Take a photo of a barcode or cover
mburnamfink 's review for:
Ringworld
by Larry Niven
Ringworld is an adventure of immense cosmological scope, held back by style and characterization that are at best, journeyman-like, where the sheer imagination of the ideas don't quite fit
The plot is simple: two aliens and two humans mount an expedition to the Ringworld, an artifact of massive size and unclear purpose. Damaged by defensive systems, they must crash land and make an escape, surviving the hazards of the ringworld and uncovering it's mysteries. The real star is the title character, the ringworld itself: A megastructure one astronomical unit in radius and roughly 1 million miles wide, the ringworld provides a habitable environment with an area equivalent to billions of Earth. It is BIG; in human terms bigger than Earth, and Niven does a great job conveying the scale, the mystery of its purpose and the decline of its civilization (human savages living in the ruins of floating cities), and its plausibility as an engineered structure. Even if some smart aleck MIT grads proved that the whole thing is dynamically unstable and requires exotic materials, the basic math of it holds together in the novel. I also really enjoyed the glimpses of Terran culture, the visible aliens in the predatory cat-like Kzin and survival-oriented Puppeteers, and the absent aliens of the gas-giant dwelling Outsiders and supertech Slavers, with their stasis shields, variable swords, and disintegration guns. What is left implied is more amazing than what is stated, and I mean that as a compliment.
Three of the characters are quite interesting. 200 year old explorer Louis Wu is our eyes and ears. Nessus is a bipolar Puppeteer and sponsor of the expedition. Speaker-to-Animals is a Kzin ambassador, and as a diplomat is only moderately murderous. The problem is the last character, Teela Brown. A 5th generation product of the human reproductive lottery, she's implicitly been bred for luck as part of a Puppeteer covert op on humanity. Incredible luck isn't a bad power, per se, except that in a authored work 'coincidence' is a terrible excuse for why things happen, and Niven proffers the explanation (via Louis Wu) that the whole novel happened because Teela Brown really need to be exposed to a dangerous place to meet a Hero and find her Destiny. I really think the whole thing would've been better and more tightly plotted as a straight up adventure minus Teela Brown's luck.
Which leads to my other complaint, which is that this book is notably weird on sex. I get that in a culture with solid life-extension, a 180 year difference in age is no big thing, and I could forgive Teela having no skills or personality beyond luck and innocence, but the other female character is Prill, a ringworld ramscoop crew-person (prostitute), driven half-mad by isolation and then enslaved by the pleasure weapon Nessus carries. Both Kzin and Puppeteer have non-sentient females. The whole thing is just... weird, beyond standard locker-room misogyny. But it's never particularly ugly, and aside from that this is a really cool book.
The plot is simple: two aliens and two humans mount an expedition to the Ringworld, an artifact of massive size and unclear purpose. Damaged by defensive systems, they must crash land and make an escape, surviving the hazards of the ringworld and uncovering it's mysteries. The real star is the title character, the ringworld itself: A megastructure one astronomical unit in radius and roughly 1 million miles wide, the ringworld provides a habitable environment with an area equivalent to billions of Earth. It is BIG; in human terms bigger than Earth, and Niven does a great job conveying the scale, the mystery of its purpose and the decline of its civilization (human savages living in the ruins of floating cities), and its plausibility as an engineered structure. Even if some smart aleck MIT grads proved that the whole thing is dynamically unstable and requires exotic materials, the basic math of it holds together in the novel. I also really enjoyed the glimpses of Terran culture, the visible aliens in the predatory cat-like Kzin and survival-oriented Puppeteers, and the absent aliens of the gas-giant dwelling Outsiders and supertech Slavers, with their stasis shields, variable swords, and disintegration guns. What is left implied is more amazing than what is stated, and I mean that as a compliment.
Three of the characters are quite interesting. 200 year old explorer Louis Wu is our eyes and ears. Nessus is a bipolar Puppeteer and sponsor of the expedition. Speaker-to-Animals is a Kzin ambassador, and as a diplomat is only moderately murderous. The problem is the last character, Teela Brown. A 5th generation product of the human reproductive lottery, she's implicitly been bred for luck as part of a Puppeteer covert op on humanity. Incredible luck isn't a bad power, per se, except that in a authored work 'coincidence' is a terrible excuse for why things happen, and Niven proffers the explanation (via Louis Wu) that the whole novel happened because Teela Brown really need to be exposed to a dangerous place to meet a Hero and find her Destiny. I really think the whole thing would've been better and more tightly plotted as a straight up adventure minus Teela Brown's luck.
Which leads to my other complaint, which is that this book is notably weird on sex. I get that in a culture with solid life-extension, a 180 year difference in age is no big thing, and I could forgive Teela having no skills or personality beyond luck and innocence, but the other female character is Prill, a ringworld ramscoop crew-person (prostitute), driven half-mad by isolation and then enslaved by the pleasure weapon Nessus carries. Both Kzin and Puppeteer have non-sentient females. The whole thing is just... weird, beyond standard locker-room misogyny. But it's never particularly ugly, and aside from that this is a really cool book.