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	Ringworld
	Release Date: 1985-09-12
	Amazon Price: $7.99 (% off the list price of $7.99) Sales Rank: 19578
	Lowest Prices from Amazon Merchants: New $3.87 Used $0.01 View Amazon.com info page for more details

Average Customer Rating:

(183 reviews)

Reviews from Amazon customers:

Review by: Craig Wood, Menlo Park, CA
Rating:

Sesame Street sci-fi
"Ringworld" is an odd book, and a difficult one to review. On the one hand, the idea of the Ringworld itself is fascinating. A massive ring encircling a medium-sized star, with inner "shadow squares" that provide night and day, is a brilliant concept. The descriptions of the Ringworld, its "Fist of God" mountain (and how it came to be), the shadow squares, and the millions of miles of shadow square wire are all captivating. On the other hand, the characters and storyline are laughable. It feels like the Smurfs meet Sesame Street. The two-headed puppeteer and the fuzzy orange kzin are hard to take seriously. They travel with the ageless Louis Wu and their good luck charm, the sassy Teela Brown, to explore the Ringworld. This motley crew gets into big-time trouble once they arrive there, and then the story peters out as they try to escape the big ring late in the book. Don't read "Ringworld" if you're looking for thoughful characters or an interesting story. You'll only be disappointed. But by all means read the book for the the sake of the creative world where Nevin takes you. In either case, it's a breezy 342 pages, so there's not much to lose if you that find that this flavor of sci-fi isn't to your liking.

Review by: David Govett, Davis, CA, USA
Rating:

Paucity of Imagination
Ringworld is soooooooooooo big. Big deal. When I read sci-fi, I hunger for people and events unextrapolatable from the known. In short, things previously unimagined, rather scaled-up things known. From the foregoing, you might get the idea I hated the book. You'd be wrong. Instead, I was disappointed by it, which is worse.

Review by: Jamie Beu, Orlando, FL
Rating:

The book that inspired "Halo" (and other video games)
I remember picking this book from the library and thinking "Oh! This must have been the basis for the game Halo." After reading it, however, I realized that this book was also the basis for other video games, such as the Wing Commander series of games and (for at least one interesting plot twist) Master of Orion 2. (I won't put any spoilers in this review, but the twist has to do with an odd trait that you can add to your custom race in MOO2.) The book was a fun read with a few "deus ex machinae" to get around potential problems before they ever come up, but if you are willing to suspend disbelief enough to imagine a world that is 93 million miles in radius, I don't think you'll have much problem with some of the other plot work-arounds. All in all, a fun book that is sure to fire the imagination, but not really that much of a hard sci-fi (i.e., "this might happen in our future") novel.

Review by: Kathleen Croghan, Splendora, Texas
Rating:

I would love to review
I would love to review this book, except I havenever received it. Haven't written to Owlbooks and answered your survey as well, with all the info that I have not received this book. there isn't anything more to add

Review by: R. Allen, St. Paul, MN, USA
Rating:

How this is considered a fantastic work of fiction is beyond me
This is my least favorite book ever. This review is quite ranty. Now, to be fair, there were things about the book I liked. We'll start off with that, first. I got into the book pretty easily. It moves along at a nice pace, and I didn't encounter many boring patches until the latter half of the novel. There were some pretty awesome concepts in the book. Like the ringworld itself--an enormous ring of landmass orbiting a star. Many of the weapons and technologies weren't like anything I've read before in sci-fi, although some of them seemed too implausible, or weren't explained like we were just expected to know that they worked and shouldn't care how. Okay, so that's all the book had going for it. Now for the fun stuff! Throughout the majority of the story, the only characters we get are two humans and two different aliens. And it's like they were all produced in separate factories, each specializing in their own stereotype. The main character is a 200 year old man with the body and health of someone in their prime, and of course has sex with both of the female characters that appear in more than one chapter (yes, there are only two females with that much scene time). The other human character is only there because she is lucky, thanks to her genetics through selective breeding (no, really). She's completely naive and has no worldly wisdom, and her few intelligent ideas seem to be from random luck and not, you know, actually using her brain. Oh, and she's gorgeous and likes to have sex and is Barely Legal. Alien #1 is a two headed thinger that is incredibly intelligent, often fearful, and is manic-depressive. I can honestly say he was the only character that I was genuinely interested in learning more about. Alien #2 is a ferocious feline hunter/killer thing. Although not arrogant, he's rather prideful, and takes offense to all sorts of comments, yet he has great control in suppressing his urge to kill things. Okay, so that's pretty much all there is to the characters. If this were a badly dubbed anime, you can bet the three males would deadpan most of their lines, and the female would be high-pitched and overzealous. You would want to slap them all. Next up is the plot. It could have gone so many ways. So many. So much potential. It was like Larry Niven sat down and thought, "okay, I have this hella awesome idea about a ringworld and all sorts of crazy stuff has happened there. It's so awesome that I don't need a strong plot (or characters, for that matter) to carry the story! The Ringworld itself will carry the story! YES!" Something like that. In any case, the plot was too expected, and in some parts, too drawn out. The book spent half of itself building up to the Ringworld, and when it finally got there, the Ringworld was way cool, but most of the things the characters ended up doing seemed almost haphazard. Niven's writing style is also kind of odd. Half of the technologies he didn't bother explaining or else I zoned out while reading the explanation (like the autopilot translator, the flycyles, and most stuff Slaver related). The technologies he did explain, he kept mentioning over and over. Yes, I know Ringworld is insanely huge. I understood that ten chapters ago, thanks. Some of the character's dialogue seems rather forced, and the lack of more than one swear word irritated me. In the language of the future, there is only one obscene expression--tanj. No variety. Tanj doesn't even have a good punch like some of my favorite English swear words (which I have managed to refrain from using in this review). The ending was really icing on the cake. It ends in the most abrupt manner possible--not just mid scene, not just mid conversation, but in the middle of a spoken sentence. WHAM, DONE. Good riddance. And finally: the way Niven treats his female characters (or lack thereof). I know this book was published in 1970, but still, there is no excuse for this. In the races of the two main alien characters, all the females are pretty much insentient. They simply exist as baby makers (and I assume to pleasure the male aliens). The main human female is, like I said, a sex-hungry idiot. Hell, near the end of the book, she goes off with another male character who believes he 'owns' her. The other female in the story is a prostitute. Clearly, the women in Niven's world know their place. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.