Ringworld (Larry Niven)

Ringworld
Larry Niven
Del Rey
Fiction, Sci-Fi
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION:  In a future where interstellar travel is commonplace, alien ambassadors dine in Earth restaurants, and instantaneous transport booths have obliterated cultural and national disparities, Louis Wu celebrates his bicentennial birthday... and finds a most unusual, self-invited guest.  Nessus is a puppeteer, a strange two-headed, three-legged alien thought to have mysteriously vanished some years ago.  He claims Louis has been chosen by his people as part of an elite alien team to explore a strange discovery in deep space.  Also chosen are Speaker-To-Animals, a muscular catlike kzin whose people have, until recently, been bent on destroying the human race, and Teela Brown, a naive young human woman with luck in her genes.  What they're expected to do, and where the discovery is, Nessus refuses to say, but the payment is a working hyperdrive ship - plus plans to make more - which may be the salvation of any species who gets hold of it.  Despite his better judgment, Louis joins up, and finds himself facing an enigma beyond anything he has ever encountered in two centuries of life.  An unimaginably advanced culture has built an unimaginably vast ring about a star - a ring full of air, full of oceans, full of life... and full of danger.

REVIEW:  This was another title in my long list of classic books I've meant to read but never got around to buying.  I found this copy for a buck at Half Price Books; for a dollar, I figured it would be worth a try.  Niven crafts a technologically advanced future that – forty years after Ringworld's first publication – still feels like the future.  He also invents a true interstellar wonder in the Ringworld itself.  Most everything in the book, no matter how huge and improbable and mind-boggling, has scientific underpinnings, and the characters go out of their way to explain these underpinnings to the reader.  I, unfortunately, have little more than a high school education in science.  An American high school education, at that, and that was some years ago.  Much of the technobabble and plot-stopping explanations washed over my undereducated little head, unfortunately.  Since most of the story is based on the "strangers visit wondrous place, have adventures, then leave" framework, I could still enjoy the scenery, and the larger-than-life ideas were nice and shiny to look at, even if I didn't understand all the little wires and knobs attached to them.  The plot itself has shades of dating, especially in the way the human Louis so often solves alien problems, not to mention the presence of the often-inept space chick Teela.  Niven eventually explains some of her evident stupidity, and once in a while she comes forward with remarkable insights to add to the technobabble conversations, but I had tired of her long before then.  For much of the book, her main contribution to the mission is providing Louis with a bedmate; the brains she occasionally demonstrates seem secondary to this far more pressing task.  The adventurers bump along through several encounters, some more memorable than others, until they reach a surprisingly abrupt ending.  I know there are more books in the Ringworld universe, but I still found myself thinking there could've been a page or two more of wrapping up to do.  I honestly don't know if I want to read further in this series.  While I found the concept of Nven's Ringworld fascinating, I also found the science of it tedious, and I wasn't so attached to any of the characters that I have to find out where they went after their adventure.  This lack of engagement ultimately made me give Ringworld a mid-grade Okay rating; even though the ideas presented would've merited a fourth star, I just wasn't feeling it when I finished the book.