Ringworld's Children

Ringworld's Children (2004) is the fourth novel in the Ringworld series, following The Ringworld Throne. In Ringworld, Louis Wu had encountered a very large patch of sunflowers, but except for a minor incident that left Speaker to Animals hairless and charred, his party managed to hide from their reflected sunbeams during the day. In The Ringworld Engineers, Louis had boiled a sea, providing enough time for the locals to weed out the mirrored plants, but also left a legacy of clouds that remained in the region.

In The Ringworld Throne, these clouds allowed the Shadow Nest vampires to greatly increase their hunting range and thus their food supply, resulting into a local population explosion of these predators. When Valavirgillin and the Farsight Trading company arrived in the region, they soon found themselves under attack by the vampires and the Machine People joined forces with various local hominids to attack the vampire lair. They gained access to the floating city and turned on the bottomside lighting system, thus driving the vampires out of their sheltered enclave and forcing them to scatter throughout the region.

Elsewhere in previous volume, Louis, Acolyte and the Hindmost were captured by a vampire protector, whom Louis named Bram. He and his mate Anne have gained control of the Meteor Defense room and now Bram has started using the meteor defense system to destroy ships from the various known space species. Louis lured the Ghoul Tunesmith into the tree-of-life garden, where he underwent the change to protector. Then Louis and his associates cooperated with these vampire protectors while they fought other vampire protectors for control of the rimwall. Anne was killed by the rimwall protectors and Bram was injured. When Bran returned from the rimwall, Tunesmith ambushed him and, with a timely diversion by Acolyte, overcame him.

In this novel, in 2893 AD, Louis Wu awakes under a coffin lid in the nanotech superdoc; he has been in the 'doc for 84 days and hasn't felt this good in two centuries. However, Tunesmith has been very busy while Louis was undergoing treatment. He has negotiated an agreement with the Spill Mountain protectors. He also has moved Hot Needle of Inquiry back under Olympus Mons, sliced it open, and removed various components. The superdoc is spread out on the cavern floor, as is the repaired hyperdrive (maybe Louis can go home afterall).

However, the Fringe War has heated up again. Warships from the ARM, Kzinti, Trinocs and other, unknown aliens abound within the system; even the Puppeteers and Outsiders have sent observers. Tunesmith has made plans to hijack the Long Shot, which is being used as a courier for the Kzinti. He has also made Hanging People protectors and is using them to pilot probes against his opponents. He sends Probe One out to agitate the Patriarchy command ship Diplomat, which is trying to link with the Long Shot. The probe thwarts the rendezvous, but is destroyed by an anti-matter bullet.

Tunesmith has made some changes to the hyperdrives and can use them in near space. First he fires Probe Two out of the linear accelerator launcher and then sends Hot Needle of Inquiry immediately after it. Probe Two acts both as a decoy and a test vehicle for the new hyperdrive. It jinks and curves and then disappears ... but returns a quarter million miles ahead. Then the ARM and Patriarchy notice the Needle and soon beams and missiles begin to converge on them. The Needle goes into hyperdrive and gains a quarter million miles on the targeting systems.

The Needle avoids the warships as it travels out to the periphery of the system, where it takes a hyperspace jump back to the other side only ten light-minutes from the Long Shot. Approaching the rendezvous point, a pulse of the hyperdrive bypasses two guard ships and the Needle dives on the Long Shot as it attaches to the Diplomat. It touches sides with the Long Shot and a "glue" stuff causes the Needle to adhere to the other ship; the Needle then accelerates at ten gravities, tearing the Long Shot away from the Diplomat. Tunesmith, Acolyte and Louis storm aboard the Long Shot, but the fight is over before Louis can reach the other cabin.

In this story, Tunesmith discovers something new about hyperspace: it is populated with living creatures, including ship-eating predators. Thus, hyperspace can be used within a gravity well as long as the ship returns to normalspace quickly. He now plans to learn even more about the quantized velocity of hyperspace using the Long Shot. Meanwhile, the Needle aerobrakes through the sun and returns to Ringworld, where it dives through an eye storm into the sea, out one meteor hole, and into another, and then hides beneath the sea.

Two ARM craft follow the Needle in the eye storm, but lose it under the sea. They are attacked by two other ships and an ARM craft disappears within an anti-matter explosion. The blast blows a wide hole in the sea, sucking out the remains of the eye storm into space. Tunesmith deploys his experimental meteor patch to the new hole and sends Louis to observe.

The other ARM craft lands on the ring and Louis joins them while pretending to be "Luis", a young Ringworld resident. The Hanging People protector who piloted Probe Two, Hanuman, pretends to be Luis' pet and also accompanies the ARM party. Later, Wembleth, a native of indeterminate species, travels with the group, as does Proserphina, one of the oldest protectors on Ringworld, who has been exiled to the Isolation Zone for millennia while her descendants have been running free on the Map of Earth.

This story is too short and abrupt -- it is less than 300 pages long -- and there is plenty of space for clarification and follow throughs, but it still provides some interesting new concepts and scenery. All the protectors seem to have consented to follow Tunesmith as the Master Protector. Of course, Tunesmith doesn't give many clues as to his plans, but you can take for granted that they are BIG; everything on the Ringworld is oversized, after all, and only BIG plans have any chance of saving the ring from the careless hands of the anti-matter wielders.

Recommended for Niven fans and for anyone else who enjoys tales of strange sentients in an even stranger environment.

-Arthur W. Jordin

The six hundred miles long and a million yards across ribbon-shaped Ringworld is home to fifty trillion hominids as well as many other species and most amazing of all it is man made. All of the sentient species want to learn the technology that went into making Ringworld but the protectors want to keep such people out. The Protector used to shoot down any ship that got too close but the new protector Tunesmoth is holding fire so as not to irritate the participants of the Fringe War, which is getting too close to Ringworld.
The ARM, the military leg of the United Nations, is using anti-matter engines near Ringworld, something that could destroy the planet if an accident occurs. When a ship falls and puts a hole in the top layer of Ringworld the Protector must fix it or the place will cease to exist. As ARMs soldiers try to ferret out the secrets of the Ringworld, are, a group of RINGWORLD'S CHILDREN work to repair the damage. One of the original engineering experts, together with Tunesmith try to figure out a way to move Ringworld away from sentient warmongers.
People who have never read the Ringworld books will find the latest entry as a strong stand-alone book that gives enough information about other novels in the series so that new readers will want to buy and read them too. It is a fascinating place to visit, an engineering marvel so advanced that even in the year 2893, the technology is too sophisticated to duplicate. Larry Niven, one of the grandmasters of science fiction, has brought a classic to a new generation of readers.
Harriet Klausner

What is it about aging Science Fiction writers that they become so obsessed with sex? It happened to Heinlein, and sadly, it's happening to Niven, two of my favorite authors from childhood.

I've read most of Niven's work, loved all his known space series, even if he's made some serious physics blunders, and loved Ringworld and Ringworld Engineers. Ringworld Throne would have been a short story if you ripped out every page with his twisted interspecies sex fantasies, and I promosed myself that I would toss Rindworld's Children if I encountered a single scene of gratuitous rishathra that didn't propel the plot line.

Surprisingly, I got through half the book, but that sucker is on the curb for recycling as I write this.

Larry, get a ticket to Thailand, get yourself thoroughly laid, and then write your next story.

It was a sad experience, like reading Harry Potter 7. This seemed pretty clearly the last ringworld book. Its been a grand 34 years for the story.
Children was short, far too short, and in my opinion, over-edited. I liked that rishathra, contrived and distracting in previous books, was tamed. I didn't like that Niven has jumped on the nanotech elven-magic bandwagon. I loathe the concept of persistent nanotechnology, its become a literary krutch for science fiction, the ultimate Deus Ex Machina when far more interesting possibilites may have crossed the creative mind. This is not to suggest in the least that Niven is slacking, the sunfish ship and the details of Quantum II Hyperdrive are interesting enough by themselves.
I liked the in-depth view of protector thinking, the satisfying plans-within-plans that has come to be expected of Niven's colorful and clever aliens. Louis Wu was at his analytical best. I was able to guess the fate of the ringworld (it was obvious), but not the extended truth of Teela Brown. The entire story is drawn carefully though somewhat breathlessly to a satisfying conclusion.
I just wish it didn't have to end. Then again, Louis Wu *did* resolve to live forever...

While Niven is my favourite author, i often feel his books are bulked up with a lot of filler. Short stories are his strong suit. With Ringworld's Children, i felt he was desperately trying to fill in gaping plot holes left unaddressed in the previous novels. An interesting read for a true fan. Not as good as the original or Engineers. Fortunately, it flowed much better than Throne.

Once there was a sci-fi writer called Larry Niven who wrote some of the most imaginative hard sci-fi of his day. Never mind that the stories were badly written, the characters two-dimensional, and the societies that he described were little more than a teen-aged boy's wet dream; the stories were so chock-full of big ideas that I avidly hunted down everything that he wrote. Then came the Larry Niven who collaborated with Jerry Pournelle. This Larry Niven was a much better writer, but his ideas became smaller and smaller until we saw sad little political tirades like "Fallen Angels". I, like so many others, have spent twenty years hoping that the old Larry Niven would return from the literary wasteland. With "Ringworld's Children" the old Niven has at least sent us a postcard.

The first Ringworld book was one of the old Larry Niven's later stories and is perhaps his grandest vision. The story is set on an artificial world that was created by building a ring around a star. The ring has the diameter of Earth's orbit, the inside is habitable, and there is enough room for almost anything to happen. Over the years Niven wrote two sequels: each less imaginative than the previous one. When "Ringworld's Children" appeared at my local library I ignored it because I was so tired of reading the awful books that Larry Niven has written over the past two decades. However, the other day I sat down and read the book and found that I could not put it down. The book is not a true return to form for Mr Niven, but it is
far better than anything that he has written since the early 1970s, and it does have the feel of his early work, right down to the bad writing.

If you like Larry Niven's early work then read this book. If you think that the Pournelle/Niven collaborations were the gospels of sci-fi then this book is probably not for you.

I am suspicious of all of the negative reviews of this book. First of all, anyone who says they read this book in one day is lying. The concepts in this story are staggering. The visuals are awe-inspiring. You can read one sentence and then spend 20 minutes visualizing the scene just described. One of the problems with most scifi is that the action is 'toned down' to the level of a bad movie or a TV show. Niven does not do that. He imagines a truly future, amazingly complex reality; and then the characters move along in real time in that situation. The reader has to THINK just to keep up.I kept thinking as I read that " there will never be a movie made of this story... it is just TOO difficult ". Niven is juggling a vast array of disparate elements here; and part of the fun is watching him keep those balls in the air and tell a story at the same time. Not for everyone; but satisfying for those who try.
I wrote the above review after reading the book one time. Then I dug out 'Ringworld Throne' and tried to read it again. It took me awhile. The first half of the book is just boring. Then I discovered that the second half deals with the characters we all love, especially Louis. So I forced myself to read through the second half. This helps to appreciate ' Ringworld's Children '. So then I picked up 'Children' and started to read it a second time. Much better. I actually enjoyed most of it. I think I understand what's going on a little more, at least enough to offer some minor helpful criticism:
Larry Niven no longer writes any descriptive sentences to help us to understand or visualize what he is talking about. He wastes no time. Almost as if he is a Protector telling a story. He touches on details and keeps moving, forcing us to figure out what is happening. This is a problem. Because sometimes the events are difficult to comprehend or understand. And without understanding them we lose the thread of the story.
Another failing is the way the characters talk. We are supposed to believe that an alien living for thousands of years on the Ringworld would be interested in literature from Earth, or phrases or concepts from pre-space-age Earth. This is fun, and makes the story colorful and easier to comprehend; but the idea is still silly.
It is never explained what exactly Protectors do with all the time they have lived. Apparently they sit around living for thousands of years and then act quickly in a flurry of excitement during the events in the story.
And they teach themselves quantum physics on their own, but fail to grasp simple concepts that to us seem obvious ( super nerds ).
And everyone uses the concept of a BallWorld ( like Earth ) but no one thinks to ever call it a sphere-world or cantaloupe-world.
I realize now that the problem list goes on and on.
Perhaps the concept of the Ringworld is just too big. Maybe a smaller Ringworld would be easier to write about and easier to visualize.
I still like the characters, and I love when Hindmost and Louis and Acolyte are doing stuff together.
And there are some great situations that Niven plays with . One of my favorite sections involves Louis Wu pretending to be a younger son named Luis and talking to a hot female ARM agent who he is lusting after but pretending not to. And he is trying to interrogate her and at the same time fool her and manipulate her. And she is trying to coerce him and interrogate him at the same time, while she wants to have sex with him and also kidnap him. The dialogue and thought balloons are maddening and great fun and to me 'pure Niven'.
All in all I greatly enjoyed 'Children' the second time through.
If I understood the physics I think I would like it even more the third time.

I just had the misfortune of reading this book. The only reason I was able to get through it is that I was on a very long flight and had nothing else to do because my laptop battery died.

I remember a way back when reading the very first Ringworld book and being entranced. My goodness, how the mighty have fallen, just like the floating cities on the Ringworld.

From the get-go, this book is unbelievably confusing. Niven spends way too much time with confusing conversation between the characters, and other than Louis Wu and the puppeteer, it's difficult to discern who the other characters are and how they fit into the story. The reader has to sit through pages and pages of confusing conversation, with events moving either too slowly or too quickly in between. The Ringworld is a fascinating place, yet we have perhaps three or four pages of description in the entire book.

Niven ought to read the "Rendezvous with Rama" series by Arthur C. Clarke, which is also a four book series. Now that is some masterful writing.

Question -- is Larry Niven on drugs?

Thank goodness I didn't pay for this book -- I got it from the library.

Maybe I'm being slightly generous with five stars but it's a pretty good read - the magnitude of Larry Niven's ideas never fails to be stunning. And known space continues to expand with the very fine stories of the Man-Kzin Wars, some by other writers with Larry's permission. I'd recommend reading Ringworld and the Man-Kzin Wars before this if you haven't done so already. It's a fine universe to lose yourself in!

I'll not give the plot away, but its fast, highly-visualised and imaginative action such as we've come to expect from the Master!

For the last 20 years readers and fans have bemoaned the lack of a worthy sequel to Lary Nivens 1970 Ringworld. 1980's Ringworld engineer was fair, and Ringworld Throne completely LAME. A lot of Niven recent work seem plain and uninteresting. I began to suspect that like his mentor and idol, Robert Hienlein that in his older years Niven was losing the ability to tell stories and had been reduced to essentially delivering long monolgue travel brochures.

Not so with this book. Niven has come through with an interesting and delightful tale that brings full circle a number of story lines and characters. I enjoyed how he over came some of his previous "Deus ex machina" such as puppeteer hulls, stasis generators. Just as in the real world,a seemingly over powering technology soon becomes less dominant in the face of newer technological advances. Ie the usage of anti matter against scrith and Puppeteer hulls.

I further enjoyed the more in depth examination of the motives of Louis Wu and Teela Brown from the first book. Without giving a spoiler simply let me say that this is the finest book Niven has delivered in a decade.

This is one truly appalling book. If I could have given it zero stars I would have. Larry Niven was once an exciting writer whose excitement in novelties carried you along with him. Now he seems to be drearily trying to tie together the loose ends of most of his previous work, to little or no effect - just going through the motions.

Where can I start? Lack of characterisation. Slack plotting (which Niven now seems to believe is purely mechanical). Ho-hum action sequences. Personal obsessions (inter-species sex). Here-and-there action to no great purpose. And a resolution which is wholly deus ex machina.

Sad to see an author who once had it all together (and remember the younger Niven justifiably won both Hugo and Nebula awards) lose it to this extent. I ended "Ringworlds's Chidren" thinking it would have read a lot better had it been edited by E. E. ("Doc") Smith - and that's saying something!

I liked the original Ring World series, and like any book I enjoy, I found myself reading each book in a day or so.

I decided to read RingWorld's Children on the strength of the original series. However, after a couple of weeks, I am still only a 3rd of the way through. I picked it up again today - after reading the new Dune series book and other - well more interesting - books in between, I found it hard to keep reading.

Why? Well I decided, sadly, that the story is just plain boring, It drones. It reads like a sad tired addition to the series that I get the distinct impression that Larry Niven probably did not want to write.

I honestly do not think I can finish it - which is probably the worst thing I can say about a book. I'll keep it by the toilet in case one day I have a bad case of diarrhea and run out of toiletry boxes to read.

It is really quite sad.

If you like clean-cut, chaste prose and loose, not to say slutty ideas you love Larry Niven. In this fourth book in the Ringworld series he leaves more loose ends than he wraps up.

Spoilers, or inside baseball.
Does Tunesmith pick a fight with the h-monsters? Pak strategists don't seem to maintain a force in being long.
Are the Ringworld pak manipulated by an artificial intelligence in the superconducting network?
Why not just use a lightsail with a stasis field for meteor patches? Also for bank shots around the Ring.
If the Ring is really out of Known Space, maybe Niven could put a Smoke Ring around a gas giant in the sequel to 'The Gripping Hand'. New Singapore? I don't think he should have used savages the first time.

This was a fun read. Fast paced and interesting. I would not recommend starting the series here though. It won't be quite the adventure and you will probably be disapointed.

Pick up "Ring World" if you have not read it. An even better idea would be to pick up "World of Ptavvs". I think it's the first of the known space books. An oldie but a goodie.

(What I really want to know is what happens when a Thrint meets a

protector. Yikes!)

This trip to Ringworld was a disappointment. The character and the plot development was weak and shallow. Niven had the material to flesh out the story, but, for some reason failed to use it. When I reached the end of the book I wondered where the rest of the story was. This is definitely not his best effort. (...)

Praise to Larry Niven!!! Just skimming the first few pages of Ringworld's Children brought about an exiting novel. Whoever loves science fiction and fantasy novels, this outrageous book is for you!! This may not be a full fledged review, but just look/read the first few pages of Ringworld's Children and you will notice the intricate detail Niven put into this novel. This book is definitly a fantastic, exciting, and awesome(yes, I said awesome)novel!!

Praise to Larry Niven!!! Just skimming the first few pages of Ringworld's Children brought about an exiting novel. Whoever loves science fiction and fantasy novels, this outrageous book is for you!! This may not be a full fledged review, but just look/read the first few pages of Ringworld's Children and you will notice the intricate detail Niven put into this novel. This book is definitly a fantastic, exciting, and awesome(yes, I said awesome)novel!!

Loved the original Ringworld book and have read all the sequals. Unfortunately I could have skipped this one. No plot, no character developement and the "story" could have taken place in any space setting, no need for the Ringworld.

It's time to leave this series alone and appreciate it for what it is, not try to make some money off it's reputation.

Yet another book in this ever-engrosing and ever-growing tale of a truly scientifically-possible and viable "ring" upon which trillions of people, human and not-so-human, live on an artificial band millions of times larger in area size than Earth. Just as fascinating as the first "Ringworld" and the others that followed, this one, wherein war threatens the ring and its inhabitants, this book should also rank with "Rendezvous with Rama", "Childhood's End", "2010", "Puppet Masters", "Stranger in a Strange Land", and even cyberpunk books like "Snow Crash", "Cryptonomicon", "Neuromancer", "Mona Lisa Overdrive", "Virtual Light", "Cyber Hunter" and more.