Rating: 
Summary: Ingenious, but a flawed masterpiece
Review: Ringworld won the Hugo and the Nebula Awards for best science fiction book of the year. It also spawned a series of sequels. The book deserves it - the idea for the Ringworld itself is ingenious. A ribbon surrounding a star, spinning for centripetal force (i.e. gravity), will have a huge surface area and would support life just as a normal planet (albeit without seasons). Niven has this world invented by an ancient alien race and sets 4 people out to explore it. Only 2 of the 4 explorers are human. The alien explorers are Niven's second great invention. One is a "Puppeteer," a herbivorous race whose defining characteristic is its cowardice (they won't do anything unless it's completely safe). The other is the "Kzin," fierce, enormous tiger-like carnivors that fought multiple wars with humankind in the past. The intrepid travellers arrive at the Ringworld, but find no evidence of activity. They blunder into some automatic defense systems (taking their spaceship for a meteor), and are consequently marooned on the ring. The story basically follows the quest of the explorers to escape the Ringworld that has apparently suffered a collapse of civilisation.This exploration itself is not really that important; there's little in the travel and exploration that is particularly exciting or inventive. For adventure through exploration, Clarke's Rendevous with Rama is much better. Instead, the development of the Puppeteer race and the conflict between the three races of the exploration party contains the bulk of the interest. In addition, there are some neat but plausible scientific dodges that make Niven's universe believable and open to countless additional opportunities (hence, sequels are likely to be just as good as this book). Unfortunately, the Kzin race is much more standard (think feline Samuri and you have the basic idea). The main human character is interesting, but his (young, nubile, and female) companion is not. Niven invents the idea that luck is a hereditary trait (inherited by this young woman), and allows the 4 travellers to be tossed about by the whims of her so-called luck/fate. While it's convenient to move the plot along, it adds a sense of artificial contrivance that the book would do better without. She could have been useful as the voice of inexperience (therefore someone to whom the reader could relate) who needed various scientific or social themes explained; instead she is uninterested and flakey, so serves no purpose (except to move the plot). I do recommend this book. The 3-star level is less than it deserves. It doesn't quite make it to 4-star status, in spite of its ingenious inventions, mostly because the plot feels linear and contrived in spite of the wonder. It is reminiscent of Farmer's "Riverworld" series, but much more plausible and better written.
Rating:
Summary: A classic example of "high-concept" science fiction
Review: The great thing about Ringworld is--you guessed it--the ringworld. The concepts of a world that is a ring, the huge size of said world, and the problems such a world might have are interesting and creative concepts, worthy of science fiction at its best. Too bad the characters are all one-dimensional and shallow. Louis Wu is a non-entity. Teela is unbelievable and the concept behind her (her hereditary luck) falls apart when you consider the fact that, even if luck *were* hereditary in some capacity, there's no reason to assume that she would be lucky in anything but reproduction (thus the whole premise of her luck being godlike and all-powerful immediately falls apart). Speaker-to-Animals is not an integrated character; he demonstrates ferocity and reasonableness by turns when the plot demands him to, not as developed character traits. The puppeteer Nessus is perhaps the most interesting character and I would have liked to see more of the puppeteers. This book was also clearly written pre-feminism (notice Teela's instant and unquestioning acceptance of a life of female slavery with the Seeker, the fact that Teela's reason for inclusion is solely because she is lucky, not that she has a useful skill to offer; that Teela follows because she loves Louis, not out of curiosity or interest; the fact that the Kzin and the puppeteers are species with non-sentient females; Prillar as ship's (...); comments such as "Every woman is born with a tasp," and so on.) There are some interesting ideas here, and some cool concepts to play with, but it would be nice, just once, to run across a hard-core science fiction book that did as good a job developing the characters as the science.
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