Ringworld

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.