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The Ringworld is a landmark engineering achievement, a flat band three million times the surface of the Earth, encircling a distant star. Home to trillions of inhabitants, not all of whom are human, and host to amazing technological wonders, the Ringworld is unique in all of the universe. Explorer Louis Wu, an Earth-born human who was part of the first expedition to Ringworld, becomes enmeshed in interplanetary and interspecies intrigue as war, and a powerful new weapon, threaten to tear the Ringworld apart forever. Now the future of Ringworld lies in its children: Tunesmith, the Ghould protector; Acolyte, the exiled son of Speaker-to-Animals, and Wembleth, a strange Ringworld native with a mysterious past. All must play a dangerous game in order to save Ringworld's population, and the stability of Ringworld itself. Blending awe-inspiring science with nonstop action, Ringworld's Children.… (more)
User reviews
Loius Wu continues as our cynical, inventive, take-it-as-it-comes protagonist, but we also get a couple of interesting new characters in Proserpina and Hanuman. Roxanny, the new human female character who survives the crash of an ARM warship on the Ringworld surface, is far from plausible. She seems to be inserted in the story primarily to give Louis someone new to have sex with and be injured by, although in the end Roxanny is also caught by the inescapable luck of Teela Brown. If you are looking for science fiction with plausible female characters, the Ringworld series is probably not the ticket.
The bizarre obsession with interspecies sex that dominated so much of book 3 makes only a brief appearance here (in a totally unnecessary scene that runs something like this “Oh, Hi. You must be the giraffe people. Wanna f***?”).
In the author's notes at the beginning Niven talks about how much fun he's had with the
While this installment of the Ringworld series includes all of those 'hard' elements, the story mainly follows the continuing adventures of Louis Wu on the Rignworld and how he and an assortment of suppporting Protectors, breeders and stranded outsiders are going to save the Ringworld from being casually destroyed by the ARM, the Kzin and others.
The story moves along quickly enough and the technology, if not explored all that much, is still interesting. Unfortunately it kind of feels like a quick tour of other parts of the Ringworld with a short history of the Pak and some gratuitous sex & violence thrown in for good measure.
If you're a Niven or a Ringworld fan, its worth a few hours reading. Otherwise, just give look a couple of books down the shelf and give the original Ringworld a try.