities and starships (yeah, yeah, and worlds). Enough to fancy hardcore SF-readers.
Partly I was disappointed by the book. I felt it's speed dropped considerably when they landed on the ringworld, and the book switched from SF to (almost) fantasy, with it's all to normal quest-structure. It stopped thrilling me then, though I kept with it, still interested. In part the lack of character depth and development was showing more profoundly in this quest. I didn't mind the sexual parts of the book. They are not arrousing (at least not in the 21th century). I see them as just a normal part in SF from this period (end 1960's, begin 70's. See f.i. Logan's run).
I see the critical notes about character depth, sex and the (in 2000) all to often used queste structures as anachronistical. But still, instead of the 5 star feeling I had about the book, before I ever opened it, I must give it 4 stars, reading it in this day and age. It's a classic SF-book. And that shows in both possitive and negative ways.
But read it anyway!! It's still very much alive. And you'll find out afterwards that a lot of present day writers use Nivens ideas as if they where their own. These ideas have been So influentual that they are now incorporated in SF as a genre.

I picked this book up in an airport bookstore over 15 yrs ago. The title caught my eye, the covert picture sparked my curiosity and the description sealed the deal. I set out to reading it on the plane and was hooked. To this day I couldn't tell you where I was going, but I remember this book and anxiously anticipating my next opportunity to read it.
It's thorough and immersive, creating an entire universe and reality that's an escape yet comfortable. I went on to read the rest of the series and enjoyed them as well. However, they don't compare to this book that is the doorway to that alternate universe. I remember it like it was my own adventure, and have re-visited the series once or twice for old times sake.

I decided to buy this book because of its reputation and I liked the concept of a vast ringworld. Even though I enjoyed some space fiction in the past, by Clarke, Asimov and other writers, I couldn't get into this one. Made it to page 140 because I was stuck with it camping. Didn't like the style of writing, the shallow characters, the slow pace or the many presentations of technological inventions, I found the whole thing boring. I can't believe it won the Nebula and Hugo awards, there were sensational novels by other writers that year, "a maze of death" by P.K.Dick for example. Unlike Dick's books this is just a story, didn't make me think, didn't trigger any interesting extrapolations. And there are sequels to this?

This is one of my favorite books and it was long since time that I stopped holding onto my aging 35 year old paperback and get an ebook version.

However, the formatting for the ebook is a mess. Words are randomly underlined. The indents are huge. It's completely amateur hour. I have been a kindle owner since 2009 and I remember the early days when terrible formatting was the norm, but this is not acceptable in 2016.

I went to the library looking for Niven's Ringworld book and was disappointed to find that they didn't have it. They did, however, have a copy of Ringworld Engineers on the shelf and I picked it up. I was excited, but a bit skeptical. I'm not an avid reader, and I have to find a REALLY good book in order to pay the time and attention necessary to finish reading it. I read this book over the weekend! It was amazing and I couldn't put it down! It makes me wish I'd heard about the Ringworld books earlier, and the rest of this series by Larry Niven.

If you are reading this review, then it means you are at least interested. And if you are interested, grab this book, either on the store or the library or where ever, and read it. I think its great and that you won't be let down. From what I've seen of these reviews of Niven's other books, I'm going to need to those ones now too!

Happy reading!

The ringworld is a great idea, but I think the story gets off track with the whole bit about Teela's luck. It is not satisfying intellectually or emotionally. The luck thing is more magical than sci fi. If you don't like fate and destiny driving stories then you probably won't like the luck device.

Also the way that Louis responds to learning about it is disturbing. He has very limited info but he acts as if his speculations are the truth. I see it as a weak attempt by the author to introduce a wrinkle, and with different treatment it could be an interesting wrinkle, but it doesn't belong. I won't explain more about the luck because I don't want to be a spoiler.

On the other hand the ring world and some of the other ideas about technology are cool, and the puppeteers and the kzin are good alien characters. Overall this book is worth reading, just don't think it is going to be the greatest sci fi ever (instead read A Fire upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge).

As I reflect upon this book, it becomes more and more aggrevating. I began reading this book with great expectations and in the beginning was not dissappointed. I felt a great sense of amazement at what Niven was laying out for us. However, as I believe must always happen with sciencefiction, the book began to dissappointe. I guess this is the inherent flaw with a book written by a human mind, we can only realate what we have experienced. And none of us has experienced anything other-worldly. Perhaps then it is no surprise to discover who the ringworld engineers are. Neverless, I keep expecting more from such a highly rated book.
Once the exploration crew had landed on the ringworld, the book was over for me. The graduer of the ringworld metled into the normalcy of everyday experience. I guess I'm just expecting to much. I think I'm going to need a real alien encounter to be satisfied. However, Niven's creativity seemed to be placed entirely on the concept of the ringworld. The story itself is unimaginative.

...science fiction. I guess I'm what you'd call a SF fanatic. I love to read it in all forms (short stories, flash fiction, space operas, historical SF, theoretical manipulation, etc.), but Ringworld fell flat for me.
The story surrounds four characters: two humans, a two headed 'puppeteer' (who seems to be the equivalent of the cowardly lion with substantial brainpower), and a Kzin (just picture an eight foot Tony-the-Tiger with claw killing capabilities of Edward Scissorhands). These four head out to a newly discovered Ring around a sun some 200 light years from known space. Teela Brown (a human woman) goes along with the group because of her breeding (she was bred for luck), Louis Wu (the other human) goes along because of his past experiences with alien cultures, Nessus (Puppeteer) is the defacto controller of many events as the story unfolds and is part of the founding society that discovered the 'Ringworld,' and Speaker-To-Animals is the Kzin (a warrior race) who joins the group because of his killing skills and prowess.
The characters are shallow and rarely believable. The story unfolds in an almost amateurish fashion and there were several times where I let the book slide from my hand and laughed at it. Seriously laughed at it! How could this have won the Hugo and Nebula awards? Indeed 1970 must have been a VERY bad year.
But if the characters were bad (and they were), the science was good. And this is what tended to shine through, throughout the story. Mr. Niven takes great joy in explaining the Ringworld structure, the strings that hold the various shadow sections in place (yes, I know...it's a puppet analogy...but so what, it's weak in character), the spaceship travel times and drive systems, the flycycle controls, etc. ad nauseum. If he'd spent half that time developing the characters into fully fledged personas and the cultures they encountered (which are TERRIBLY lacking in development) into fully understandable societies, I would have enjoyed this novel 200 percent better. But as it stands, it's a poor book from my perspective. It needs much more, and it simply didn't have it. And didn't touch on opportunities to further these characters into the minds of the reader. C+ is my grade. And that's generous.

Even fans of Larry Niven will be awed by the stirring vision he presents in Ringworld. A band of six hundred million miles in length and a million miles wide is set in orbit around the sun. Although obviously manufactured by an advanced alien civilization, it is discovered by an exploration team to be utterly devoid of intelligent life.
Headed by the swashbuckling Louis Wu, the crew sets out on a laborious trek to expose the mystery of the immense ring's existence. When their journey finally brings them face to face with an entirely primitive humanoid race living in the ruins of a highly-developed metropolis, Wu senses that the solution is all but imminent. Yet little does he know what unapparent mighty forces are secretly at work on the Ringworld.
Despite the book's surrealistic appearance, its idea is based on a distinct scientific possibility. But even though merging a discernible amount of fact with the fiction, Niven ensures a primarily entertaining read with his playful characters and settings.

A mysterious (and mad) stranger offers a rich prize to an apparently mismatched crew, if they will undertake a dangerous mission to a strange land - the Ringworld.
Far from a typical adventure yarn, Ringworld is a landmark science fiction story. The worlds and cultures, the future human history, and the technology conceived for this book (and for other related Known Space stories) are a major achievement of imagination. Larry Niven has a gift for making them all fit and work together into a cohesive and enjoyable whole.
The exploration of the Ringworld, a massive artifact of mysterious origins, forms the backdrop for a further exploration of the history and the cultures in Larry Niven's Known Space series.
Ringworld provides insights and intriguing clues about the two principal alien species of the novel, the Kzin and the Puppeteers, and the history of their interactions with the human race. The creation of alien viewpoints and personalities is exceptionally well handled here. Nessus and Speaker-to-Animals are credible characters with unique viewpoints.
I was particularly pleased with the handling of the warrior culture of the Kzin. Speaker-to-Animals is aggressive and proud, but also intelligent, articulate and judicious. Contrast this with the one dimensional, noble but simple minded Klingons of Star Trek NG.
Ringworld has my recommendation. Other Larry Niven books worth reading include Neutron Star and Protector.
I don't recommend Ringworld Engineers, the sequel to this book.

In Ringworld, Larry Niven takes great lengths to describe the surroundings down to very minute detail at some points so much so that you can picture each scene as if you were there. I've read quite a bit of Niven and I guess for me I'm more impressed by the otherworldly characters he creates than the ships, landscapes, and futuristic cities they inhabit. The Man Kzin Wars series and Draco Tavern come to mind as Niven novels I will and have stayed up late to read just one more chapter. Having said that, if you need a Niven fix, Ringworld will provide enough otherworldly oddities to satisfy your craving.

The construction of a ring shaped world is conceived and physically built by humans in the futures past. It's area is 3 million times the size of Earth's. It was ingeniously designed as an answer to overpolulated worlds. It is also noticed by the puppeteers, an advanced race of apparent cowards that are terrified by it's awesome presence. They choose a crew of 2 humans (one intelligent and one lucky) 1 kzin (a humanoid cat-like warrior)and 1 insane puppeteer to investigate it. A tanj perfect plan!

This was a fun read. I am starting to see that Niven seems to tend to write stories that hint at a belief toward intelligent design. But his ideas of intelligent design are more scientific and less religious. His stories seem to politely scoff at those who worship diety. It's a very interesting concept.

Bought audiobook through iTunes. Had little of the wonder of the first book. The author was obsessed with mating Louis Wu to every female he came across, which felt silly, lurid and jarring to the story. After this book, I don't have the desire to read more.

The Ringworld is an incredibly interesting setting. And some of the characters Niven creates are interesting. Even the plot is marginally interesting (although reliant upon Niven's luck MacGuffin).

The problem is that Niven's writing is like that of a horny teenager. The concept of 'rishathra' was introduced in Ringworld, and it was irritating there. It's even more so here. Niven, like a lot of sci-fi writers, is obsessed with sex and has to constantly interject it into the story. It was somewhat forgivable at the time of Ringworld, but Niven was 42 when this book came out. It's just weird and creepy to have hard sci-fi conversations constantly interrupted with lurid, juvenile sexual errata.

Even the concept is ridiculous. Niven wants us to believe that 'rishathra' is a form of diplomacy. That's pure idiocy even among the same species (considering that it relies upon the extreme convenience of the negotiators being of opposite sex), but Niven introduces creatures as small as cats and as big as skyscrapers, then waves away the impossibility of 'rishathra' as a solution. This is because 'rishathra' as diplomacy is just a lame excuse to let Niven write soft-core porn. Can you think of any need for a story about a ring world to include lines like "she had fine control over the muscles of her vagina"?

Niven has a real head for hard sci-fi, as evidenced by his best work, 'The Mote in God's Eye'. The Ringworld is the most interesting concept Niven has created. Pity he can't just tell us about it, rather than his tiresome fantasies about sexing up aliens.

Ringworld is perhaps the most unique Sci Fi story that I have ever read. The entire premise of the "Ringworld" is full of intriguing possibilities, though Niven chooses to leave something of a mysterious quality about the giant artifact. The actually story takes place many years in the future, after contact with many alien races. The story is interesting, following four adventurers--two humans, a Kzin (giant tiger alien) and a Puppeteer (too weird to describe here). The crew ventures through space to the Ringworld. They explore it from above and below, until a mysterious power crashes them onto the Ring itself. From there it's a fight to discover the secrets of the Ring, to learn from its people, and ultimately, to survive.
Ringworld is one of my favorite books (and I've read quite a bit of Sci FI). Despite some loose ends and unsolved mysteries, it stands well on its own. It goes very well with its sequel, together making one of the most memorable Sci Fi stories of all time.

Luis Wu, 20 years from his glorious exploration of the ringworld, is a recovering wire head. He is kidnapped along with Speaker-To-Animals (now known as Chmee) the Kzin, enslaved to help search the ringworld for riches and technology. When they arrive, they find that the ringworld is off-balance and falling toward its sun. They embark on a journey to satiate the avarice of another puppeteer, and also attempt to save/repair the ringworld in the process. But neither humans nor kzin make good slaves.

This was a great sequel to Ringworld! With more fun technology mixed with fantastic evolutionary possibilities. They meet giants, sea people, vampires, ghouls, and many variations of hominid types. I love the way Niven allows for a large mix of anything between extremely intelligent to mostly instinctive species.

Niven is fast becoming one of my favorite sci-fi authors. His books are about what could happen (science), but [probably] won't (fiction). More and more, SCI-FI is fantasy with lasers instead of melee weapons and space ships rather than horses.

Niven has a comprehensive understanding of the universe. His speculation is top notch, well thought out and beyond insightful. His writing is great: efficient, functional, entertaining, enlightening, completely unpretentious, descriptive and even moving.

As to the other reviews, this book's sexual content is relatively minor. I agree "gratuitous" sexual description ruins-cheapens a book, however it is not the case in this book. It really is only a few paragraphs. So please, don't let that get in the way of giving this book to a young man (or woman, if you can find one interested ;). It might even be enough to get them interested in science.

So put down that book about aliens in space bikinis and read a SCI-FI with some actual sci. This is a great book that puts our lives into perspective. If nothing else read it for the hot PG-13 eroticism! Really good book, but not his most stirring, 86%.

"RingWorld" is so well-knowen that I feel kinda stupid for writing about it - but for those who have'nt read it thus far (and there for cannot call themselves true sci-fi readers):
the protagonist is Louis Wu - a 200 years old human , whom a Peirson's-Puppeteer kidnapp's together with speaker-to-animals - a Kzinty ambassedor , in order to investigate Ringworld - an immense structure , a partial Dyson sphere , a ring around a sun , built by an unknowen race of frightening power. The Puppeteers must have more information. The builders might be dangerous.
The puppeteer , Louis and speaker travel to Ringworld , "land" upon it and go through many adventures in order to mend their spaceship (yes it's hurt , eventhough it's a general-products hull).
This book is among the most praised science fiction books in the world , like "Dune" or the original "Foundation" trilogy , and rightfully so ; I promise you one of the most memorable protagonists you have read about , and ofcourse , no side-kick is equel to speaker-to-animals. The plot is excellent , the science is superb if you let the few points that make this a science-FICTION work pass with a smile instead with a grunt. Besides , not everyone will understand enough to recognize a scientific immposibility , and therefore , the science is also great.
Since we are talking about Niven , you know the writing itself is excellent , filled with interesting ideas , facsinating races and cool weapons , in such good use that I can't put it to words - the book is just too great - read it.
"RingWorld" is a masterpiece by one of the best hard-style sci-fi writers , and is equeled by few indeed.
VERY RECOMMENDED.

Ringworld Engineers is one of the best Sci Fi books I've ever read. It greatly expands on its predecessor, filling in gaps and solving the mysteries of the first book. 23 years after escaping the Ringworld, Louis and Speaker-to-Animals are kidnapped and brought back. Their captor--a deposed Pupeteer leader--is searching for vital technology and secrets that will impress his people and reinstate himself. However, the Ring is falling towards its sun and will soon be destroyed. Thus, Louis and Speaker (now called Chmeee) must find a way to free themselves before the inevitable collision.
As the two travel across the Ring they uncover secrets and origins that could possibly save them--or destroy them. The story is a race against time to uncover the ultimate secrets never revealed in the first book. Despite the protests of a few hardcore Niven fans, most Sci Fi readers I have talked with highly recommend this book, as do I. Together with the original, Ringworld and Ringworld Engineers comprise one of the most compelling, original works of fiction that I have ever read.

Imagine an artificial world made into a ring that is the same distance from the sun as the earth is from our sun. (radius 96 million miles, circumference= 600 million miles). The width is one million miles, and the walls at the edges are 10,000 miles high. Now inside mold entire continents with contours for mountains, lakes, oceans, etc. You could fit millions of worlds in this place, whole sets of species. The builders made sure they provided a way to have a night a day for all parts of the ring . Now put some humans and unique aliens in a space ship to explore the place. What a concept. One of the best settings , ever. The Pearson's Puppeteer is one of the most endearing aliens ever created.
Having said all that, there are scenes where the plot dragged a bit and the character interplay at times seemed a bit drab. But this book is really terrrifc on so many levels and while it leaves you hanging in some areas, it places a part of ring world with you. I should know I read this story over 20 years ago and it still leaves an impression.
Although not a criteria for a book rating, Hollywood should consider making this into a picture.

Ringworld is a marvellously inventive story - two humans and two Aliens, a cariverous, Cat-like kzin and a herbiverous puppeteer - set out to explore a vast world built in a ring around a sun, with a surface area of billions of square miles on which all kinds of societies can flourish. Niven is a trained mathematician, and it makes the story more satisfying that the maths are worked out plausibly. It deserves its many awards for sheer non-stop inventiveness and action. The characters are plausible and fascinating, too. There is a website "Known space", devoted to Niven's works, if anybody doesn't know, and a brilliant new book of the wars of humans and Kzin, The Wunder War, set in the same universe, published recently. There have been two sequels to "Ringworld" published and another due out soon.

This was hailed to me as a classic by several pals who, like me, enjoy hard scifi. My friends were truly passionate about the book, with all its quirky detail and humor, so I agreed to read it. No this is personal, but it just didn't work for me that well.

The plot takes place on a massive belt that is build around a sun, kind of like a ribbon Dyson sphere. As it spins, it creates an artificial gravity for the inhabitants, who are unknown. An unlikely team - an Asian, a felinoid Kzin, a girl gifted with luck, and an alien prostitute - enter and try to unlock its secrets. They go on a long journey and there are many funny asides, such as when the Kzin gets all his fur burned off with the exception of the bush he was sitting upon and a band around his shielded eyes. There are also some very interesting details, such as the medical advances of the time but also the notions that some people are genetically lucky. However, by the end, I did not like the explanation of what had happened: rather than awe, I felt disappointment that it wasn't more clever.

Recommended. It is good hard scifi. I just expected more after so many enthusiastic endorsements.

Larry Niven is not that good a writer, but its anyway slightly fascinating to read about his sci-fi universe. In this book we visit the Ringworld, it's a massive artificial construction meant to support life in space. It's shaped like a massive ring around a star, this ring has got kind of the size that a planet would traverse in an orbit, so it's very big! In Niven's universe humans are just one part of the intelligent species in the universe, other species are pupeteers (a specie superior to humans in intelligence) and kzins (an animal like species, inferior to humans). The most interesting thing of the novel is that it proposes that luck is a genetic property, quite interesting.

At first, I couldn't quite put my finger on it. I am usually the first person to defend SF as primarily an exercise of the imagination. Consequently, flat characters, pedestrian writing and simplistic plots do not detract as much from SF as they would from other genres. The grandmasters of SF like Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein all suffer from literary inadequacy to varying degrees, yet they have all produced stellar works that must count among the classics of the genre.
By this measure, Ringworld should be entitled to the same consideration as the classics. So why are these same failings in this book so grating? The difference, I think, can be found in the authors' contrasting egos. Those other works do not try to make a virtue of their shortcomings. They acknowledge their weaknesses by making them the least significant elements in their respective stories. Such acts of humility predispose us to forgiving them their faults. But in this book, the author is unrepentant. Despite the fact that the characters, the writing and the plot are all weak, unexciting and predictable, these elements are still made the central features of the story rather than the supporting cast. It's almost as if Niven were daring us to take his literary shortcomings to task by shoving them in our face.
To illustrate what I mean, it is instructive to compare this work to something like Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous With Rama. The two novels share some remarkable similarities. They both take a tried and true scientific concept (an alien ark in Rama's case; a Dyson sphere in Ringworld's) and turn them into stories of exploration. Both novels tell a story of initial discovery, then the assembly of an exploration team, followed by adventures and revelations, and finally, escape back to human civilization.
But that is where the similarities end. In Rama, the characters are the least important part of the story. Consequently, their individual blandness does not matter because the characters themselves do not matter. Clarke realized that the only entity that really mattered was Rama itself. So he invested Rama with the mystery, intrigue and personality lacking in his human characters. The result was a spellbinding read because the focus was on the spaceship and the spaceship exceeded our expectations.
In Ringworld, the characters keep getting in the way of the setting. We are forced to consider their squabbles, foibles and pettiness, and in doing so, lose our focus on Ringworld itself. How much awe can discovery hold when the explorers of a new world spend most of their time bickering instead of exploring?
So while the best science fiction deserves to be judged as imaginative science, this novel demands that it be judged as fiction. Yet, this is precisely where it is at its weakest. I suppose that Niven's world still earns marks for its imaginative scope; but its failure to deliver on memorable characters, well crafted language or compelling story turns this particular novel into a sterile and unengaging bore.

Ringworld, one of the books for which Larry Niven is most well known, is an interesting science fiction novel containing a mixture of disperate elements bound together by a common theme and plotline. The book is as imaginative as it is funny, and as exciting as it is odd.
One of Niven's strengths lies in his creation of characters, which are varied and are lended realism by the odd quirks and personalities they each possess. One of the most important parts of this process is motivation; Niven's characters always have a real, burning motivation behind each of their actions, which can bee seen clarly after reading the book. I emphasize "after" because the charcters' motivations are not always immediately apparent- in fact, Niven is so skilled at hiding characters' true intentions until later in the plot that his style would aptly suit the construction of a mystery novel. In many books, one reads of an illogical action and wonders if they will ever understand why it occured. This is never a problem with Niven; you can trust him to have carefully engineered each of his plot twists and odd actions, and they all have both a purpose and a goal.
Ringworld features a gargantuan world of incredible proportions. While Niven's skill comes through in his descriptions of the world's size, it truly shines as he describes what this world contains. Some of the most amazing alien creatures you will ever read about live and breathe within the pages of this book. Many of the world's locales and odd devices are equally stunning in their bizarre brilliance and unexpected properties.
Niven allows you to experience a fanciful version of what it might be like to explore an alien world, and you will find yourself wondering if you would be up to the challenge. His protagonist is as well-developed as any of the other characters, and acts in a particularly human manner. The humanity and clarity with which the protagonist is depicted provides an anchor in an otherwise strange alien world, ensuring the reader does not lose touch with the greater happenings of the plotline.
Ringworld won the Nebula award, perhaps one of the most prestigious awards given to Science Fiction novels in the world. This is no accident, for Ringworld is a truly remarkable book - both for its origionality, and its level of flawlessness of execution. Although a few elements from this book have been copied by later authors and filmmakers (at least after 1970 or so), Niven's ideas remain, for the most part, origional.
Ringworld is an interesting and dynamic book, full of fascinating elements and unpredicable changes. If you are ready for a bizarre adventure, give Ringworld a try.

I was thrilled to, not only see this fine work still in print but, find that the title is also available as an Audible product.
I read this decades ago, and it quickly became a favorite of mine. Years later it has been elevated to the very top of the pile! I shan't delve into storyline or character development, as there are many fine reviews here that amply cover those topics. What I do wish to touch on, briefly, is the fact that, decades later, the book's technical aspects still ring true and the possibility of such a world existing is as viable as it was when first published. Every time I pick up this book, I am loathe to put it down. Highly recommended!

I remember buying this book when I was a kid because the premise of a giant ringworld appealed to me. However, I never tried to read it. When the audiobook version came up on Audible thirty years later, I thought I'd give it a try, even though I've never read much "hard sci-fi."

Overall, I found myself interested and motivated enough to keep listening; the narrator is good, and I think he kept me engaged better than reading the book would have. I was proud of myself for absorbing most of the scientific concepts, or at least being able to go with the flow when I didn't fully understand. I liked a lot of the technology and gadgets.

Lots of things about the setting are interesting, and I really liked the two main alien characters, especially the two-headed puppeteer, who I think turns out to be the most successful aspect of the book. Louis Wu is fine as the main protagonist, but I didn't like the concept of Teela Brown and her "luck," which just doesn't seem very plausible.

As far as the actual storyline goes, the book is less interesting, and parts of it sort of drag a little and lack elements of gripping drama. The ringworld itself turns out to be a little boring for me, and the four main characters' interactions with the world aren't all that interesting, compared with their interactions with each other. I found the size of the ringworld, especially its million-mile width, to be a little too unbelievable.

The book ends so abruptly and unsatisfyingly that I thought I was experiencing technical difficulties with my audiobook download. Overall, though, I liked the imaginative sci-fi elements of the book and don't regret listening to it, although I will not seek out any of the sequels, especially after reading about them online. Also, I think this book was enough hard sci-fi to last me for the foreseeable future, although if "Dune" is considered "hard sci-fi," that one is on my list to try one of these years.

This is a book that takes me right back to what got me into Sci-Fi in the first place. It has all the elements of classic sci-fi, a comic cowardly alien, a dangerous carnivorous alien, a drop-dead gorgeous sexy female companion and a world weary protagonist.

They fly across the galaxy and find a huge constructed ring shaped world, which has descended into barbarity. They have some adventures, touching only a tiny proportion of the world.

There is enough technology to be engaging, but not so much that you need a degree in quantum physics to follow the plot.

What you are left with at the end is more questions than you started with. I can now daydream for days on end about what may lie elsewhere on Ringworld.

If you love reading fast-paced, imaginative, inventive stories about special people traveling to amazing worlds, then you'll love Ringworld. You'll meet Nessus the Puppeteer and Speaker-to-Animals (I guess they aren't people, are they?) and Louis Wu and Teela Brown. They get in a craft protected by their trusty General Products hull and take off for the Ringworld. Ringworld's breathtaking size and Larry Niven's breathtaking imagination will keep you reading until the end and leave you wanting more. And of course, there are sequels! This is the real McCoy; accept no substitutes. Also remember: never eat food that has been dropped on the ground, then picked up by a Puppeteer. And *I'm* not going to be the one to tell why no one knows the location of the Puppeteer home world.

this is one of the examples of how great niven can be. he created a universe tightly adhering to his own set of rules and laws.when i was reading early niven i was brought into a new world.. not so with later books, the laws of nature ala niven were stretched to breaking, the characters were inconsequential, the timelines were confused. i fear that there will never be another neutron star, tales of known space or protector again.

This is one of the masterpieces of hard-science fiction novels, though that is one of its problems. Its power lies in working out the dazzling scientific premise -- what would an artificial world built on an immense scale be like? The novel has two big flaws, however. Once the characters double back on their path and Niven has no more novelties to present, he seems to lose interest in the story. More importantly, the novel exhibits dated 60s attitudes about condescending to and exploiting "natives". (By the time he started writing the sequels Niven was clearly aware of this, and had his hero treat the Ringworlders as equals and with respect from then on. But the original novel couldn't be rewritten).

This is an ingeniously thought out novel. In it, Larry Niven succeeds in reconcilling some of the apparent inconsistencies between the Ringworld books and his other Known Space novels (by demonstrating that the Ringworld was built by the Pak protectors), and incorporates the ideas and questions of his fans (spillpipes, attitude jets, and defense system) into the operation of the Ringworld, while at the same time telling an exciting, and fast moving story. That he manages all three so flawlessly is surely a sign of his genius as a writer.
Louis Wu and Speaker to Animals (now known as Chmee) are kidnapped by the Hindmost (puppeteer mate of Nessus from the preious book) and brought to the Ringworld again to steal a technology from it that will ensure the security of Hindmost's political faction on the puppeteer world. Louis Wu, however, ends up stranded alone with little but his wits in the middle of the Ringworld, with no-one but the Ringworld natives to turn to for help. And he does indeed need their help, for the Ringworld is off-centre, and very soon will brush against its sun...

I got this book because I liked the concept of making a planet as a strip of land wrapped around a star with tall tall walls to keep in the atmosphere. I did find it interesting enough to read the entire series. Also a cool idea to have someone genetically bread to be lucky (random lottery draw for couples to be allowed an extra child, then that child wins the lottery and gets permission for an extra child, than that child grows up.... until the 6th generation lottery child gets picked to go on the expedition to the ring world). Great book for hard sci-fi fans, ok for other sci-fi fans, definitely not a good idea for anyone else.

Ringworld is among the best sci-fi works I've ever read. Actually it's among the best books I've ever read at all. It is amazingly colourful, imaginative and appealing. Some might be put off by the very technical "hard-science" style, but I think that that actually enhances the story. There are so many incredible and very intriguing ideas incorporated in this book that it makes the reader dizzy. It's so convincingly written that in the end, you almost start thinking that the incredible world of Ringworld is for real. When I first began reading this book, I couldn't put it down. It just stuck to my hand like glue. I was completely spellbound by Niven's incredible visions and ideas. I finished it in one day. I am really a party animal, but I came too late to a party that night because I had to finish Ringworld. I can't recommend this book enough! I myself was told that it was great when I bought it, but I had no idea just how great it really was. It surpassed my wildest expectations, and has made me the huge Niven-fan I am today!

The great thing about Ringworld is--you guessed it--the ringworld. The concepts of a world that is a ring, the huge size of said world, and the problems such a world might have are interesting and creative concepts, worthy of science fiction at its best. Too bad the characters are all one-dimensional and shallow. Louis Wu is a non-entity. Teela is unbelievable and the concept behind her (her hereditary luck) falls apart when you consider the fact that, even if luck *were* hereditary in some capacity, there's no reason to assume that she would be lucky in anything but reproduction (thus the whole premise of her luck being godlike and all-powerful immediately falls apart). Speaker-to-Animals is not an integrated character; he demonstrates ferocity and reasonableness by turns when the plot demands him to, not as developed character traits. The puppeteer Nessus is perhaps the most interesting character and I would have liked to see more of the puppeteers. This book was also clearly written pre-feminism (notice Teela's instant and unquestioning acceptance of a life of female slavery with the Seeker, the fact that Teela's reason for inclusion is solely because she is lucky, not that she has a useful skill to offer; that Teela follows because she loves Louis, not out of curiosity or interest; the fact that the Kzin and the puppeteers are species with non-sentient females; Prillar as ship's (...); comments such as "Every woman is born with a tasp," and so on.) There are some interesting ideas here, and some cool concepts to play with, but it would be nice, just once, to run across a hard-core science fiction book that did as good a job developing the characters as the science.

The Ringworld Engineers is the sequel to Ringworld. In Ringworld, Larry Niven introduced us to the concept of a world made in the shape of an extraordinarily large ring encircling a star. In this book he gives us answers to questions we might not have even asked about the Ringworld, but that others apparently did. After the publication of Ringworld, Niven received numerous pieces of correspondence from people offering helpful information about the details of how the Ringworld would actually function. Niven took inspiration from the enthusiasm of those people and created the Ringworld Engineers in part to publish the answers to important questions about the structure. Around those answers he has created a thoughtful and engaging story that adds in a positive way to the Ringworld legacy.

The basic premise behind the Ringworld Engineers is that twenty or so years have passed since Louis Wu and Speaker To Animals returned from the Ringworld. Since then, Louis has withdrawn into a life of ascetic practices livened up by his addiction to current stimulation. Speaker to Animals (who has earned his full name of Chmeee for the treasure he brought back from the original Ringworld adventure) lives a prosperous life on Kzin having earned high status from his Ringworld discoveries. The circumstance that brings Louis and Chmeee back to the Ringworld is one quite familiar to them, but the situation they face upon arriving on the Ringworld is quite different than when they left. The Ringworld is moving out of position around the sun and the only way for Louis and Chmeee to find out how to fix it lies with the origins of the Ringworld Engineers.

I found the Ringworld Engineers to be engaging and interesting wholely apart from the original Ringworld. While certainly the references to parts of the original book are made more clear having read that novel, this book is very readable even having read Ringworld many years before. Having said that, I would advise that it is a good idea to read Ringworld first as there are certainly items of that book which are spoiled herein.

The way that Niven engages parts of his other novels of Known Space and entertwines them with this book made me want to go give some of those a shot as well. He truly is a master storyteller and this is one of his best novels on his own. Niven's collaborations with author Jerry Pournelle are also highly recommended. The classic The Mote In God's Eye as well as Footfall and Lucifer's Hammer are all very well done and certainly are must read novels for any Niven fan.

I get the impression the Ringworld was written by someone just learning his trade. Taken in that context, it's a promising start from a writer who got a whole lot better later. I urge anyone, fan of sci-fi or not, to read the books Niven wrote with Pournelle and/or Barnes. Those are masterpieces, books like 'Legacy of Hereot', 'Dragons of Herot', 'Footfall', 'Lucifer's Hammer', 'The Mote in God's Eye', etc. You won't find better sci-fi thrillers than those, they blow pretty much everything else out of the water. Ringworld by comparison is tame and perhaps a bit dated. Characterization was fairly mixed ... the aliens 'Speaker' and Nessus were entertaining, although it was hard to believe in either character. Louis on the other hand didn't behave much like a 200 year old - he seemed more like a college sophamore, and Teela was pretty lacking in substance. Still, it's harmless fun. I just urge the people who didn't like this book to check out Niven's later work. You'll be pleasantly surprised, I guarantee.

Some sci-fi stories make psychological and social exploration their dominant them, others focus on scientific/technological themes. "Ringworld" has both elements, but it is unquestionably the scientific/technological that gives this story its strength. The heart this work is the presentation of the "Ringworld" itself, a manufactured world millions of times bigger than Earth, a technological accomplishment truly mind-boggling in its sheer size and audacity.
A huge part of any sci-fi stories' strength is what I call the "what if?" factor, the introduction of a new, or freshly presented, idea that really gives you food for thought. Niven's development of Ringworld itself and his idea of luck as a sort of psychic power has succeeded in this respect.
I give "Ringworld" 4 stars: it's good, but not THAT good---it's the concept of the Ringworld itself that gives the story its real strength. I think the character development, though adequate for the book's purpose, could have been stronger. I was also a little non-plussed with the powerful sphere of influence finally attributed to "luck."

I have rarely come across a sequel that continues a story as well as this. It's advisable to read "Ringworld" first, otherwise this won't make all that much sense. Once you've done that and want more, read this. You'll probably have a difficult time discerning between the two books afterwards, because they complement each other very well. The story revolves around Louis Wu and his alien friend (or foe?), the kzin formerly known as Speaker-To-Animals. The Puppeteers (an extremely paranoid alien species) manage to get the two on board a spaceship heading for a second rendezvous with the mysterious Ringworld, a huge habitable "circular ribbon in space". I won't disclose more. Just read the thing. It's worth it.

I had just finished "Protector" by Niven, and upon enjoying that little book very much, decided to continue reading in the "Known Space" series with the hard sci-fi classic, "Ringworld". The basic story of Ringworld starts off with an adventurer named Louis Wu, who in his prolonged existence has seen all marvels of Known Space and is in dire need of a new challenge to rekindle his swashbuckling spirit. After recently celebrating his 200th birthday (and also extending it via traveling westward through instantaneous portal devices) is sequestered by a member of a peculiar alien species, who offers Louis the adventure he has been seeking. The alien species, the puppeteers, have detected some kind of derelict alien artifact floating out in deep space, of which knowledge concerning it are desperately sought after; although, the puppeteers are reluctant to obtain it themselves, because of their extreme cowardice in all things from confrontation to spaceship travel. However, this particular Puppeteer that Louis meets is an outsider from the species, displaying a shred of bravery in his willingness to investigate this structure. With Louis already recruited, other members soon join the foray, from a ferocious feline like Kzin species to another human who possesses a genetically enhanced propensity for luck...of which may be needed in this expedition.

Niven really creates a fantastical future in which to immerse one's self in; contrasting the world of "Protector" (being set in the near future) as a welcomed abandonment to believable futuristic technology. FTL travel, nigh instantaneous terrestrial travel, substances which extend life, the incredible rosette of worlds (the ultimate spaceship), to the Ringworld itself, Niven has developed here an exercise to seemingly extend your imagination to the limit. So many interesting and marvelous ideas are on display, but Niven, having a talent for storytelling, melds this wonderful future together with just the right amount of mystery and intrigue to keep the pages turning, leaving one wanting more. As with "Protector", Niven keeps this wealth of entertainment contained within a reasonable amount of pages, neglecting chapters and chapters of useless filler other Sci-Fi authors are known to do (e.g. Brin). The only criticism I can offer is with the way Niven handles dialogue between his characters. Sometimes he doesn't properly announce who is speaking in the narrative, which leads to some confusion and interrupts the flow of the book. However, this book truly deserves all the awards given to it...a true Sci-Fi classic!!!

So Ringworld was one of those "Classic" science fiction books I knew I should have already read if I want to claim any sort of expertise in the genre (Note, apparently I hate science fiction -- but that's a discussion for another time). Anyways, I say this book on my library's shelf for new graphic novels. I was excited. I get credit for reading the book, and it's a picture book so it's like there's less work.

But here's the thing. In small print on the cover, it's only part one, and I can't find part two.
This isn't fun because the whole book was just build-up. It was like the first Hobbit movie where the whole the thing is getting the clan together for a quest and then there is...

Hold on, you have to wait for book two.

I don't know who the audience for this book is -- people who have read the book, and want to relive it, or people like me who have never read it.

Granted, I couldn't put it down, but that's just how I am when I want to know the answer to something. I was dissapointed at how short it was, and there is no sense of time. Events which are suposed to take a week or more seem to fly by in minutes. I noticed this lack of time in many places.
It wasn't as sex-filled as some of the reviews say....I was actually expecting more sex after reading the reviews here. Although somewhat dissapointed by the book, I was satisfied to have answers to some of the questions left by the first book, but I think this book just opens up more questions. I still am womdering "What happens now?"

Now that the 'Ringworld' series has been completed (unless it is one day expanded beyond the current tetralogy -who knows?), one of the most commonly accepted views among critics is that all three sequels to the original novel totally failed to capitalise on the most enticing premise of the original.
In the first novel, the dazzlingly seductive artefact that is the Ringworld was billed, more or less, as 'big enough for anything to happen' within its enormous cast.
But...what exactly does happen? In this first sequel, not that much -and what does occur does so in fits and starts.
The characters are presented with two objectives: nobly, they must prevent a catastrophe that threatens to destroy the Ringworld itself; less nobly, they have to pinch an item of unique technology that may salvage the career of their alien paymaster.
Admittedly, boxes are duly checked: much is revealed about the Ringworld design (there is even a sort of generic diagram at the beginning), its structure and ecology; its creators are identified, and dastardly deeds by 'allies' revealed. The first objective is also achieved, albeit at enormous environmental cost to the Ring's native inhabitants.
However, the narrative that links these events is peculiarly reminiscent of the trials faced by the hapless King Arthur in the Monty Python imagining of the quest for the Holy Grail. Fortunately, we are spared encounters with 'hominids who say...NI!!!' -but not by much. Even native sub-groups who are helpful to the adventurers exist only to point out more improbable difficulties in their path.
On the whole, it is easily readable and a decent story, but no more. Given the possibilities implied by first novel, and the scale of its conception, it seems decidedly parochial.
The Ringworld is a beautiful (if flawed) idea: a despoiled yet beckoning alien world that haunts you long after reading the original story. It deserves a better future!

I really enjoyed this book. To be specific, what really amazed me was the proportions of the ring world and immensity of the universe the author offers you to imagine in his simple way of narrating such a complicated story. The language is easy to grasp, which makes all the inter-galactic transport easy to make. The characters are well developed and once your in the Ringworld, your kept in awe from the vast amount of places and geographic pearls the place has to offer.

If my opinion means anything to you (ok, ok, you got me already), I say read this first, then go back and read Ringworld. I did that (no choice -- one day it was the only book around), and thought it was more interesting than the first [Ringworld]. I read it a second time and it lacked something, probably that Niven repeats himself between the 2. I still think this is the better of the 3 (The Ringworld Throne was the last), but only for it was the first time I read about "a blue christmas ribbon laid out around a candle.." blah blah blah.. if you've read 'em, you know what I mean ;-) [Still gets 5 stars tho]

The earth of the future is a bleak depressing place devoid of orginality.
How does the earth cope with overcrowding and overpopulation? Simple you build a new planet within easy reach of the planet.
This "planet" is enormous each person could have there own personal space of 100 square miles. But as the first settlers arrive they realize that getting to ringworld was just the beginning. This is one of my most favorite books in science fiction. Mr. Nivian has created a wonderful premise here and it continues in other books of the serise. If you enjoy a good story I suggest you read this.

have a slightly worn first-edition copy of this scifi classic, which I picked up in 1993 in a Kingston, Ontario used book store. I hadn't read this copy until recently; I read the novel originally back in 1982 or 1983, when I was in grade 8. The story revolves around an interstellar cast of characters, who set out to explore large, ring-shaped world that someone has constructed and is circling a star a fair distance from Earth. Reading the story this time 'round, it didn't find it as good as my memory had indicated. It's more technically oriented, and less character oriented, than I remember. There's not much in the way of character development, and I find it difficult to point to a specific climax point in the story. I guess my reading tastes have changed.

This book was more an exercise in world building than anything else. For the most part it feels like the point of the book is "let's explore this awesome Dyson sphere variation while examining inter-species relationships." There is definitely character development that takes place as well, but to me it comes off as primarily an exploration and survival book. The world explored is incredibly interesting, but I found the main character a bit distasteful. He is a bored-with-life 200 year old man who is pragmatic, self-centered, sex-obsessed, and unlike the other characters seems very little changed/improved by the whole experience. The storytelling was a bit jerky, and I though the foreshadowing regarding a big plot point toward the end was incredibly obvious. Overall: I'm glad I read this for the excellent world-building but probably won't bother to ever read it again.

Ringworld is a good science fiction book. However I don't think it merits being called a classic. The idea is great, the exploration of a gigantic populated ring around a far away sun, sort of a subset of a Dyson Sphere, with living space comparable to a billions of planets. The book also gets off to a good start as we are introduced to the characters, two humans and two aliens, and they go off on their quest. What disappointed me was that the potential that the exploration of this great artifact offers was never quite realized. Our explorers go from one place to another and none inspired in me the awe I was expecting from locations on such an exciting object. Compare this for instance with Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke where the tension never lags. Also, probably because I haven't read Niven's previous books, I found the aliens becoming more comical as the book progressed, which detracted from the tension (but may have been intentional by the author).
However this was a good read and I will go on and explore some of its prequels.

Attack of the Killer Sunflowers!
Two hundred year old Louis Wu is bored. So when Nessus, an alien called a puppeteer, offers to include him on a journey to a strange Ring World, Louis accept. The duo is joined by Speaker-To-Animals, a kzin (think Klingon warrior cats), and Teela Brown, a ditzy, lucky woman.

I Liked:
By far the absolute best aspect of the book was the world building. From the moment the Ringworld was described, I was intrigued. A ring, with the circumference of an Earth orbit? That rocks! When does construction begin? Niven puts a lot of effort into the crown piece of the Ringworld. We get the logistics of how it would be built, what it would be made of, what has happened to it and more.
I think the interplay amongst the travelers was well-done too. I liked the friction between the kzin and the others, how Teela actually gets to be intelligent occasionally (more on this later), and how they all have to pull together to make it work. Plus, one of the coolest things was how Nessus was from a far more technologically advanced culture and yet was way more afraid than any of the others. I liked how he was slightly mad, shifting from paranoia to depression. Of course, Teela also gets a bit of development. At the beginning, she's a reckless "child", running around and not worrying about getting into trouble or pain. By the end, she's matured a lot, is a lot more cautious, and is more wary.
While nothing on the caliber of Hitchhiker's Guide or The Princess Bride, there is quite a bit of humor in the novel. Louis is quite the snarker, as is Nessus. Even a few serious situations are made lighter with the humor.

I Didn't Like:
I struggled to listen to all of this book, and, at first, I didn't know why. Yes, Louis Wu was your typical, aggravating, superior human male protagonist that can do no wrong, looks amazing at 200, can have great sex, and is wealthier than Bill Gates, but that wasn't it. Yes, the story did smart a little too much of The Hobbit (Nessus "knocks" at Louis' door, only Louis agrees instead of being forced into the adventure like Bilbo), but I actually like adventure stories in that vein, so that wasn't it either. Yes, Teela is yet another 70's scifi woman shown to be stupid, vacuous, vapid, inane, childlike, and unimportant, but that wasn't it either.
And that was when I figured it out. The book was boring. Hard to believe, with such an interesting concept as the Ringworld (which I totally loved), but the pace is incredibly slow. The plot is nearly nonexistent. The whole plot is "travelers go to investigate Ringworld, get shot down on the surface, and try to return". Actually, the plot doesn't sound that bad and has a lot of potential, but when you actually read it (or hear it), it just becomes snooze-worthy. When the travelers get stuck on the Ringworld, instead of being awed by being on the Ringworld and seeing it firsthand, I wanted to bash my head into a wall as they bickered, argued, postulated, and sped along in fly-cycles. "Please," I was begging the audiobook. "Make it stop!" The writing, while certainly not the worst I've ever seen, just doesn't transmit the awe and intrigue you would expect. Not to mention, there were some strange word choices, particularly in the love-making scenes.
The characters minus Nessus, as I mentioned above, are hideously stereotyped. We have our trademark warrior race, our trademark super-hero, and our trademark stupid woman. I understand this book was written in the sixties/seventies (there may not have been as many warrior races back then, women were often personified as stupid and incapable to make our hero look so amazing and wonderful and gag-worthy), but I still like a little depth, a little pizzazz, a reason to be invested in the characters. Probably my least favorite character was Louis Wu, who soars headfirst into Marty Stu territory, with his 200 year old wisdom in a 20 year old body, able to make amazing love to any woman and can talk physics with far superior beings. Teela comes in close second for her horrible "character" in the form of "stupid woman drug along to boink the hero". And the prostitute spacer lady...wrong, wrong, wrong.
As for the Teela and Louis "relationship"...laughable. They jump each other like bunnies, Louis treats her like an idiot most of the time, and Teela laps it up like the lap dog she is. And yet, I get the creepy sense that he is her grandfather, caring for her in a father-figure, slightly demeaning teacher-to-student way. Really doesn't make me feel good. There are sparse few scenes where they behave towards each other anything like normal human reactions (and yes, I know this is years in the future, but no where was it stated that love has been banned or manipulated, like in THX-1138). The end of their "relationship" is so flat--after Teela's accident, Louis just up and decides that he doesn't love her anymore. Pathetic. And I was prepared not to insult the lovemaking scenes (most of them were of the "cut to black" variety), but then I read this one: "Teela impaled herself as she straddled his hips". Sounds romantic, doesn't it? Not. Most of the love-making scenes are written so thoughtlessly and totally ruin any emotion you build up into them.
Minor Quibble: People call this book "hard scifi", and as I was listening, I had to scratch my head in confusion. Faster than light drives? Teleporting booths? Aliens? Sounds pretty soft to me. But this complaint is more about marketing; I don't care if a book is "hard" or "soft", as long as it A) has good characters, B) has a good story, and C) is well-written.

Dialogue/Sexual Situations/Violence:
The ship is called the Lying Ba****d.
Louis has Teela around to "keep him company". They hop out of their flyers to make the most awkward love.
Louis gets punched.

Overall:
I am very disappointed. I was so looking forward to reading this Hugo (and Nebula and Locus) award winning novel. I have wanted to read more varied scifi authors and went into this novel excited. And in the beginning, I was entertained and hopeful. But then, as the novel wore on, and the execution didn't live up to my expectations, my hopes began to die. The characters were dull and lifeless and just couldn't carry the story. The plot forgot the Ringworld. And Niven's writing couldn't save the story at all.
Oh, and as for the review title: there is a pseudo-action scene involving Louis and Speaker trying to evade sunflowers. Strange...

Brought to you by:
*C.S. Light*

As a followup to Ringworld, which I enjoyed, this book was disappointing.
While he discusses at length descriptions of futuristic technology, Niven cleverly obscures any working detail about the technologies which help make it appear as "timeless", but the age of the story still seems obvious.
Sort of like watching old StarTrek episodes.
I had a difficult time buying into the character development in the first book and this book is even more bizarre.
I enjoy science fiction but this story just wasn't fun for me.

"Ringworld" is perhaps the most science based sci-fi book I have ever read, and I have read a fair share. Larry Niven creates a future that is far removed from our own, yet employs our understanding of physics in the most imaginative of ways. A world BUILT around a star rather than orbiting it? Pure genius.

This book is an amazing piece of literature. From the moment it starts to the moment it ends, it leaves you constantly asking for more. The adventure arc of the characters is unbelievably epic in nature. What it basically comes down to is a desert-island story: an unlikely group of explorers stranded on an alien planet.

But it is so much more than that. The motley crew are two bizarre humans, a feral and vicious but sentient cat, and a Puppeteer (an alien species long since disappeared in the galaxy). The four of them, in a seemingly indestructible ship, crash onto their target destination, the Ringworld. This ringworld is a trillion times the size of the Earth! The scope and magnitude of this size is almost too big to comprehend but don't worry: it's hard for the characters as well.

The scale of the book is almost too large to fathom, which is part of the only weakness this book suffers. Niven paints a magnificent picture but sometimes that picture is SO abstract it's hard to fathom. He explains it well enough through science and poetic phrase but it sometimes isn't enough. It too me a long time to fully grasp many of the events in the book.

In the end, this is a MUST read. It is magnificently written: the characters are believable and endearing, the story is magnificently told, and the settings are beyond other-worldly. To kick it off, the end to the book is one of the more memorable reads you will come across.

This is the outstanding classic of SF. Indeed there are things which might be improved, but I wouldn't know how. Indeed it does not manage to keep up the roaring pace it starts off with, but it carries on quite adequately. Of course it has been written some time ago, and people nowadays are spoiled by the fancy optic effects of contemporary SF movies, and by great story tellers like Orson Scott Card, but leaving such superficialities aside, I have never seen anything that can even touch Ringworld.
By the way, Orson Scott Card may be a terrific story teller, but, to say it gently, his work is out and out fantasy, never touching reality. He should have quit after "Ender's game" (the 1977 short story that is) and waited until he had a worthwhile story to tell.

Ringworld introduced us to the marvelous construct with 3 million times the
surface area of the Earth. The Ringworld Engineers tells us who built it.
Louis Wu and friends once again visit Ringworld, and this time are on a
mission to save the unstable structure from plunging into it's star. More
adventure, more strange hybrid subspecies of humans with their unusual
cultures. Larry Niven at his best, and one of my all time favorite books.

which is very heavy on the "science" part of it.
Niven is a master of ideas: this novel alone touches on solutions to overpopulation, the possibility that luck is an inherited trait and a solid ring the size of Earth's orbit around another star. All his works tend to feature grand or unusual concepts: he also writes about the use of organ banks as capital punishment, a habitable ring of gas around a neutron star, and the effects of other worlds' environments on the human form itself. These ideas are always wonderful and fascinating, and they are always the focus of his stories.
This, unfortunately, results in a decided lack of depth in most of his characters. This can especially be seen in "Ringworld": while his characters are evolved further in the sequels (which I emphatically recommend reading!), none of them are particularly interesting in this work. Granted, Teela (the genetically-lucky woman) is <em>supposed</em> to be shallow, but the other characters aren't much better, despite the fact that Louis is two hundred years old and the alien Nessus is older and more intelligent than any living human.
Niven's treatment of his characters is not a fatal flaw: this work is fun and the concepts will stagger you, and many of his other stories are much better. He does extremely well with short stories (check out Crashlander and Flatlander, among many others), and his collaborations with Jerry Pournelle are outstanding. Pournelle's work, generally uninspiring (at least to me) benefit from Niven's grand ideas; and Niven does very well leaving many of the character interactions to his colleagues.
I do recommend this book to any science-fiction fan, or anyone who finds the title concept fascinating; but it is most definitely not literary in any sense of the word.

Ringworld is a showcase of truly "out of this world" ideas. Niven has written many thoughtful and mind-expanding short stories, but the concept of the ringworld of this novel is spectacular. In my opinion Niven has always written his best work as a single author. That being said, his works form a monumental collection.
Niven is best at ideas and following the path scientific would forge. Many of his characters are simplistic, but it doesn't matter. The ideas drive his work.

There is a reason why the Pierson's Puppeteers are very interested in this strange "ring" around a distant sun, over the very horizon of "known space" (known to humans).

A mystery that is not normally of interest to the more commerce and not at all adventurous Puppeteers who are more interested in trade and perpetual compounding of wealth.

The mystery is what is happening at the core of the galaxy, and the Puppeteers immediate response to something that would take almost 30,000 years to affect them, or us on 30th century Earth and known space.

None the less, the ring is explored by the motley crew, including a Kzin, two humans, one Luis Wu who is 200 years old, and Teela Brown, a 20 year old who is product of the birth right lotteries centuries long little genetic expiriment instigated by the Puppeers, a 500,000 year old species with an interstellar trade empire older than Earth's Bronze Age.

What is found is a remarkable artifact built an untold number of centuries earlier, and either abandoned by the people who created it, or whose civilization just collapse leaving a population in a relative Dark Age totally oblivious to the origins of the world they live on.

Pockets of technology continue, but are scattered through out a world with an endless horizon. Cities in the sky supported by repulser beams from the serface. A 12 o'clock high perpetual noon day sun that is eclipsed by "shadow squares". A hugh 1000 mile high mountain called "Fist of God".

One of the lighter, more fun aspects of the journey may have been the custom of "Rishathra" between the diverging humanoid species of the large, open world.

Having just finished reading Ringworld, I'm still trying to sort out how I feel about it. There's one thing that I can say for certain: it's totally different from any other science fiction novel that I've read recently. If I tried to describe the premise of this book, it would sound absurd. However, Ringworld is not an attempt at comedy. At the same time, it isn't really a typical work of hard science fiction. It's set in the far future, and takes place mostly among civilizations run by aliens who possess amazing technology. However, there's not much attempt to explain how the technology works. For instance, we learn that the aliens can move entire planets, but we never find out how they do it.
The story concerns a team of two humans and two aliens who crash-land on a gigantic ring in a distant star system. The ring is millions of times larger than the Earth, and was clearly built by some very advanced society. Most of the novel concerns their exploration of the ring itself. However, very little time is spent on action or fighting scenes. Instead, there is a great deal of description. The creativity that Niven uses in creating the Ringworld is probably the novel's biggest strength.
Another concept that makes this work an original is the explanation of the relationships between humans and different alien species. This isn't a stereotypical us vs them adventure story, but it isn't a feel good, everybody works together scenario like Star Trek either. As I said, the ideas would sound silly if I listed them here, but Niven takes them seriously and works them into the story quite well.
Ringworld is an easy read, and at 350 pages, it's shorter and flows better than many SF novels. Other have complained that the character development is poor, but characters aren't supposed to be the main focus of Ringworld. Finally, let me just add that you don't need to have read any of Niven's previous works to enjoy this one. I'd never even heard of him until I picked this book up.

Ringworld is a well-thought, well-written piece of hard core science fiction that will appeal to fans of Golden Age authors from the 50s and 60s. That being said, SF has come a long way since the early days of detailed explanations of physics or exotic alien names like Halrloprillalar to create a sense of authenticity. It's unfortunate that Niven's characterization can't match the dazzling setting because the two average out to a ho-hum read.

The main plot revolves around four characters. Get used to them because very few other characters are ever introduced. They are hired by one of the team to explore a discovered artifact called the Ringworld. They end up crash landing fairly early on and the remainder of the book happens on the Ringworld's surface. Unfortunately, the reasons for the expedition are never properly fleshed out, but it becomes moot as the story unfolds. The novel incorporates themes of manipulation and the essence of a civilzation as the characters try to survive a savage wasteland. Some of these themes are better explored than others and he does manage to raise some interesting questions.

However...

The essential problem with Ringworld, what makes it feel like a relic, is that Niven is clearly more comfortable talking about science than he is about his characters. He describes the technology with a real passion that sells the Ringworld as a place to the reader. He incorporates good scientific explanations into the book in a way that feels natural. It's a double-edged sword because it does end up feeling a bit clinical. Technology in science fiction is there as a tool to push boundaries and ask questions. Here, Niven offers up lots of believability while forgetting to actually do something with it. This is where he needed good, strong characters to give the Ringworld life - and doesn't deliver.

Up to the crash landing the science drives the book in high gear. Then, when the novel moves into a more character-driven mode, that passion seems gone. He wants to describe his characters with the same functionality as technology, making the crew seem more like tools than sentient beings. He creates characters that follow rigid patterns of behavior. The sense of any depth is gone and robs Ringworld of a lot of its potential meaningfulness. It's tame by modern standards.

It's not bad, but it just doesn't live up to what I think an award-winning piece of science fiction should be. I think we're passed the days when science fiction can skate on its depiction of technology. Regardless of how the book was perceived when it was written, I read it in 2011 and hoped for more.

"Ringworld" was very good science fiction. "The Ringworld Engineers" is so-so science fiction (at best). I read it. It was OK. It was not very good. It, also, is not, totally, consistent with "Ringworld". It gets boring, very boring. It, also, has much too much sex and the main characters are less than admirable. However, Niven is a good SF writer and there are some good spots.

I think my three stars are a gift for this book. However, Larry Niven may be the best SF writer who is still contributing to SF.

So, go to your library and try to find this book and read it. I still have my copy. So, I guess I felt it was worth buying. But, read before buying.

Ringworld is a good science fiction book. However I don't think it merits being called a classic. The idea is great, the exploration of a gigantic populated ring around a far away sun, sort of a subset of a Dyson Sphere, with living space comparable to a billions of planets. The book also gets off to a good start as we are introduced to the characters, two humans and two aliens, and they go off on their quest. What disappointed me was that the potential that the exploration of this great artifact offers was never quite realized. Our explorers go from one place to another and none inspired in me the awe I was expecting from locations on such an exciting object. Compare this for instance with Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke where the tension never lags. Also, probably because I haven't read Niven's previous books, I found the aliens becoming more comical as the book progressed, which detracted from the tension (but may have been intentional by the author).
However this was a good read and I will go on and explore some of its prequels.

Attack of the Killer Sunflowers!
Two hundred year old Louis Wu is bored. So when Nessus, an alien called a puppeteer, offers to include him on a journey to a strange Ring World, Louis accept. The duo is joined by Speaker-To-Animals, a kzin (think Klingon warrior cats), and Teela Brown, a ditzy, lucky woman.

I Liked:
By far the absolute best aspect of the book was the world building. From the moment the Ringworld was described, I was intrigued. A ring, with the circumference of an Earth orbit? That rocks! When does construction begin? Niven puts a lot of effort into the crown piece of the Ringworld. We get the logistics of how it would be built, what it would be made of, what has happened to it and more.
I think the interplay amongst the travelers was well-done too. I liked the friction between the kzin and the others, how Teela actually gets to be intelligent occasionally (more on this later), and how they all have to pull together to make it work. Plus, one of the coolest things was how Nessus was from a far more technologically advanced culture and yet was way more afraid than any of the others. I liked how he was slightly mad, shifting from paranoia to depression. Of course, Teela also gets a bit of development. At the beginning, she's a reckless "child", running around and not worrying about getting into trouble or pain. By the end, she's matured a lot, is a lot more cautious, and is more wary.
While nothing on the caliber of Hitchhiker's Guide or The Princess Bride, there is quite a bit of humor in the novel. Louis is quite the snarker, as is Nessus. Even a few serious situations are made lighter with the humor.

I Didn't Like:
I struggled to listen to all of this book, and, at first, I didn't know why. Yes, Louis Wu was your typical, aggravating, superior human male protagonist that can do no wrong, looks amazing at 200, can have great sex, and is wealthier than Bill Gates, but that wasn't it. Yes, the story did smart a little too much of The Hobbit (Nessus "knocks" at Louis' door, only Louis agrees instead of being forced into the adventure like Bilbo), but I actually like adventure stories in that vein, so that wasn't it either. Yes, Teela is yet another 70's scifi woman shown to be stupid, vacuous, vapid, inane, childlike, and unimportant, but that wasn't it either.
And that was when I figured it out. The book was boring. Hard to believe, with such an interesting concept as the Ringworld (which I totally loved), but the pace is incredibly slow. The plot is nearly nonexistent. The whole plot is "travelers go to investigate Ringworld, get shot down on the surface, and try to return". Actually, the plot doesn't sound that bad and has a lot of potential, but when you actually read it (or hear it), it just becomes snooze-worthy. When the travelers get stuck on the Ringworld, instead of being awed by being on the Ringworld and seeing it firsthand, I wanted to bash my head into a wall as they bickered, argued, postulated, and sped along in fly-cycles. "Please," I was begging the audiobook. "Make it stop!" The writing, while certainly not the worst I've ever seen, just doesn't transmit the awe and intrigue you would expect. Not to mention, there were some strange word choices, particularly in the love-making scenes.
The characters minus Nessus, as I mentioned above, are hideously stereotyped. We have our trademark warrior race, our trademark super-hero, and our trademark stupid woman. I understand this book was written in the sixties/seventies (there may not have been as many warrior races back then, women were often personified as stupid and incapable to make our hero look so amazing and wonderful and gag-worthy), but I still like a little depth, a little pizzazz, a reason to be invested in the characters. Probably my least favorite character was Louis Wu, who soars headfirst into Marty Stu territory, with his 200 year old wisdom in a 20 year old body, able to make amazing love to any woman and can talk physics with far superior beings. Teela comes in close second for her horrible "character" in the form of "stupid woman drug along to boink the hero". And the prostitute spacer lady...wrong, wrong, wrong.
As for the Teela and Louis "relationship"...laughable. They jump each other like bunnies, Louis treats her like an idiot most of the time, and Teela laps it up like the lap dog she is. And yet, I get the creepy sense that he is her grandfather, caring for her in a father-figure, slightly demeaning teacher-to-student way. Really doesn't make me feel good. There are sparse few scenes where they behave towards each other anything like normal human reactions (and yes, I know this is years in the future, but no where was it stated that love has been banned or manipulated, like in THX-1138). The end of their "relationship" is so flat--after Teela's accident, Louis just up and decides that he doesn't love her anymore. Pathetic. And I was prepared not to insult the lovemaking scenes (most of them were of the "cut to black" variety), but then I read this one: "Teela impaled herself as she straddled his hips". Sounds romantic, doesn't it? Not. Most of the love-making scenes are written so thoughtlessly and totally ruin any emotion you build up into them.
Minor Quibble: People call this book "hard scifi", and as I was listening, I had to scratch my head in confusion. Faster than light drives? Teleporting booths? Aliens? Sounds pretty soft to me. But this complaint is more about marketing; I don't care if a book is "hard" or "soft", as long as it A) has good characters, B) has a good story, and C) is well-written.

Dialogue/Sexual Situations/Violence:
The ship is called the Lying Ba****d.
Louis has Teela around to "keep him company". They hop out of their flyers to make the most awkward love.
Louis gets punched.

Overall:
I am very disappointed. I was so looking forward to reading this Hugo (and Nebula and Locus) award winning novel. I have wanted to read more varied scifi authors and went into this novel excited. And in the beginning, I was entertained and hopeful. But then, as the novel wore on, and the execution didn't live up to my expectations, my hopes began to die. The characters were dull and lifeless and just couldn't carry the story. The plot forgot the Ringworld. And Niven's writing couldn't save the story at all.
Oh, and as for the review title: there is a pseudo-action scene involving Louis and Speaker trying to evade sunflowers. Strange...

Brought to you by:
*C.S. Light*

As a followup to Ringworld, which I enjoyed, this book was disappointing.
While he discusses at length descriptions of futuristic technology, Niven cleverly obscures any working detail about the technologies which help make it appear as "timeless", but the age of the story still seems obvious.
Sort of like watching old StarTrek episodes.
I had a difficult time buying into the character development in the first book and this book is even more bizarre.
I enjoy science fiction but this story just wasn't fun for me.

"Ringworld" is perhaps the most science based sci-fi book I have ever read, and I have read a fair share. Larry Niven creates a future that is far removed from our own, yet employs our understanding of physics in the most imaginative of ways. A world BUILT around a star rather than orbiting it? Pure genius.

This book is an amazing piece of literature. From the moment it starts to the moment it ends, it leaves you constantly asking for more. The adventure arc of the characters is unbelievably epic in nature. What it basically comes down to is a desert-island story: an unlikely group of explorers stranded on an alien planet.

But it is so much more than that. The motley crew are two bizarre humans, a feral and vicious but sentient cat, and a Puppeteer (an alien species long since disappeared in the galaxy). The four of them, in a seemingly indestructible ship, crash onto their target destination, the Ringworld. This ringworld is a trillion times the size of the Earth! The scope and magnitude of this size is almost too big to comprehend but don't worry: it's hard for the characters as well.

The scale of the book is almost too large to fathom, which is part of the only weakness this book suffers. Niven paints a magnificent picture but sometimes that picture is SO abstract it's hard to fathom. He explains it well enough through science and poetic phrase but it sometimes isn't enough. It too me a long time to fully grasp many of the events in the book.

In the end, this is a MUST read. It is magnificently written: the characters are believable and endearing, the story is magnificently told, and the settings are beyond other-worldly. To kick it off, the end to the book is one of the more memorable reads you will come across.

This is the outstanding classic of SF. Indeed there are things which might be improved, but I wouldn't know how. Indeed it does not manage to keep up the roaring pace it starts off with, but it carries on quite adequately. Of course it has been written some time ago, and people nowadays are spoiled by the fancy optic effects of contemporary SF movies, and by great story tellers like Orson Scott Card, but leaving such superficialities aside, I have never seen anything that can even touch Ringworld.
By the way, Orson Scott Card may be a terrific story teller, but, to say it gently, his work is out and out fantasy, never touching reality. He should have quit after "Ender's game" (the 1977 short story that is) and waited until he had a worthwhile story to tell.

Ringworld introduced us to the marvelous construct with 3 million times the
surface area of the Earth. The Ringworld Engineers tells us who built it.
Louis Wu and friends once again visit Ringworld, and this time are on a
mission to save the unstable structure from plunging into it's star. More
adventure, more strange hybrid subspecies of humans with their unusual
cultures. Larry Niven at his best, and one of my all time favorite books.

which is very heavy on the "science" part of it.
Niven is a master of ideas: this novel alone touches on solutions to overpopulation, the possibility that luck is an inherited trait and a solid ring the size of Earth's orbit around another star. All his works tend to feature grand or unusual concepts: he also writes about the use of organ banks as capital punishment, a habitable ring of gas around a neutron star, and the effects of other worlds' environments on the human form itself. These ideas are always wonderful and fascinating, and they are always the focus of his stories.
This, unfortunately, results in a decided lack of depth in most of his characters. This can especially be seen in "Ringworld": while his characters are evolved further in the sequels (which I emphatically recommend reading!), none of them are particularly interesting in this work. Granted, Teela (the genetically-lucky woman) is <em>supposed</em> to be shallow, but the other characters aren't much better, despite the fact that Louis is two hundred years old and the alien Nessus is older and more intelligent than any living human.
Niven's treatment of his characters is not a fatal flaw: this work is fun and the concepts will stagger you, and many of his other stories are much better. He does extremely well with short stories (check out Crashlander and Flatlander, among many others), and his collaborations with Jerry Pournelle are outstanding. Pournelle's work, generally uninspiring (at least to me) benefit from Niven's grand ideas; and Niven does very well leaving many of the character interactions to his colleagues.
I do recommend this book to any science-fiction fan, or anyone who finds the title concept fascinating; but it is most definitely not literary in any sense of the word.

Ringworld is a showcase of truly "out of this world" ideas. Niven has written many thoughtful and mind-expanding short stories, but the concept of the ringworld of this novel is spectacular. In my opinion Niven has always written his best work as a single author. That being said, his works form a monumental collection.
Niven is best at ideas and following the path scientific would forge. Many of his characters are simplistic, but it doesn't matter. The ideas drive his work.

There is a reason why the Pierson's Puppeteers are very interested in this strange "ring" around a distant sun, over the very horizon of "known space" (known to humans).

A mystery that is not normally of interest to the more commerce and not at all adventurous Puppeteers who are more interested in trade and perpetual compounding of wealth.

The mystery is what is happening at the core of the galaxy, and the Puppeteers immediate response to something that would take almost 30,000 years to affect them, or us on 30th century Earth and known space.

None the less, the ring is explored by the motley crew, including a Kzin, two humans, one Luis Wu who is 200 years old, and Teela Brown, a 20 year old who is product of the birth right lotteries centuries long little genetic expiriment instigated by the Puppeers, a 500,000 year old species with an interstellar trade empire older than Earth's Bronze Age.

What is found is a remarkable artifact built an untold number of centuries earlier, and either abandoned by the people who created it, or whose civilization just collapse leaving a population in a relative Dark Age totally oblivious to the origins of the world they live on.

Pockets of technology continue, but are scattered through out a world with an endless horizon. Cities in the sky supported by repulser beams from the serface. A 12 o'clock high perpetual noon day sun that is eclipsed by "shadow squares". A hugh 1000 mile high mountain called "Fist of God".

One of the lighter, more fun aspects of the journey may have been the custom of "Rishathra" between the diverging humanoid species of the large, open world.

Having just finished reading Ringworld, I'm still trying to sort out how I feel about it. There's one thing that I can say for certain: it's totally different from any other science fiction novel that I've read recently. If I tried to describe the premise of this book, it would sound absurd. However, Ringworld is not an attempt at comedy. At the same time, it isn't really a typical work of hard science fiction. It's set in the far future, and takes place mostly among civilizations run by aliens who possess amazing technology. However, there's not much attempt to explain how the technology works. For instance, we learn that the aliens can move entire planets, but we never find out how they do it.
The story concerns a team of two humans and two aliens who crash-land on a gigantic ring in a distant star system. The ring is millions of times larger than the Earth, and was clearly built by some very advanced society. Most of the novel concerns their exploration of the ring itself. However, very little time is spent on action or fighting scenes. Instead, there is a great deal of description. The creativity that Niven uses in creating the Ringworld is probably the novel's biggest strength.
Another concept that makes this work an original is the explanation of the relationships between humans and different alien species. This isn't a stereotypical us vs them adventure story, but it isn't a feel good, everybody works together scenario like Star Trek either. As I said, the ideas would sound silly if I listed them here, but Niven takes them seriously and works them into the story quite well.
Ringworld is an easy read, and at 350 pages, it's shorter and flows better than many SF novels. Other have complained that the character development is poor, but characters aren't supposed to be the main focus of Ringworld. Finally, let me just add that you don't need to have read any of Niven's previous works to enjoy this one. I'd never even heard of him until I picked this book up.

Ringworld is a well-thought, well-written piece of hard core science fiction that will appeal to fans of Golden Age authors from the 50s and 60s. That being said, SF has come a long way since the early days of detailed explanations of physics or exotic alien names like Halrloprillalar to create a sense of authenticity. It's unfortunate that Niven's characterization can't match the dazzling setting because the two average out to a ho-hum read.

The main plot revolves around four characters. Get used to them because very few other characters are ever introduced. They are hired by one of the team to explore a discovered artifact called the Ringworld. They end up crash landing fairly early on and the remainder of the book happens on the Ringworld's surface. Unfortunately, the reasons for the expedition are never properly fleshed out, but it becomes moot as the story unfolds. The novel incorporates themes of manipulation and the essence of a civilzation as the characters try to survive a savage wasteland. Some of these themes are better explored than others and he does manage to raise some interesting questions.

However...

The essential problem with Ringworld, what makes it feel like a relic, is that Niven is clearly more comfortable talking about science than he is about his characters. He describes the technology with a real passion that sells the Ringworld as a place to the reader. He incorporates good scientific explanations into the book in a way that feels natural. It's a double-edged sword because it does end up feeling a bit clinical. Technology in science fiction is there as a tool to push boundaries and ask questions. Here, Niven offers up lots of believability while forgetting to actually do something with it. This is where he needed good, strong characters to give the Ringworld life - and doesn't deliver.

Up to the crash landing the science drives the book in high gear. Then, when the novel moves into a more character-driven mode, that passion seems gone. He wants to describe his characters with the same functionality as technology, making the crew seem more like tools than sentient beings. He creates characters that follow rigid patterns of behavior. The sense of any depth is gone and robs Ringworld of a lot of its potential meaningfulness. It's tame by modern standards.

It's not bad, but it just doesn't live up to what I think an award-winning piece of science fiction should be. I think we're passed the days when science fiction can skate on its depiction of technology. Regardless of how the book was perceived when it was written, I read it in 2011 and hoped for more.

"Ringworld" was very good science fiction. "The Ringworld Engineers" is so-so science fiction (at best). I read it. It was OK. It was not very good. It, also, is not, totally, consistent with "Ringworld". It gets boring, very boring. It, also, has much too much sex and the main characters are less than admirable. However, Niven is a good SF writer and there are some good spots.

I think my three stars are a gift for this book. However, Larry Niven may be the best SF writer who is still contributing to SF.

So, go to your library and try to find this book and read it. I still have my copy. So, I guess I felt it was worth buying. But, read before buying.

Ringworld by Larry Niven is a classic of hard Sci-Fi. It's strength's include plausible aliens, an interesting future history for humanity and the fascinating concept of the Ringworld itself. The main drawback was a few technical passages that had my eyes glazing over. For the most part though Niven did a good job creating an enjoyable story from a fascinating concept.

This is money well spent. I enjoyed this novel and spent nearly a whole night reading it in one sitting. I will never tire of Larry Niven when he sticks to Known Space, the best of his fiction areas. I like the Pupperteers, the Kzin, and Pac. Larry delivers a nearly perfect end to the Ringworld series. I have had personal conversations with him back in 1983 and he never intended to make more Known Space books. Note, you should read this novel before reading "Ringworld's Children", due out in Summer of 2004. Enjoy it, I did!

You get exactly what the title says. This is a black and white graphic novel or manga style book of Niven's Ringworld. I read the soft cover version in an evening, and found it sort of like a visual cliff notes of Niven's novel. All of the major plots of the novel are covered.

It starts with an overview of the human-kzin war and proceeds to the Puppeteer, Nessus, recruiting Louis Wu and others on a secret mission, which is to explore Ringworld. They first visit the Puppeteer home worlds, and then proceed to Ringworld, where they crash. They then take off in flying vehicles to reach the rim wall. They have a disastrous encounter with some of the hairy natives, and then escape to continue their quest for the rim wall.

Part 1 ends at the point where the Kzin's (Speaker's) flycycle is attacked, which from my copy of Niven's Ringworld is at page 200 of 342, so this graphic novel covers a bit over 1/2 of the story.

I'm over 60 years old, and read Ringworld long ago. I had no problem with the size of the text (as one reviewer stated). I found the book a nice quick summary that brought to mind all of the story elements I had enjoyed. I found Nessus reminded me for some reason of Jar Jar Binks, but otherwise I liked how the characters were drawn. A couple of panels I found confusing, but otherwise they flow smoothly.

A very nice addition at the end of the book is a timeline of Ringworld events and a summary of the various 'Worlds of Known Space'. I really enjoyed reading these.

Look, this is not a novel, it's a comic book, so the depth of a novel is not there. I found it a nice reminder of why I liked Ringworld to begin with, and am now sitting down to reread the novel. I wonder what a young person who has never read Ringworld would make of this book?

Over all I found the story interesting and Larry Niven did good research on technology. However, I probably would have enjoyed the book more if I was about 15-20 years younger. You can definitely tell that this was written during the Hippy era. I found the alien characters and Teela Brown to be 2-dimensional. You pretty much knew how they were going to react. Some descriptions of things (vehicle controls) are antiquated. I just couldn't see how people are still using dials, buttons and switches centuries from now.

If you are looking for good in-depth Sci-fi with good characters try the Dune series or even William Gibson's work like Neuromancer.

This was an awesome read! I read it when I was in high school. I thought it was awesome then. This was the first Larry Niven book that I read. It turned me on to some of his other works.
I compare the Ringworld series to the Rama series by Arthur C. Clarke.
This series is just incredible. The whole concept of a civilization being so advanced that they can manipulate their solar system.... Wow!
I plan on re-reading the entire Ringworld series one after the other....
Buy/Borrow this book as soon as you can.....

A great book that you can read over and over again and find
it new and exciting each time. Niven introduces us to a
host of characters each unique with their own vews,
culture, and way of life.
As for Ringworld itself, it is a masterpeice of Niven's
imagination and his skill of weaving a world so real, it's
as if he was actually there.
A must for all SF fans, and for those just discovering the
wonders of this genre, a great introduction to the world of
hard-core science fiction.

Ringworld must be Larry Niven's greatest masterpiece. It's a book I've read and reread time and again. The story isn't strong on character, but the heroes do grow and change. The main thing is the spectacular adventure and bizarre cultures both alien and human that Niven delivers in this classic science fiction novel. Ringworld is a stunning display of imagination. It should be required reading in engineering courses. Louis Wu is a resourceful and likeable good guy. Speaker To Animals is a wonderful reluctant tough guy sidekick. Teela Brown is a dream, and Nessus rounds out the crew with his cowardly schemes. Visiting the vast alien structure of the Ringworld with them is always a pleasure.

As a piece of technology, the Ringworld is one of the most fantastic ideas I've ever heard. Truly a stroke of genius. As a story, Ringworld is lacking. I greatly dislike the main character, Louis Wu. I find his depth of experience and near expertise in almost all things to be irritating and preposterous, regardless of his age. The other characters are much more tolerable. Ringworld is very uneventful and shallow as far as the characters are concerned. In fact, I'm almost inclined to say that Niven first came up with the idea of the Ringworld itself, and then just tossed a story around it so he could get the concept out in the open. Despite all this, however, Ringworld does have its moments. There are several exchanges between characters and situations which are funny and entertaining. In conclusion, definitely buy this book and read it just for the Ringworld itself, but don't expect to get an award-winning story out of it.

It is a truly mindboggling experience to read the book
and suddenly realize just HOW big the Ringworld is. The
engineering effort is almost too great for the earthbound
human's mind to grasp. The fact that is not too technical
makes it readable almost anybody, though some knowledge
of physics and astronomy makes it even more enjoyable.
A very good book indeed, though the cast of charachters
and their relations are nowhere near as interesting as
the setting of the plot.

The original and informal trilogy that began with Protector ends here. There's a fair bit more character development here than in Ringworld. I remember not liking this book as much as Ringworld, and now the tables are turned, which does I guess reflect that change in reading tastes. The whole trilogy is worth reading for scifi fans, as some pretty interesting ideas are present (evolution, life cycles, stellar engineering, superconductivity...just to name a few), and it is easy reading as well.

I'm a classifier. I break everything down into neat little categories. This book falls under the realm of "idea science fiction". If you read science fiction for an other worldly escape into a detailed, plausible, expansive universe...THIS IS THE BOOK TO READ. The story is like nothing you will ever read again. Raunchy, fast paced, intriguing, challenging...all at the same time, just like science fiction should be.

Now, if you read science fiction and have never read Niven, then stop telling people you read science fiction. That is until you've read this book, Intergral Trees, Mote in Gods Eye, and for christ sake read Footfall!

If you read and enjoy Niven, which means you're pretty brainy(good job!), Give your brain a rest and go get The Deathworld Trilogy by the great Harry Harrison. And would it kill you to pick up The Stainless Steel Rat...have I taught you nothing?

Wait, was that a book review or a rant...I don't know. Suffice it to say that RingWorld is one of the Definitive Science Fiction Pieces from a Nebula award winning author...'nuff said!

Better than Rama, Ring, Orbitsville, etc. Mostly a travelogue; a 200-year-old semi-immortal in the 29th century gets hired by a bizarre alien to go investigate a mysterious object in space. Adventure ensues. Filled with 5 or 6 years of Niven's future history backstory: aliens, gizmos. Back when science fiction seemed to be all hippie sex - Dhalgren, Silverberg - this was a very different What If story. Yeah the 200 year old has a 20-year-old girlfriend, but I guess everyone does in southern California where Niven lives. Ringworld was followed by prequel Protector, not-connected World Out of Time, & Mote in God's Eye cowritten with Pournelle. Niven in the 70s was great.

....but not to me. I dig Niven b/c he uses a lot of "hard" sci-fi and there's plenty evident here; however, it definitely helps to be familiar w/the species of the characters before undertaking this book. (Check out some of Niven's "Known Space" novels and short stories.) The sheer number of species introduced can make your head spin, and the journey *to* the Ringworld seemed more exciting than the voyage *on* it. Intriguing indeed were the discussions of the RW's possible origins and dimensions, but these, to me, were few and far between.

As I'm a self-proclaimed nerd, so perhaps you can take this whole review with a grain of salt. But personally, I think Ringworld is some of the best SciFi out there.

Many points are raised in the other reviews here, and most of them are good. But I feel that far too many people missed the bigger message of it all. Yes, the 200-year-old main character (world-weary Louis Wu) winds up explaining technical jargon to a 20-year-old bimbo in a situation where characters obviously take a backseat to the great technical underpinnings of the universe... but a scene or two over, he also switches sides with a line something like: "The world's greatest lover was a friend of mine... we're going to need gravity for this."

The point of the novel isn't just to follow the typical drivel of who's starstruck for who or who's the best at splurting out technobabble WHILE you just happen to be in the future, it's to set back in awe of the setting and the world in which all of those little things happen. Truly, the Ringworld itself is the greatest and best character in this book, and everyone else (even Louis Wu) really is playing second fiddle to the main course- a structure so unimaginably complex that scientists will be (and have been) fueding over it for generations to come.

Marvel at the lasers and stasis fields. Wonder at the scenic vistas and the incredible settings. And maybe, just maybe, you'll get attached to the band of rogues caught up in all of this along the way. All in all, it's mostly about the journey and the setting, and just going along for the ride. Truly, this work is more about expanding your headspace to the massive complexity of all the universe's wonders than it is about babble (although there is a fair share of that as well), and it's about seeing how a merry band of adventurers deal with the all-too-human task of dealing with what they've been exposed to along the way.

Open your mind and just try to "get" where the ride is taking you, and it'll be a blast. Not to mention it provides excellent commentary into many aspects of both where humanity is and where it's headed. Solid SciFi in every sense. This is one of my favorite novels of all time, and I can't reccomend it highly enough.

This return to the ringworld was both boring and unsatisfying. The Characters are _STILL_ inanimate, the dialogue _STILL_ horrible and plot developments _STILL_ mysterious.
While reading Ringworld Engineers I felt left out of the story, quite an odd experience while reading a book. Louis Wu and his 'pals' would constanly leap to conclusions (which were invariably correct) based on literally, almost nothing. I almost feel that Niven knew the story but didnt want to tell it, he'd rather us read 200 pages of bad interaction then suddenly spring a left-field 'conclusion' on us.
The 'aliens' were nothing more then oddly shaped/colored humans, bad ones at that, and the 'technical' details on ringworld he added seemed out-of-place, almost as if someone gave him a scientific fact-sheet and he incorperated those facts just to validate himself..
I still wonder what I'm missing, why are these niven books such classics? There are other storys (written in the same era) that blow ringworld away technically and through sheer originality. maybe I've been spoiled by such stories.
Anyway I've said it before, and I'll say it again, Read John Varley's Titan Trilogy (Titan, Wizard, Demon) for what ringworld COULD'VE been.
email comments appreciated.

Larry Niven is not a good writer, but he has a quite potent fantasy, so he is an all-right read. This book is a sequel to "Ringworld", seen in that light "The Ringworld Engineers" doesn't offer anything new. Larry Niven is a cult writer, reading his books you get this sense that you are sitting beside him at his desk, journeying with him in his brain. He rests in himself, he even invented several new words to populate his universe.

The concept of the "Ringworld" in this book is really awesome. It's really too bad that better characters and plot couldn't be added to make this book good. The characters are difficult to distinguish despite their species, and I was rather shocked that there were no strong female characters in this; all women in this book are shallow and lifeless. The plot greatly resembles a comic book series; random event after random event, that never really tie together. All in all, this book is a waste of time, despite the concept of the ringworld.

Having loved Ringworld, and also read Engineers, Throne, and Children, I believe this is the only one that is worthy of being associated with the original. It expands on the original story and helps answer questions left in the original without too much filler material (see Throne for copious amounts).

I would recommend reading Ringworld, Engineers, then stopping. Look for Protector if you'd like to get more information about the Pak.

An entertaining look at a world that is a thin ring thousands of miles long. This is a classic and mind-blowing piece of hard science fiction, with the emphasis on the cool implications of the enormity of Ringworld. The characters tend toward the scifi cardboard cutouts familiar to the genre, but this is not to be missed for scifi fans.
A better Niven book for the characters, although not the science, is Footfall. Also check out the Mote in God's Eye, a fascinating look at a totally alien world.

If you enjoyed the original Ringworld, then Ringworld Engineers will be worth your time.
Twenty years after the first Novel, Louis Wu goes back to find the Ringworld's orbit has degenerated and will collide with its parent star in a matter of a few years. He decides to save Ringworld no matter the cost.
Although not quite as enthralling as the first installment, the book is worth the effort as Niven reveals who built the Ringworld and some more information on some of its intricacies. A good read and highly recommended.

I was unfamiliar with the term "School and Library Binding Edition" and was very disappointed in the product. I was looking to replace my well-worn original paperback with something more permanent, but this is a very poor reproduction copy the same size as the paperpack, with a cheap pasteboard binding slapped around it. Don't waste your money.

When I frist read Ringworld, it amaze me, this book has continued to amaze me in the same way, and shows some of the things I wanted to see in the other book.Is so consistant that both books can be put together and the only thing that tells you when one starts and the other begins is the 23-year lapse between the events. Just one word of advice: read ringworld first, otherwise this book is almost tasteless. Reading protector will also be good.

This book includes all the good and bad of Larry Niven: generally light-hearted and funny; creative and sometimes bizarre characters; interesting technology; difficult to grasp descriptions of aforementioned technology. Niven often fails to describe a given situation or object in a way that I can visualize. I find myself asking "she did what where and with what?" Ultimately, this novel is just a collection of little adventures on the Ringworld strung together by a molecule-thin thread (sorry, couldn't resist!). The ending is kind of one of those "uh, gee, that's it?" sort of endings and I was never moved or touched emotionally by this book. Nevertheless, it's a fun read with nice sprinklings of humor and adventure.

I've been told that I should read the other Ringworld books and that they would give me a better appreciation for this one, and so I probably will. The premise of the book is inherantly weak. I feel bad saying that, but it's just true. I feel that Niven had this cool idea for a world, physics-wise, and tried to throw up a story around it as an excuse to explore that world.
The plot, what plot there was, just didn't go anywhere. The characters were so-so. It really may be much better in a larger context, and since I really like Niven, I'm going to give it that chance.
I have to say that overall, I'd call this book fairly dull and unmemorable.

A group composed of a couple of humans and aliens go looking for the ring world, a huge ring-shaped construct, in order to explore it. The characters are memorable, and the plot very original.

I read this book years ago. Back then I did not like it much, but I still remember big chunks of the plot, so it made an impression, and I recommend it.

"Ringworld" is an odd book, and a difficult one to review. On the one hand, the idea of the Ringworld itself is fascinating. A massive ring encircling a medium-sized star, with inner "shadow squares" that provide night and day, is a brilliant concept. The descriptions of the Ringworld, its "Fist of God" mountain (and how it came to be), the shadow squares, and the millions of miles of shadow square wire are all captivating. On the other hand, the characters and storyline are laughable. It feels like the Smurfs meet Sesame Street. The two-headed puppeteer and the fuzzy orange kzin are hard to take seriously. They travel with the ageless Louis Wu and their good luck charm, the sassy Teela Brown, to explore the Ringworld. This motley crew gets into big-time trouble once they arrive there, and then the story peters out as they try to escape the big ring late in the book.

Don't read "Ringworld" if you're looking for thoughful characters or an interesting story. You'll only be disappointed. But by all means read the book for the the sake of the creative world where Nevin takes you. In either case, it's a breezy 342 pages, so there's not much to lose if you that find that this flavor of sci-fi isn't to your liking.

This is my first niven book to read since being an adult and I thoroughly enojoyed it. The idea of the ringworld and the mysterious culture who built it fascinated me. I found the math , science, and physics to be excellent. However the characters were a bit underdeveloped. I also found the way they interacted with each other to get a little laughable near the end, especially the aliens. The plot was great but sometimes the pacing was a bit off and you miss the jump from one sceen to another. But overall this book was great!

I read this book when it was first published, again about 10 years later, and once again recently. In all that time, my impression of it has not changed. I have been a science fiction addict all my life, and a fan of nearly everything Niven has done. But not this. While it contains interesting characters and some strikingly original ideas, it suffers from the same disease as Tom Clancy's more recent novels: it drags. God, how it drags. Finishing it was a major chore, all three times. Like Clancy's recent work, this would be twice the novel if it were half as long.

i seriously do not know how anyone could judge this book or the series badly. this is true sci-fi - the concepts are second to none - very few writers could convincingly create a believeable world as mind-boggling huge and intriguing as the ringworld - a soild hominid-built ring that orbits a sun - 40 million times bigger than the earth! the story is non-stop action with gadgets that will blow your mind. i dont see how anyone could be disappointed by the amount of gadgets in this book - this is the future - this is why we read these book - to get an idea of the level of technology that we have yet to even grasp. and Niven backs these brilliant ideas up with amazing theory and mechanical descriptions, making them so much more believeable.
Now the characters - where the [heck] do start - i wont even go into that much because i could write forever! they are absolutely fantastic, intriguing, funny, deep and incredibly intelligent. the interaction between the characters is one of the reasons why i have reread the series - Niven is a gem at developing an intense relationship between such diverse aliens that have come together to explore this incredible relic.
i could go on and on and on - but just read the book and you will soon find out. i cannot believe a movie has not been made about this book. Niven has written some other great novels - but i do believe he was born specifically to write this series. DO NOT LISTEN TO NEGATIVE HYPE - it has won awards for a reason - and dont forget it was written in the 70s and is still a convincing sci-fi novel.

I really wanted to like this book because I'd heard good things about it. It was a real chore but I somehow managed to slog through it. Let me break it down for you...

Pros:.
The Ringworld itself is very, very cool.

Cons:
Everything else. Seriously, everything else. The characters are awful, walking clichés. The dialogue is stilted and awkward. The females are all vacuous bimbos, only there to copulate (very awkwardly, I might add) with the main character. The writing is often atrocious, and most of the things that happen (or don't happen) during the book are just ridiculously absurd. Any one of these things on its own would be forgivable, but this book is just a total mess. I could honestly sit here and write out page after page of complaints but I'll save you the headache.

Literally the only thing this book has going for it is the Ringworld structure, which was a very neat idea, and sadly wasted here. It would have been better for us, the readers, if Larry Niven had sold his fantastic idea to a better author. As it is, I am seriously dumbfounded as to how this book won so many awards and is now considered a classic of the genre. I can only guess that nothing better came out that year (hard to believe), or that people were so enamored by that one concept that they were willing to overlook everything else. If the Ringworld was made to be more interesting, perhaps this would have been somewhat salvageable. Again, it's a very cool concept, but once our party actually lands on the Ringworld it ceases to be new and exciting and just becomes boring, it could have been developed more but was not, or at least not in a good way. Also, the characters and "plot" (and I use that word loosely) are constantly in the foreground, the Ringworld is in the background. This does not work, because as I've already pointed out, everything in this book aside from the Ringworld itself is very, very lame.

I simply cannot recommend this one. I was tempted to give it one star but let it slide at two just because, once again, the Ringworld is worthy of note. Still, in my opinion this book is not anywhere near deserving of the awards and praise it has received. Niven had a great idea and I give all due respect for that, but he killed it when he put it down on paper and tried to make a story out of it. If this is anything to go by, the man cannot write decent fiction. If this were my first exposure to science-fiction I'd probably never touch the genre again, and that would be a very sad thing. With all the awards that were heaped upon this book one might assume that it's a shining example of the very best that the genre has to offer, but this is not even close to the truth. Thankfully, I already knew better.

While the characters and the plot are rather flat, Niven is able to fill in many of the scientific gaps that were left in the orginal book. He answers many of the particular problems that would arise in the construction of the Ringworld and discusses many of the social issues that would arise upon the Ringworld. Despite the weaknesses of the book it is an enjoyable trip back to the novel creation of Larry Niven

Read it years ago... it was fun to see illustrators depicted scenes and images, comparing it to my memories of the book. Completely enjoyed it, and looking forward to reading "Part Two" this November...

I first read this book when I was 14, and literally never put it down. I remember by dad attempting to describe a puppeteer at dinner the night before, and I had been skeptical of concepts like impervious hulls, but the story weaves a diversity of elements together seamlessly. This year I stumbled into Niven again as an escape from law school reading, and find the science, narrative, and stories as compelling as ever. Its a pleasure to return to this book after so long, and I highly recommend it to any reader.

Ringworld by Larry Niven Ringworld presents us with a rich, highly detailed novel about a 200-year old man who is bored with his life. But when he is confronted with a special journey to a mysterious relic, Louis Wu accepts the challenge. Along with a twenty-year old female, an alien from a race which has been missing for quite some time, and a cat-like alien named Speaker, Louis boards a mysterious ship to investigate a world three million times the size of Earth. Upon crash landing on the surface, the team is confronted with a planet so mysterious and large that they may never return from it alive. This first of a three novel series is great, however, many may find it hard to visuallize the Ringworld itself as the author doesn't clearly detail what it looks like. It often had me confused when details of the land were being described. It was an above-average sci-fi novel, however, and should appeal to most who read it. The character development was well written and the character interactions were well portrayed. I recommend this novel to anyone who is willing to read about an enticing sci-fi journey.

This is certainly an enjoyable work of science fiction--Niven spins a good tale. The characters are interesting and diverse, and the concept of the "ringworld" itself is intriguing. My only problem with Niven's work is that at times it goes far afield and there are a few concepts developed incompletely. But this does not take away from the enjoyment he gives. Definitely recommended.

I know it's a classic but it just seemed so slow. I really tried to like it but I just couldn't get into it.

I normally really like hard SciFi and the premise of the book is awesome, I just couldn't buy into the characters and the slow pace killed it for me.

Anytime I finish a book just to see how it ended it can't be a good sign.

I keep telling myself I need to read more science-fiction, so I decided to make good on that, starting with a classic, Ringworld by Larry Niven. I haven't read any books by Larry Niven before, although Ringworld is part of his Known Space book universe.

Ringworld is about an artificial world, 3 million miles across, that is built in the shape of a ring that spins around a sun (the concept is similar to a Dyson sphere.) Nessus, a Pierson's puppeteer (a cowardly alien species with two heads) leads a motley crew on a top-secret mission to explore it. Louis Wu is a two hundred year old world-famous adventurer, Teela Brown is an extraordinarily lucky twenty year old girl (and Louis's lover), and Speaker-to-Animals is a ferocious Kzinti diplomat.

The book starts off as an exciting adventure, I really enjoyed it up until the point where the expedition actually lands on the Ringworld (halfway through the book.) After that, it got a bit tedious, like Niven didn't know what to do with his characters.

Some of the ideas mentioned and explored in this book are pretty interesting - I enjoyed the discussions about the different kinds of evolutions (what the puppeteer's fight or flight response meant, for example) and how that led to different priorities for different species. I also liked the Ringworld itself, as well as the puppeteer's home world. Teela's "psychic luck" was also an interesting concept, although I found it implausible.

The characters are interesting to start off with, but like I said above, halfway into the book, they get pretty dull. I also found the descriptions of Louis Wu's (constant) sex kind of awful ("she impaled herself" is an awful description.) Also, the writing felt a bit dated; I think our conception of space were very different in the 70s.

I probably would not have stuck through this book if it was not part of a challenge I set myself, but I'm glad I did because it's a classic, and at least I've read it now! I probably won't be reading the other books in the series soon, but maybe eventually.

Hmm... only a thousand words. I cant begin to EVEN explain how good it is. the concepts are NOT far fetched (10 years maybe) clear concrete, 2 headed aliens, a colossal cat with the biggest chip on his shoulder, shall I go on? The concept on going to distant reaches of space to find a ring around a sun is kinda kooky but, it is the best book Ive ever read. I compare ALL books I read with this one.

This book is an excellent sequal in that it answers almost every question that cam to mind after people were done reading the first one. This book is about a voyage back to Ringworld, it gives much more deatiled information on the Ringworld, and tells what happens to some old characters like Teela as well. If you were lucky enough to experience the first one, then you must experience the second

This was my first Niven Book, and I have to say, what is all the hoopla about?
The -CONCEPT- of ringworld is fantastic, and really sent my mind reeling, however I had to work very hard at forming the imagry as Niven's descriptions were lacking at best.
The characters and plot were also great in THEORY, however Niven's execution and development was less then spectacular. In the so called 'climax' I found I didnt care about any of the characters, if they lived or died was of no concern.. they seemed as words on paper, nothing more.
It must be that Niven's style just dosent suit me, as I enjoy other Sci-Fi Authors a great deal, but then again they have some descriptive talant that niven lacks.
Overall It is a superior idea with inferior stylings. If you agree with this, I'd suggest Reading anything by David Brin, or Most of anything by John Varley.. (Varley's 'titan' trilogy is a lot like ringworld, but MUCH better IMHO)

With a mysterious ringworld, this book had a lot of potential for action and intrigue. Instead, four characters drive their flycycles across an endless plain with nothing too exciting happening along the way. I just didn't care about the weak premise or characters. One of the main threads of the story having to do with luck is novel but ultimately stupid.

This book was a huge letdown for me. I was going to put it down halfway through but thought that it's a revered book... maybe it's just slow to build and will pick up as details about the ringworld are revealed. I wish I had stopped.

I am not tempted in the least to read the sequels, even though they may explain more about the ringworld; I no longer care.

I was somewhat disappointed with this novel. While the setting was intricately described and amazing in conception, the characters and story fell flat. The alien races were too one-dimensional, and many of the plot devices seemed either ludicrous or contrived.
Overall, this book still ranks as a sci-fi classic, if only for one aspect of the book - the Ringworld itself. Given the minimal time investment in this rather short novel, it is worth reading.

Ever since getting my hands on my first Larry Niven novel, Tales of Known Space, I have been hooked. Ringworld did not disappoint me. The plot keeps you interested and does not become too verbose.
The only item where I find it weak is in the scientific background. The fact that the Ringworld is built by the Pak, a race of warlike beings ancestral to humans, who live in three stages, child, breeder and Protector, is hard to beleive. The Pak are so warlike they should have become extinct before developing space flight. They certainly did not have the cooperative inclination to build a partial Dyson Sphere.
The rate of mutation in the ringworld is also somewhat far fetched, given the age of the construct and the time since protectors left the breeders to their own devices.
But this is only a problem with people with some degree of training in the natural sciences. For the majority of readers, this is no barrier to enjoying one of the most fascinating sci fi novels of the late 20th century!

Anyone into classic sense-of-wonder science fiction will like Niven's Ringworld. Niven brings a down-to-Earth way of describing some pretty fantastic things. His aliens were a bit too human, but that's forgivable. He hits the reader hard with a couple of shocking realizations by the main character, Louis Wu. He captures a larger scope, one that had me begging for the sequel.

I can't understand how this book has become a "classic" of science fiction. This was my second attempt to read this book, and this time was just as slow and tedious as the first. I hesitate to review a book I didn't finish, but this was so bad, I couldn't resist. Ringworld is loaded with flat, uninteresting characters and situations that didn't hold my attention at all. It was as if Niven threw many good individual concepts onto the pages, but couldn't figure out how to cohesively link them together. Oh well, I can always look at the wonderful Puppeteer painting in Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials and give a slight bit of gratitude to Niven for coming up with that character.

As we speak, as close as we human's can come to building a Ringworld is through the emerging Computer Animation technologies. So, some one out there, build it we will come. This is what Close Encounter's did for UFO buff's. Now those of us with enough imagination and intelligence have an author who can see The Bigger Picture .
BRAVO Mr. Niven!
MORE Mr. Niven!

I am somewhere between a 4 and a 5 rating on this book. I like it, I really like it. It's mainly just a fun book to read. I mean how far from this reality can you get then Larry Niven's ring shaped world. I think I like the second book more then the first because it gets more into the nitty gritty of the ringworld experience.

An interesting fantasy... This is only the second science fiction book I've ever read, so maybe my relatively low rating is because I'm not really a science fiction fan... The alien characters almost defy imagination (The Kazin and the Puppeteer), but I have to complement the author for being relatively accurate with respect to basic physics... An enjoyable read, nevertheless...

Larry Niven never intended to write a sequel to his 1970 Hugo and Nebula award-winning novel RINGWORLD, but science fiction fans were so enthralled by the Niven's concept of a ring-shaped world 93 million times the size of the Earth that Niven felt compelled to give the fans more. Unfortunately, THE RINGWORLD ENGINEERS is one of Niven's poorest works, and it is bad enough to tarnish the excellent first book.
THE RINGWORLD ENGINEERS opens 23 years after the end of RINGWORLD. Louis Wu has become a wirehead, an addict to current fed directly into the pleasure center of the brain, and is living a pathetic life in the frontier world Canyon. He is kidnapped by The Hindmost, the deposed puppeteer supreme leader, along with Speaker-to-Animals, who is now a noble called Chmee. The Hindmost takes them back to the Ringworld, hoping to find the transmutation device that was spoken of during the first time on the Ringworld and so impress the Fleet of Worlds that they will accept him as ruler again. When they arrive, however, they discover that the Ringworld is unstable and will impact the sun in a year's time...
Larry Niven spends a lot of time detailing the various species of hominids on the Ringworld, and this is where the book falls apart. The hominids cannot reproduce except within their own species, and rishathra, or risk-free sex between species but within the hominids, is used to seal contracts and express friendly intentions.Niven is so obsessed with this concept that the introduction of every new town is an excuse for Louis Wu to engage in graphic sex. The plot of THE RINGWORLD ENGINEERS exists essentially to string sex scenes together.
THE RINGWORLD ENGINEERS also fails because it contradicts much of Niven's previous Known Space work, especially the novels RINGWORLD and PROTECTOR. In the initial part of the book Niven, wanting to settle the issue, just says "Well, the Pak created the Ringworld" even though this goes against the Known Space setup that Niven spent fifteen years building.
Finally, a great deal of the novel simple isn't Niven's work. In the introduction he states that most of the ideas were contributed by readers. As a result, he has cobbled together some truly terrible ideas sent in by fans that don't bear much resemblance to the quality Known Space works of the late 1960's.
THE RINGWORLD ENGINEERS is a terrible book.While not as bad as the execrable third volume in the Ringworld series, THE RINGWORLD THRONE, it is bad enough to taint one's memories of the first book, which was well-written and introduced some fascinating concepts. Unfortunately, readers who read the RINGWORLD often feel compelled to move on to the sequels. Take my advice, however, and avoid THE RINGWORLD ENGINEERS.

I first saw a reprint of the book in the early eighties
in my house and I never actually read it until 1993 when
I picked it up, read the first chapter and wouldn't you know it? I was hooked!

Niven finds his way of entertaining the reader at every chapter -- consider the awe of the Ringworld and
the Known Space. One word: BOGGLE!!

Bold and breathtaking. The entire universe this novel takes place in is a character unto itself. Just the concept embodied in Ringworld is spectacular enough for an entire series, but add to that an amazing array of scenery, alien creatures, and bizarre technology and you have yourself a masterpiece!!! A page turner. Will have you treading water. One of The Greats.

When I first read this book I was in awe and decided that it was a literary masterpiece. There was a wondefully well thought out, brilliant concept rooted in a well developed and detailed universe, as close as we're likely to get to Middle Earth in S-F. I still love the book, and reread it periodically with great enthusiasm, but I realized as I read the negative reviews that this book will not satisfy every reader. It is indeed tremendously sexist, and although I found the storytelling exciting and interesting, it certainly doesn't have the amazing prosaic style or literary merit of such masters as Philip K. Dick. I consider Niven a conceptual writer of the highest caliber, and the hard science elements of this book are truly compelling. This type of writing is something I really love, but if you're looking for a great overall package, look elsewhere.

It's been years since I read it, but Ringworld is one of the reputed sci fi classics that clearly deserves its status. Although not my favorite of the genre, it is a must-read, and its influence on the genre is unmistakable.

Should you read The Ringworld Engineers? Absolutely. But I caution to put some distance between Ringworld and it's sequel. The latter book was written a decade after Ringworld, and Niven backpeddled on some of his best concepts and characters. Why the book is fascinating, and a good sequel, a little time to appreciate the first book in innocence is a good thing!

Excellent read. A good mix of hard science fiction and storytelling, the author never lets technical explanations interrupt the story. And the characters are fun to get to know, and the plot is gripping. Worth your time.

I enjoyed the book. The engineers are the most loved people in the whole book, something I can relate to. The problem with the book is that it has too much sex to spice it up for the adolescent reading the book. I really don't think there was much of a point to all the boinking with Teela Brown, and in the end the mind controling capabilities of the prostitute. Come on man, grow up.

To be honest I dont read a huge amount of sci fi novels but of thosew I have read nivens are among the best. I loved this book the ringworld really caught my imagination, as did the puppeteers. Granted the charactors arent all that strong but the level of imagination gone in to this makes it easy to over look. Even if your not a sci fi fan you should give this book a try, it is worth it.

I just finished listening to the audio book. The writing style is mediocre at best. The book is presented as a series of scenes, rather than a story. The characters lack depth and emotion, they all seem to have to state exactly what they are thinking in poorly written dialog. The descriptions of technology are sometimes childish and overly simple. The women in the book are there only to provide the occasional love scene. It's incredibly obvious this was written by a man from the 1960s. I will not be reading the other books in the series.

A Puppeteer recruits a group to travel to the Ringworld, a large, artificial construct that is a very large band around a sun.

This group includes Louis Wu, a 200 year old bored junkie, your average warrior Kzin type, but for his people, he is remarkable tolerant, and a woman named Teela Brown. She is included for her presumable genetic dispensation towards luck being the result of so many winning birth lotteries.

What the Puppeteer really wants they have yet to find out.

"Ringworld" and "The Ringworld Engineers", taken together as one work, make the greatest script for an SF movie series that I've ever seen. Just think of the teaser.... "Imagine a candle with a baby blue Christmas ribbon...now increase the scale"..
I wonder why nobody's made a movie out of this series? Perhaps now, with digital technology, some of the characters (Nessus, the Hindmost) and the artifacts (shadow squares, the Arch, the Fleet of Worlds) can be brought to life.
IMHO, it's worth taking a shot at making the "impossible" book into a movie ("Dune" was at least an attempt at that - no one could have captured all of it).
Mr. Niven deserves the recognition.

For me reading Ringworld was, in a word, painful. I understand that a good deal of this pain came from the fact that I am not a fan of "hard science". Yes, the concept of the Ringworld and Dyson spheres is facinating, I even like the idea of genetic luck, but I simply didn't enjoy reading 300 pages of pure technical description. I would have read that and more if there had only been some decent character interaction. There were glimmers of hope when the puppeteer's plotting came out, but no, the characters simply went their seperate ways and ignored one and other, as if Niven himself was afraid to concieve their emotions. Instead of focusing on these interactions we were left with the only character that did not seem to care who also did not want to talk about it and only contacted the interesting characters when he wanted to talk about the technical aspects of their escape. Overall I feel that there were the seeds of an interesting story, but they failed to flourish.

I'm surprised at all the negative reviews. This is quite an excellent book, with many interesting twists along the way. The characters are quite interesting too. I don't see how they are "flat" at all... the power structure shifts several times within this mixed group, and the banter between them is fun. If this universe is so bad, somebody should inform all the other authors who have expanded upon Niven's universe in their own novels and stories. Before giving up on Niven entirely, try one of his collections of short stories. THey are up there with I, Robot. The Ringworld Engineers was okay, but the Ringworld Throne was dreadful. I'll get back to you on Ringworld's Children.

I'm glad I bought this with a gift certificate. Niven seems to be too busy trying to impress with his scientific knowledge to take time to entertain. I read 2/3 of the book and finally gave up. I don't really care about the characters and I don't really care about Ringworld or its inhabitants. He should follow Asimov's lead and make the science serve the story instead of the other way around. If you like hard sf that actually entertains while making you think, try Stephen R. Donaldson's 5-volume GAP cycle.