The Ringworld Engineers

by Larry Niven

Paperback, 1981

Status

Available

Call number

813.54

Genres

Science Fiction

All Topics

Fiction

Collection

English paperback sf

Publication

Del Rey (1981), Mass Market Paperback

Description

Fiction. Science Fiction. HTML: It's been twenty years since the quixotic and worlds-weary Louis Wu discovered the Ringworld. Now he and Speaker-to-Animals are going back, captives of the Hindmost, a deposed puppeteer leader. With Louis' help, the Hindmost intends to regain his status by bringing back such extraordinary treasures from the Ringworld that his fellow puppeteers will have to be impressed. But when they arrive, Louis discovers that the Ringworld is no longer stable�??and will destroy itself within months. To survive, he must locate the control center of the legendary engineers who built the planet. His quest becomes a wild and gripping venture blended with the mysteries and spectacular technologies that only Larry Niven can conjure.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member wweisser

I can't believe no other reviews have mentioned the rishathra. It's nonstop rishathra, rishathra, rishathra! Serves its purpose as a continuation of the Ringworld story, but man, way too much rishathra.

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LibraryThing member buffalogr

This one goes in the category of DNF...did not finish. I know that it will be a waste of time when the book sounds just like Charlie Brown's teacher: "waaah waaah wah wah". This one did. I truly listened to the author's forward and believed him when he said that it was written because people liked

it. But, I could tell just a few minutes into the story that I didn't.

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LibraryThing member tole_lege

From my POV, this suffers as so many sequels do - the original Ringworld was very good indeed. This is... alright, it's a perfectly acceptable piece of fairly light sci fi.

But it's not much more than that.

LibraryThing member rufty

The follow on to the classic Ringworld.

This book seems to be an excuse to discuss some of the backstory and engineering of the ringworld. In that it does exactly what it says on the cover.

TBH at times for what is covered in this book you might be better off reading the wikipedia page on the

ringworld and it tells you what you learn from this book.
Still if you enjoy the thoughts of stellar engineering and thinly veiled exposition (which I do) then this is a pleasant read for the train or such like. Otherwise not as powerful a book as ringworld but has the feeling of a stepping stone to a larger arc - I look forward to Ringworld Children to find out what happens next

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LibraryThing member sf_addict

Brilliant sequel but Niven should have stopped here!

LibraryThing member willowcove

Enjoyable, but not as good as the first volume.

LibraryThing member tjsjohanna

Back to the Ringworld - but with a completely different plot line and a chance for Mr. Niven to explain and work out the science behind his creation. I like Louis Wu and Chmee - I was glad they were back on the scene. I enjoyed seeing more of the Ringworld and some of the behind the scenes workings

of a gigantic "made" world. It is hard to imagine the scale of this construct.

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LibraryThing member Petroglyph

I didn't really enjoy the original Ringworld, and this book, the sequel, was a little worse. I only persevered in reading it out of a sense of duty: given that the Ringworld is so famously unstable, I wanted to see how Niven had responded to fans' engineering tips. Call it reading the primary

source materials behind an episode in nerd history.

In his preamble, Niven states that he had had no intention to write a sequel to the earlier book, and that he only wrote Engineers to quiet down the clamoring hordes. Cue a mixture of back-pedalling, retconning and infodumps, all lacking even the modicum of inspiration that characterized Ringworld.

The storyline seemed much less self-contained than the original book: it felt as though Niven was cramming as much corrective physics and engineering into this volume as possible in order to please the many fans who'd mailed him their suggestions; plots and events and even character development (e.g. a recovering drug addict) took a back seat and were often mere excuses for exposition and infodumping. Just about the only thing about Engineers where it outclasses the previous volume is the moral issues: the main character does contemplate the death and destruction that the troupe's earlier romping about had caused. In a similar vein, the ending to this instalment is a little stronger than the first in that it invokes moral dilemmas; if only it wouldn't then casually brush them aside after a paragraph's shallow consideration.

One thing that Engineers did so much worse than the original was the attitudes surrounding sex -- and especially the part where the main character, as a red-blooded male, can't be expected to not have any. Ringworld had two women explicitly stating they would join the main character (Gary Stu in all but name) on a long voyage in a cramped space ship partially so he wouldn't have to sleep alone. Engineers turned that up to eleven, by introducing the concept of rishathra: ritualized inter-species sex between various species of hominids to seal agreements, solve diplomatic issues, or for anticonception purposes (due to interspecies infertility). Naturally, Mr. Stu gets to sample a wide selection of local females, because Niven keeps introducing rationalizations for why rishathra is necessary in Mr. Stu's dealings with any species he comes across.

So. I've now read two famous sf classics that come with an amusing anecdote in nerd history, and I've now more than fulfilled my nerd duties. I will not be reading the next instalments in this series.

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LibraryThing member DinadansFriend

Since the originally-written Ringworld was unstable, Mr. Niven creates a plausible fiction to explain some necessary safety features. I found it a pretty good book, and read it twice over the years.

LibraryThing member BruceCoulson

Sometimes, it's better not to go back home. Ringworld Engineers is one of those times. In addition to other flaws, Niven contradicts the precepts of his own Known Space universe in order to reach a dramatic plot point.

LibraryThing member tlockney

I'm not exactly sure why, but this was a real let down given how much I recall liking it when I was much younger -- I guess I was somewhat of a sucker for most sci-fi back then, but still... what a disappointment. It felt far too much like Niven penned this one only to answer demanding questions

from fans of the earlier book in this series. Oh well, I guess I likely won't follow up and continue reading the other Ringworld books unless I really feel something can offset the feeling this one left in me.

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LibraryThing member reading_fox

This is a stunning sequal easily readable on its own. A detailed world, fully backed by belivable physics and probable (well sort of) aliens.

LibraryThing member DanTarlin

Sequel to the Sci Fi classic "Ringworld", and I liked it better than the original. In this volume, set 23 years later, protagonist Louis Wu and his Kzinti comrade Speaker to Animals (now named Chmee) are kidnapped by another Puppeteer and brought back to the Ringworld in order to find a machine

that the Puppeteer can bring back to his homeworld to reclaim his standing as leader.

Once on the Ringworld, however, the expedition discovers that the artifact has come off-center and is in danger of falling into its sun. The remainder of the book features the expedition's attempts to save the Ringworld.

Niven's strength remains that he writes plausible science, with carefully crafted physics and an imaginative world. Following the plot can be challenging, however, as he doesn't always explain clearly what is going on.

Anyway, a good take, and I'm hooked enough to continue and read the rest of the series.

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LibraryThing member tcarter

With some books it seems that they have more depths the older you get and the more you read them, some seem to get shallower. I find that this is of the second kind. Some interesting ideas around how cultures develop and how the interactions between cultures might pan out, but they don't really

seem to be worked through in any meaningful way. Written some time after the first book, and it shows.

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LibraryThing member ikeman100

Niven writes a pretty good book. This is a fun follow up to Ringworld. It's hard science fiction with interesting aliens and great characters. It's adventures in space and Niven can write an adventure as good as anyone.

I can only look at it from the perspective of having read the first book but I

think this one stands on it's own.

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LibraryThing member bespen

Alternative title: Louis Wu gets Busy

While not quite the crowning achievement of Ringworld, this is a solid scifi book that explores the concept of human evolution, using the Ring to expand the space of possibilities.

In the dedication, Larry Niven says he never intended to write a sequel to

Ringworld. It was the continual efforts of his fans that persuaded him to do so, and provided a lot of material in the process. Including the hook that drives the action in the book: the Ringworld is not dynamically stable in orbit. A Dyson sphere is, any perturbation of the orbit tends to be cancelled out. Not so, for the Ringworld.

Thus, when Louis Wu is kidnapped and returned to the Ringworld, he finds he must save it, and the trillions of humans who live on it. I call them humans even though they are clearly not the same species as Louis, because "human" isn't really a biological concept at all. I get a lot of mileage out of this quote from John J. Reilly, which will be coming up in a blog post he wrote on October 3rd of 2006.

"A human is an essence (if you don't believe in essences you don't believe in human beings); a homo sapiens is a kind of monkey; and a person is a phenomenon. Perhaps I read too much science fiction, but it is not at all clear to me that every human must necessarily be a homo sapiens. As for person, which is an entity, conscious or otherwise, that you can regard as a "thou," is conflated with the notion of person, as an entity able to respond in law, either directly or through an agent."

This very well could have been the book John had in mind when he said that. The other humans on the Ringworld do share a common ancestor with Louis Wu, a really long time ago. However, in the intervening millennia, they have diversified into a vast array of different species, filling empty niches in the Ringworld's ecology, and evolving societies to match.

There are small carnivorous herders with sharp teeth, and large grazers with flat teeth, and scavengers, and so on. And this is all just in the one small part of the Ringworld Louis keeps going back to. The Ringworld is just so big, that lots and lots of evolution will occur, because the rate of favorable mutations spreading scales up with population size, and the population size on the Ringworld is really, really big.

However, it doesn't look to me [or Greg Cochran] like Niven got here in this way, but looking at what selection could do in the time and space available. It looks like he thought this was a cool idea, and he just ran with it. So, hardish scifi.

Also, I am still struck that Niven's Ringworld books are a product of their time. The glue that holds all of the various species of the Ring together is ritual sex between species, which he calls rishathra. As Louis moves through the Ring on his quest, he has sex with pretty much everything that moves, because that is just what you do there.

In fact, it turns out that literally the only temptation in the known universe that Louis cannot resist is his libido. Inbetween the first book and this one, Louis ends up spending most of his time "under the wire", Niven's slangy term for having an electrode implanted in your brain's pleasure center. This turns into a providential plot point at the end of the book, but I find it kind of funny that Louis can resist anything but sex. In the era of #MeToo, perhaps this was unintentionally prophetic.

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LibraryThing member antao

(Original Review, 1980-12-20)

Reading some people's complaints about unpleasant events in SF (e.g. Louis Wu becoming a wirehead in "The Ringworld Engineers") reminded me of an article in Analog some time back. It was written by a founder of a company that would keep you in cryogenic storage until a

cure was found for your disease, or the Messiah came or a John Bircher became president or whatever was your heart's desire. He had harsh words for science fiction writers. All this pessimism about the future could only do harm. People are only going to work hard if they think that tomorrow is going to be better than today; progress is fueled by delayed gratification. Stories of doom and gloom are only going to convince people that they better get theirs while the getting's good, thus bringing on the collapse. Besides, who is going to pay him to be frozen if no one believes in the future? He proposed a national campaign for the writing of sunny sf.

Me, I say smoke dope if you wanna feel good; that's not what art is about.

I had read that Larry Niven inherited some independent wealth, and didn't NEED money. This affected his writing (either positively or negatively). I forget exactly where I read this, but I believe it was BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS, edited by Spider Robinson. Now, I don't know what Ben Bova's financial situation is like, but he does seem to occupy a lucrative position with OMNI (admittedly after the cartoon episodes were written).

SF = Speculative Fiction.

[2018 EDIT: This review was written at the time as I was running my own personal BBS server. Much of the language of this and other reviews written in 1980 reflect a very particular kind of language: what I call now in retrospect a “BBS language”.]

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LibraryThing member Phrim

The Ringworld Engineers is a direct follow-up to Ringworld in which most of the protagonists from the original novel get roped into another expedition to the Ringworld. In this book, the reader encounters a greater variety of the Ringworld's inhabitants, who are portrayed as a lot less human than

the ones encountered in the first book. At the same time, we're given a reasonable explanation of why they seem human at all, which I thought was a big plot hole from the original. I really enjoyed exploring the world and meeting the different peoples, and how they've adapted to the general fall of high technology. The protagonists this time are much more interested in the mysteries of the Ringworld's origin and workings (or at least Louis is), giving the reader an outlet to his own curiosity--and we're actually given some answers this time. Largely absent is the "bred for luck" Teela plotline from the first book which I disliked, though she does make a brief appearance. On the whole I thought this was a better read than the first book, and more of what I really wanted from an exploration novel.

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LibraryThing member nx74defiant

Very well done. Hard to put down. Louis and Speaker are kidnapped by a Puppeteer and taken back to Ringworld. The Ringwold is unstable and will be destroyed unless Lou can figure out how to save it.

LibraryThing member nasko7

Great novel, even more comprehensive than the first book on sociocultural grounds.

LibraryThing member clong

I loved the first book of this series, but Interesting engineering concepts are not nearly enough to save this pointless follow up.

LibraryThing member jklugman

Niven is so far up his own ass. The only things he is interested in are: (a) BS physics of megastructures like his ringworld; and (b) alien sex. The thing I really don't like about Niven is that he is most interested in "hard" science fiction at the expense of really conveying a world or even

characters. I really had little sense of what the surroundings in the "Needle" spaceship and civilized portions of the Ringworld were like, and the climatic battle with the Pak Protector was just confusing.

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LibraryThing member sgsmitty

It had been awhile since I last read this so it was a pleasant read. Story is about what one would expect with a Niven novel and wraps up some lose ends and questions from the first book.

LibraryThing member gypsysmom

This continuation of Niven's brilliant Ringworld was written in 1980, ten years after the original. In that time Niven received a lot of suggestions about Ringworld some of which he incorporates into this work. One of them, in fact, forms the basis for this book. Ringworld has become unstable and

will destroy itself in months. Louis Wu, from the original book, has to find the engineers who built Ringworld to try to save it.

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LibraryThing member IanMoyes

Just astounding.

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