73 of 75 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A pointless, directionless sequel, May 22, 2004
This review is from: The Ringworld Throne (Mass Market Paperback)
Larry Niven's Ringworld (1970) is one of the truly great SF novels. A crew of four, comprising Louis Wu, a cynical, 200-year-old man; Teela Brown, a young woman bred for luck; Speaker-to-Animals, an aggressive, cat-like Kzin; and Nessus, a Pierson's Puppeteer, a technologically advanced race whose highest virtue is cowardice. The four of them go exploring on a recently discovered artifact: a gigantic ring a million miles wide and as big around as Earth's orbit.
The sequel, The Ringworld Engineers (1980), starts twenty years later, with Louis Wu and Speaker (now known as Chmeee) returning to the Ringworld with the Hindmost, the deposed leader of the Puppeteers, to find a supposed transmutation device that the Hindmost thinks will help restore him to power. Along the way they discover various alien civilizations, Vampires (non-sentient, blood-eating hominids), and Ghouls (eaters of the dead who trade in information). They also learn that the orbit of the Ringworld has become eccentric and it will destroy itself in a matter of years unless they can save it.
And then . . . there's The Ringworld Throne, where the only mystery yet to solve is, apparently, "Who are you, and what have you done with the real Larry Niven?" To say that Throne is a disappointing sequel is an understatement.
The story picks up about a year after The Ringworld Engineers leaves off. Louis Wu and his motley crew are still stranded on the Ringworld after human-turned-Pak-protector Teela buried their spaceship under tons of lava. Unfortunately, Niven has changed a major premise of the last book. Engineers ended with an unthinkable moral dilemma: whether to allow the Ringworld and its trillions of occupants to be destroyed, or save it at the cost of several hundred million lives. This should weigh mighty heavily on Louis Wu's mind, but Niven lets him off the hook: the Hindmost announces that he could control the Ringworld's meteor defenses more precisely than anticipated, and thus was able to minimize the deaths. Had this been revealed at the end of Engineers it would be a hideous deus ex machina. As it is, it's just very sloppy writing; Niven conveniently no longer has to deal with a more complex protagonist.
From here, Throne is basically two intertwined but generally unrelated stories. The first deals with an infestation of Vampires. Louis Wu is legendary on the Ringworld for once boiling an ocean to destroy a field of mirror sunflowers (which kill their prey by focusing sunlight on it and burning it). The resulting cloud cover cut off their light. However, one unintended consequence of this feat is a never-ending overcast sky, ideal for the spreading of Vampires. This, Niven gets right; all actions, however noble, may have unintended side effects that are not so good. The resulting battle between the locals and the Vampires drives about two-thirds of the novel's action.
It's unfortunate that the vast majority of this action involves neither the principal characters nor the mysteries of the Ringworld itself. The appeal of the Ringworld novels is directly proportional to the amount of time Louis Wu spends exploring it. Instead we are treated to four or five different species of hominids comprising thirty-odd interchangeable individuals with unpronounceable names, alternately fighting vampires and "rishing" with each other (i.e. inter-species sex for the sake of binding contracts or forging friendships). It's monotonous, and in the end, there's no payoff. No more of the Ringworld's mysteries are revealed.
Meanwhile, Louis Wu and the Hindmost are investigating why the Ringworld's remaining Pak protectors are destroying incoming ships and interfering with species other than their own. This part of the novel is completely incomprehensible, and I won't even attempt to explain what goes on. It doesn't help that the majority of the action is viewed through telescopes, communication devices, and so forth. Finally, we get to follow the principal characters around, and the story is a mess.
This novel reveals nothing new about the mysteries of the Ringworld, nor does it develop the characters or the series' plot any further. If Ringworld's Children can't make sense of all this, then sadly one of the great hard-SF world ends not with a bang, but a whimper.
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49 of 50 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Niven confirms your suspicions, December 27, 2004
This review is from: The Ringworld Throne (Mass Market Paperback)
The original Ringworld left a number of unanswered question that Ringworld Engineers attempted to answer. But by the end of Engineers one got the sneaking suspicion that Niven had pretty much exhausted his store of ideas for this world. Ringworld Throne only manages to confirm your suspicions that Ringworld is played out as a theme.
Engineers did leave one wonderful hook: the kzin plans to conquer earth. What is an earth conquered by the kzinti like? The book starts off with the Louis and the cat man sailing to the Ringworld earth to fulfill his dream but then the book veers off to follow the trials and tribulations of a caravan of boring Ringworld denizens. It becomes Ringworld meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Ten chapters in you begin to wonder why he wrote this book. People tramp around with little direction and kill vampires. Every third page one finds a little discussion on interspecies sex. You begin to wonder when Niven stopped being an innovative thinker and became a dirty old man, sweaty palms on a typewriter thinking sci fi fan boys still want this stuff. Newsflash, Lar. The fan boys have moved on to much "better" Japanese tentacle sex magna.
It's bad stuff from an author who should know better. It reads like Niven outsourced the whole project to Kevin J Anderson and never rises above Anderson's dial-a-novel method of cranking out bad sci fi.
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21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Stop Reading Before its Too Late, November 18, 2003
This review is from: The Ringworld Throne (Mass Market Paperback)
The 'professional' reviews for this book are much too kind.
Compared to Ringworld and Ringworld Engineers, Throne is a major disappointment through and through. I just kept slogging along through the unreadable narrative, uninteresting characters with unpronounceable names whizzing by my head, looking forward to every sensible moment with Louis and the Hindmost. I only finished reading it because the Protectors storyline finally started to get my interest in the end.
I should have stopped reading at page 100.
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