Well this book won both the Hugo and Nebula award in 1970/71 for best novel, and who am I to argue with the voting panels. In my view this book is astounding (SF pun intended), its characters are well built, and the story is just so far reaching with brilliant science to back it up.I first read this sometime back in the late 70s and have re-read it a couple of time since, but it has to be 15 years since I last read it, oh how I have missed books this far ranging, this broad in their scope, this

I have a lot of faith in science fiction but this one dented it - it's a daft cartoon of a novel in which there's this really big, you know, I mean giant big big enormous, like, world, and these aliens go there, and they droop and mumble about in it, and it's really big, and one of them looks like a carpet and the other looks like a diplodocus, and the other like an old chinaman cause you got to have an old chinaman in your far future novels, yeah. It was showered with awards but i would have sh...

I find it hard to believe anyone got through this one, let alone its whole legion of sequels and spin-offs.The Ringworld is such a cool concept but it's SO poorly described, I defy anyone to picture what the hell Niven is on about. It was black and on the horizon blue, a ribbon, several squares were hovering there like... WHAT?! Take some time to do this thing justice, mate! We're gonna be spending a deal of time there... It takes too long to get to Ringworld, then when they do, nothing happens....

If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.R(t) = sqrt(r**2+dr**2-2*r*dr*cos(t)): "Ringworld" by Larry Niven(Original Review, 1980-08-26)A short analysis of the (in)stability of a Ringworld (digging deeper into the Math):Let the Ringworld have radius r, mass m, and mass/length p. Let the parent sun have mass M. Put the center of the Ringworld at the origin, with the axis of rotation along the z-axis. Now, place the sun at dr along the x-axis (a small perturbation in the plane o...

Upon re-reading I have upgraded this book an additional star. I am starting to see a pattern that perhaps I wasn't aware of before, of older science fiction having very limited charterer depth and focusing more on the using the plot to explore scientific ideas. (The same hold true for a lot of older fantasy as well, except with fantastical ideas.)This didn't use to bother me (when all I read was older, shallow character sci-fi and fantasy) but now, no matter how exciting the ideas are, I miss th...

Larry Niven published Ringworld in October 1970 to much acclaim – the novel won the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards for best science fiction novel in 1970.Any fan of the genre will be familiar with Ringworld, it’s frequently cited as one of the best ever and I’ve seen it on countless bookshelves and it has long been on my radar to read. It’s a SF classic and has no doubt been wildly influential on scores of works since it first came out.To be blunt: I was a little disappointed.I liked it, don’t ge...

A very interesting concept....BUT, I have to get on my soapbox for a minute. After reading a few of his books, I have to say that Larry Niven's attitude towards women, what they are like and what they are capable of, is sadly lacking. Though his male characters seem to be pretty well fleshed out (human--even if they are alien--fallible and interesting), his female characters are sadly one-dimensional. It seems to me that most the female character in his books are either clueless, idiot savants,

I’d wanted to read this because I’m a fan of the Halo video games, and I’d heard that it was a big influence on those. I gotta say that I’d have liked it more if the Master Chief would have shown up and started chucking some plasma grenades around.Set in 2855, human Louis Wu is recruited by an alien named Nessus to go on a hazardous mission to explore a strange structure that rings a distant star. Another alien called Speaker-To-Animals from a warrior race apparently descended from some really t...

I can't believe this won three big awards. The story is about as interesting as the trade war minutia of Episodes 1-3 of Star Wars. In non-geeky terms, not very interesting. Actually as I went out to buy a cup of coffee this morning I thought that if Larry Niven had teamed up with George Lucas the prequel episodes of Star Wars could have been totally ruined, and maybe episodes 4-6 could have been reworked too to make them completely insipid and unwatchable. How? Well, Larry Niven seems to be rea...

Ringworld is definitely a sci-fi classic, a monumental achievement in world building. Any sci-fi aficionados who don’t like it should be ashamed of themselves.Argh! It’s never pleasant to go against the conventional wisdom but over at PrintSF (online SF discussion community) I see a lot of comments along the line of “I really want to like this book because everybody say it’s great, what am I missing?” I think a lot of people try too hard to like certain books and I don’t know why, it does not en...

Here’s the recipe for Ringworld. Take a few large handfuls of hard science fiction galactic engineering, several aliens with a single specific species trait, a pinch of magic (luck breeding, eternal youth serum, etc.), a quest, and a dollop of misogyny – mix well – voila! The good news is that the galactic engineering carries the day. Amazon has announced a streaming series, so I decided a reread was in order. I read this book when I was around fourteen and all I could remember before I started

I started this book expecting an awesome experience -- it won the Hugo AND Nebula awards, after all.Too bad it was a hot mess. The smile is because the book was lighthearted.What to say of Niven's prose, other than that it is horrible? The dialog is stilted; often it is impossible to tell what the characters are talking about because their references are unclear or new information necessary to understand WTF is going on passes through the cardboard cutout/protagonist's head only after the page-l...

I'm afraid this made me want to punch Larry Niven in the stomach on the behalf of all women everywhere. Along with people who aren't so privileged that life bores them with its comforts, but mostly on behalf of women. A 180 year old man sleeping with a 20 year old woman? Just so wrong, and it keeps going more wrong. He writes things about Teela like"Her lips, he saw, were perfect for pouting. She was one of those rare, lucky women whom crying does not make ugly."It is painfully condescending, ev...

On Luis Wu’s 200th birthday, he is approached by Nessus, a quasi-equine alien species knows as Puppeteers because of the two heads sprouting from their backs that are tethered by strands of skin, to undertake a remarkable journey. Being 200 years old, Luis has seen his share of the universe, so he is a bit skeptical when Nessus asks him to join a force of beings to explore the mysterious Ringworld. So far so good. Enter the rest of the cast. First off, I have no problem with how any alien is cre...

Being an engineer by nature, and by training (10 yrs at MIT), when I read this book (in the 1970s) I went supernova. Massive engineering on an unimaginable scale, made real by Niven. Fabulous!

Dazzlingly huge in space is RingworldAn artificial construct three million times the surface area of the EarthThe explorers;Louis Wu - an old crafty human Teela Brown - a human bred for luckSpeaker-to-Animals - a warrior Kzin alien - imagine a giant tigerNessus - a puppeteer alien - from a paranoid, high tech raceThink bigThe rim of the ring expanded in their view. It was a wall, rising inward toward the star. They could see its black, space-exposed outer side silhouetted against the sunlit blue...

Radio waves move at the speed of light. This is not particularly noticeable on Earth, but if you were at the sun, it would take eight and a half minutes for a signal to reach you, which would make a phonecall rather awkward. It would be even worse at the next closest star, Proxima Centauri, where messages take four years. Thus, the speed of light is the rate at which information moves, at which change change can propagate.But most people don't think, when watching Star Trek, that Captain Picard

The magic intersection point of the old and new styles of SF... basically, Golden Age space opera with cool aliens, but also including sex. (The sex isn't with the cool aliens, in case you were wondering - that's James Tiptree Jr. you're thinking of). If you are an SF fan and have never been to the Ringworld, try and visit them some time! If you're not particularly into SF, well, these days Iain M. Banks does the same kind of thing better, so I would recommend reading "Consider Phlebas", "Player...

Larry Niven takes a lot of shit. A lot. Without ever reading a word of his before I have heard him called a racist, a sexist pig and a dolt. If the racist statements attributed to him are true, well, that is deplorable but everything I can find about them is 2nd or 3rd hand and seems to be of fairly questionable authenticity. Even in the worst case I can enjoy a Roman Polanski or Woody Allen movie so I should be able to enjoy a Larry Niven book right? He is not that bad! As far as the sexism go...

Not much I can say about this. It blew my mind.In order for you to truly appreciate Ringworld you would have to mentally backtrack forty-odd years. Big Ideas in Science Fiction are a dime a dozen. Today.But in 1970…?Perhaps Niven’s vision upstaged his characters. Perhaps. But I could still lose myself on the ring. It fascinated me then; it fascinates me now. This novel made authors sit up and pay attention to just how big you could think if you really applied your imagination. Also, I’ve spent y...