Ringworld

Read until they started floating around the Ringworld. I kept waiting for the interesting part, what was there in the Ringworld and why that would be of any importance. But I couldn't bare the thought that it would never happen, and this was going to be one of those books about the journey, not the end. And the journey is boring. I don't much care for alien races, unless they are very well developed perhaps. And they were not. Giving weird names and appearances does not a good character make.

I did not like the main character at all. Nothing to relate to. Reading some reviews, people seem to have an issue on how the female character was portrayed. I did not share that feeling because ALL of the characters felt really blend to me.

Rendezvous with Rama but with actual characters and on an object of unimaginable scale? Sign me up!

The claim is not false, it is similar in certain ways to Rama. But in other ways it very much reminded me of Hitchhiker's Guide with its humor and characters. Perhaps Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle too (it's been a while though) because the humor was also smart and subtle. The book never went into absurd in a way where it would break the immersion like Douglas or Vonnegut did, though. However, what nonsense there was, was to its detriment.

Unlike Clarke, Niven is also good character writer and I will remember most of this crew very fondly. Especially Speaker was funny and terrifying at the same time. I liked every character except for Teela and, sadly, the whole book revolves around her.

Speaker and Nessus were amazing aliens and Louis great main character. Chemistry between them was amazing and dialogues witty but when you introduce Mary Sue everything starts falling apart like those hovering skyscrapers. And in this case she was Mary Sue on purpose. It's actually hinted at right at the beginning, even before their journey begins. It has to do with purpose of their journey in a way. Characters figure it out towards the end so I won't spoil it. What I will say is that the story did not need this plot and without it I would love this book even more.

While I find the idea of a story like this incredibly attractive, it did not work for me because I was here for the Ringworld. To see how Louis and Speaker get along with each other. To awe at the scale of the world. Not to see absurd albeit entertaining events happen one after another with lazy explanations. Simply put, I wanted it to be more grounded in reality.

The scale... let's talk about it for a minute. Rama was vast and wonderous, it's what I love about that book the most. Ringworld on the other hand is so huge I fail to imagine it. Just like Louis I struggle with the scale because humans have simply never seen anything like it. One ocean on Ringworld could swallow entire planet Earth and probably Mercury on top of it. It's insane. It's amazing. But the scale works to the book's detriment for me. It's simply too vast to be awestruck too much and so I wasn't. It will not burn its place in my brain like Rama did although I still find it incredible. Perhaps someone will bring it justice on the big screen one day, though I don't see that happening any time soon.

It is one of the best sci-fi novels I've ever read and it's a big shame it does not reach the highest highs. I was tempted to give it four stars, it would most likely end up as 4.5 if I could give it that. Four stars are unfair to this book, though. I'm thinking of continuing Ringworld series but from what I heard it only goes downhill from here and the ending was sort of sufficient.

I'd heard the Sci-Fi channel was in the process of making this book into a mini-series and decided to give it a shot. Being an inspiration for Halo also tipped my interest. This one follows the idea of a Dyson Ring, which has always been an intriguing topic to me. The idea that one Dyson Ring could have the habitable area of 3 million earth-size planets is mind-blowing. The world was more interesting than the characters, unfortunately. There is some controversy about the minimized role of women in this book, which I'd also agree with.

I'm giving Ringworld a 3, but this is a conditional rating. I think Ringworld is both a book with a terrific story and convincing world-building, but it is unfortunately told through the eyes of flat, uninteresting characters utilizing dated, often chauvinistic dialogue. A lot of “golden age” sci-fi falls into this trap, having been written by middle-aged white men in an era when this sort of behaviour and attitude was left unchecked. I understand that, and can usually appreciate the work as a piece from its place and time. It feels jarring though when the only female character behaves ignorantly, acts clumsy, and is hyper sexualized by the writer - and the male characters around her treat her critically because of these things. However, if you can look past this (and there were a few moments where I really struggled) the concept of the Ringworld itself is good fun, especially when Niven manages to blow your mind with the scale of it. I do feel like I'm kind of done with the saga though and as interesting as the Ringworld is, I don't feel compelled enough to read the other four books in the series.

Larry Niven is one of the first sci-fi writers I ever read. He is one of my dad's favorites, and my dad gave me all of the Man-Kzin Wars books when I was twelve or thirteen. My memory of them is very vague, but I remember really loving klingon tigers. Since that time, I haven't really gone back to Niven's works until now, and I've never read any of the Ringworld saga.

I started out enjoying the book a lot. Niven has a great sense of humor and the dialogue never ceased to entertain me. I love his aliens, especially klingon tigers. The cautiously coward puppeteers are also a unique species, and one I had fun envisioning. I got a little bit lost in the science, which is not unusual for me, but for the most part, I enjoyed the journey, which seems to me the main purpose of the book.

The idea of breeding for luck was an intriguing one although I found it similar to time-travel or clairvoyance as far as the confusion factor went. It's not something I believe would ever be possible, but it gives a kind of fantasy element to a science fiction book which I don't necessarily dislike. Niven seems to treat the 60s/70s attitude toward mind-altering psychic powers as a possible fact, which isn't all that believable, but it makes for a neat plot device. I had to think through events and their implications for Teela as often as Nessus or Louis did. It hurt my head in a good way.

That said, reading this as a modern adult left several things irking at me. Aside from the dated science ideas (tapes, anyone?) which are excusable, Niven falls right into the female character trap. There are only two women in this book, both of them are defined by their sexuality, and one of them needs a good slap upside the head.

Teela is thoroughly unlikable. She takes all the fun out of the hereditary luck hypothesis in that I spent most of the book wishing for her luck to run out. Niven seems to try and make her a human by excusing her behavior and attitude with the luck hypothesis and regularly stating how smart she is, but he never actually gives her an opportunity to demonstrate her intelligence besides finding a tourniquet. Louis Wu, age 200, falling for this 20 year old vacant trophy girl is also straining my disbelief. Luck may affect circumstance, but how could it affect another person's emotions? All the probability goes out of the theory at that point. Also, he more or less admits he only wants her to come along for sex. Did I mention he's 200 years old? I can't get past these things even in far future where age is really just a number.

Then Teela gets separated, which would be a great time for her to develop a character, but instead she finds a handsome barbarian (whom I kept envisioning as Kevin Sorbo... sorry) to take care of her and he's the love of her life because that's how lucky she is. Oh and it's fine if Louis Wu sells her to him. She has no problem with that at all if it makes life easier. It was such a let-down. I love the premise of Teela being a girl who can't be hurt, so she needs to learn what being hurt is like, but she never really does. She just watches other people get hurt, and it doesn't seem to affect her on an emotional level at all.The other female character, Halrloprillalar, is a similar problem. Immediately, we find out she's a space-whore. And ... that's pretty much it. She has a flying castle, but we don't get much in the way of character development. But she'll join us in the end because earthlings need to learn to have better sex.

Let's not even get into the non-sentient sexes. The aliens presented are uniformly presented as “he's,” so these non-sentient sexes are presumably female. I can't imagine an evolutionary advantage to this arrangement, and Niven never provides one, so it's just there to irritate me through the whole book.

I'm one who usually gives books some leeway based on their publication date, but things like this suck a little enjoyment out of the book for me. It doesn't overshadow any of the great fantastic-journey style adventures of the book, but it does diminish them a bit. I read somewhere that Niven is a “big idea” man and story/character are secondary to his writing. That's certainly true of Ringworld. The ideas are all there, but the lack of character made it harder to enjoy the ride. Might continue with the series someday, but not immediately.

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.

This book has been praised and given awards as a classic in science fiction writing. I had heard a lot about it and because of that I wanted to give it a try.

The basic premise is that 2 aliens, Nessus who is called a puppeteer, Talks with animals who is a member of a warrior species and 2 humans. 1 man and 1 woman embark on a voyage to investigate a mysterious ring world around a star. Crashing on the surface they embark on a exploration to try to not only survive but find a way to repair their ship and return back home.

First off I love the premise, I think its a really good idea and that has a lot of potential. Having people from 3 very different cultures work together to survive, often at odds with on another is in itself a great foundation for any story.

However I feel that I am being generous with a 3 star rating mainly because I did not think it was terrible story but it was not that great, I found the characters to be a bit flat and did not care all that much for them. It really was a plot driven story not not much for characters or character development.

The one female character Teela only purpose was for sex and good luck. The idea of luck being bred for in the human race was not only ridiculous but non sensical in a story that is supposed to be a serious scifi story and just did not do it for me.

overall I enjoyed the concept, the general plot was good but the story execution was not, so generous 3/5 stars for me

I am going to read the other books because I have them and hopefully it gets better

I had mixed feelings about this one. On the one hand, it started off really well and I was intrigued from the first couple of chapters. The characters and plot seemed promising. Then towards the middle, things started to slow down and drag on. I'm not sure what it was, but I was just not motivated to read the book, and it took me a really long time to pass that midpoint. Things started picking up again during the last hundred pages, and then Niven leaves you with a cliffhanger ending, which was a bit frustrating.

I thought the concepts and ideas presented in Ringworld were very interesting, and I have to admit that I'm curious to know more about the Engineers and to see what happens to Speaker, Louis, and Nessus once they return from the expedition (I felt like Teela's story came to a close here, but I looked it up and she seems to be featured in the next installment).

I don't know if I'm curious enough to pick up the next book, but overall I though the novel was good, just not good enough. I probably won't recommend this to most people–only those who are interested in classic sci-fi. I guess I was just expecting more from Ringworld, so... three out of five stars from me.

One thing that struck me while reading this was how much the Next Generation episode “Relics” drew from this. In Relics it's an actual Dyson sphere not a ring, but a lot of similar issues and problems exist.

But that's only a sideline. I like Niven's aliens. They're believably alien and consistent. Not just humans with weird skin and a different culture.

I was struck with the importance of luck as a predictive value. It's almost magic. Niven does his best to worj through it logically of course, but it's really fascinating.

Executive Summary: This book is a lot of big ideas, and not a lot of depth of character or plot. If you like that sort of thing, you may enjoy this.

Full Review
This book was a tough one for me. It makes it a tough one to review as well.

I had been meaning to check this one out for awhile, but didn't make time for it. It ended up being one of the picks for July in Sword & Laser so I finally fit it in.

I read it over the course of 2 weekends, which with the way I've been lately is a really long time. The book is only 340 pages, and I read nearly half of it in one day. What was I doing the other 4 or 5 days that I was “reading” it?

Well not, much. I'd get an email notification and I'd go off and spend 10-15 minutes on the tablet instead of reading. Or I wouldn't even pick the book up to begin with.

I haven't read a lot of “classic” Sci-Fi, but most of them seem to be big on ideas, and little on much else. I liked the characters for the most part in this book, but there wasn't a ton of depth there. I think Speaker to Animals was by far the most interesting of the bunch.

Somewhere around the halfway point though, some new facts came to light and the story just seemed to click in and I managed to finish it fairly quickly.

I have a bit of a science background. My engineering degree has a lot of foundation in math and science. I haven't really used most of that in over 10 years, but I do find Hard Sci-Fi a bit interesting. I don't pretend to be smart enough to look at what Mr. Niven wrote and prove or disprove the science behind it.

The concepts in this book are really cool. Building planets and instantaneous travel among others. The actual plot wasn't anything spectacular however.

It's one of those books I'm glad I read, but probably won't read again, or go off recommending as something you MUST read.

I'd heard the Sci-Fi channel was in the process of making this book into a mini-series and decided to give it a shot. Being an inspiration for Halo also tipped my interest. This one follows the idea of a Dyson Ring, which has always been an intriguing topic to me. The idea that one Dyson Ring could have the habitable area of 3 million earth-size planets is mind-blowing. The world was more interesting than the characters, unfortunately. There is some controversy about the minimized role of women in this book, which I'd also agree with.

Hmm... I find it somewhat misogynist and I find the MC rather irritating in his garystueness. Sure, that all the females would fall in love with him was part of the story, but it's still unnecessary and stupid.
I like aliens. I can see Khajeet being modeled on Kzits. I like the grasseater aliens. Reminds me of the Kelpiens in Star Trek

Larry Niven's hard sci-fi novel is a classic, hands down. I'm sure it has all the ingredients to be considered a masterpiece for many people, which is why I get this bitter feeling of disappointment after hearing how amazing this book was and having finished it without that “wow” feeling. Don't get me wrong, I liked it. All in all, it was a fun and exciting read full of thought-provoking ideas, the worldbuilding and the science behind it are great, but I couldn't connect with the story and didn't give a damn about the characters. There are other things worth mentioning like selective breeding based on psychic luck, that was awesome, and so as the exploration part that reminded me of Clarke's “Rendezvous with Rama”.

This officially becomes the weakest joint Hugo, Locus and Nebula award winner I've read: ⠀
⠀
— The Forever War (5⭐)⠀
— Gateway (5⭐)⠀
— The Gods Themselves(4⭐)⠀
— Rendezvous with Rama (4⭐)⠀
— The Stone Sky (5⭐)

2021 re-read of an absolute classic. First read since ~1988 or so.

Fantastic story of an adventurous 200-year old human (Louis Wu), a Kzin (Speaker-to-Animals), and a very lucky young female human (Teela Brown) who are convinced to go on a journey to places unknown by a Pierson's Puppeteer. The reward: technology for a new faster-than-light spacecraft designed by the Puppeteers that may save their respective species from the certain death coming from the galactic core in the form of severe radiation that is the result of a chain reaction of supernovae 20,000 light-years away.

The great thing about the story is the imaginative scenarios Niven creates. The interpersonal banter between the species, each with their own peculiarities, is tremendously well done and plays a great counter-point to the scientific aspects of the environment they find themselves in.

Extremely well done and worthwhile reading for any lover of science fiction.

I loved the overall story, I did, I did. Louis and Speaker were awesome. Less so with the rest of the group. It had some amazing concepts. I actually read the foreword for book 2, and Niven mentions all the people that independently provided science(y) proofs to him.

That being said, I couldn't follow most of the story. The way things were written, combined with the way my brain works, I got lost a lot.

I'm kinda tempted to read the next book, but considering I kinda struggled to stay focused on this one, I will probably read something else and try book two in the future.