Ringworld

I find Ringworld hard to rate. It's full of imagination and ideas, the story is well paced and pulls you along, but I find it somewhat unsatisfying, and it's not one of my favourite stories even from Niven.

I think this is because there are only four or five significant characters in the story, and they're not inherently interesting. Two of them are non-human, and the humans have unusual attributes of different kinds, so they're all superficially interesting, but fundamentally they're all quite similar: intelligent, rational puzzle-solvers who think in the same kind of way.

Niven has difficulty in imagining people who are very different from himself, and his characters tend to be interchangeable. Perhaps this is why he's often written about non-humans: to force some variety into his characters. But even the non-humans tend to think and talk like Niven apart from a few simple differences.

As a work of fiction, I might be tempted to give it only three stars, but I suppose the way he throws out all these ideas and ingeniously knits them together deserves more acclaim than that, so I'll give it four overall.

It's a book for sf readers, who'll be impressed by the ideas and don't need to feed on deep characterization or a finely descriptive writing style. Niven's writing style is in the sf tradition, plain and simple, he describes the essentials briefly and moves straight on to the next idea or plot development.