Sci-Fi Storm Product Display

	Ringworld
	Release Date: 1985-09-12
	Amazon Price: $7.99 (% off the list price of $7.99) Sales Rank: 16881
	Lowest Prices from Amazon Merchants: New $4.12 Used $0.67

Average Customer Rating:

(187 reviews)

Reviews from Amazon customers:

Review by: J. R. Stoddard, Kennett Square, PA
Rating:

One of the best Sci-Fi books you'll read
This became a favorite book of mine some years ago and I just had to get a new copy. Someone borrowed mine and didn't give it back! This story by Larry Niven has won a slew of awards and justly so. It relates a story of the future that inhabits it's own world, that creates its own reality as the best stories do, and never fails to entertain. The characters are well drawn and the action is well written and always propels the storyline. This is intelligent, well written science fiction and a wonderful read. Still time to take a copy on vacation or give to someone who loves sci-fi so you can borrow it.

Review by: themarsman, Georgetown, TX
Rating:

Complex But Uneven Adventure Romp
Louis Wu is two hundred years old and has seen many strange things out amongst the stars. When a Puppeteer (a species characterized by two heads, three legs and a startling degree of pathetic pusillanimous-ness) named Nessus approaches him about a mission to a strange star system beyond known space, Louis Wu can't help but agree to join the timorous alien. So Louis Wu, Nessus and two others, a twenty year old human woman named Teela Brown who tends to be quite lucky and a Kzin (think eight foot tall, bipedal tiger) named Speaker-to-Animals set off to this strange star system. What they find there would boggle any engineer's mind: A world, not spheroid in shape like any ordinary planet, but an artificial construct that is wrapped entirely around its parent star...a Ringworld. After numerous attempts at contacting the inhabitants of the Ringworld the four intrepid explorers manage to end up (crash) on its surface. Their subsequent exploration of the Ringworld's surface leads them to many unusual wonders and quite a bit of harrowing danger. Can these four explorers figure out what happened to the civilization of those who created the Ringworld and manage to find a way off of its surface? Niven's Ringworld is an audacious piece of speculative scifi. The engineering talents to create such a structure would be enormous...and obviously well beyond anything we can currently accomplish or will likely be able to accomplish even several centuries from now. But the story of Ringworld, while the structure itself would be a wonderful discussion for engineering students, is not really about the structure, but is more about four explorers trying to survive in an unknown and, at times hostile, environment. And that's primarily where I think Niven went wrong with this story. If you had picked up these four characters and placed them on Planet X a thousand light years from the Ringworld the story could have been much the same. I kept wanting more details about the amazing environment and technology and society that these amazing engineers built...and while some of this popped up occasionally, it wasn't near enough to sate my curiosity about a world so enormously vast it would be impossible to see it all in ten lifetimes. However, the sheer brilliance of the Ringworld concept makes this story worth four stars...and worth picking up the sequel in the future.

Review by: Steven, Colorado, USA
Rating:

Hard sci-fi? I'm not sure. A fun romp in a bizarre world? Certainly!
Ringworld: it's bizarre, outlandish, humorous - and in the end it's a fun romp through the mind of Niven. Louis Wu, a 200 year-old human is trying to get the most out of his birthday. As his birthday ends in one part of the world he travels to another (via teleporter) to continue his celebration. Along the way he teleports to somewhere unknown, where an odd 2-headed, 3-legged cowardice of a creature named Nessus persuades him to join his mission. Louis caves in easily because he is sick of the monotony of life. Two more characters are recruited; an attractive, ditzy but incredibly lucky lady named Teela Brown and an easily aggravated, highly impatient feline-ish character named Speaker-To-Animals. Together, under the leadership (or hindship) of Nessus they set out to discover what the Ringworld is. What they discover is almost beyond imagination. When I read about this book I often see it classified as hard sci-fi. I have a hard time calling this book 'hard' sci-fi because much of it seems to be way out of the scope of reality. This book has ships that travel faster than light speed (WAAAAAAY faster), teleporters, alien races moving entire planetary systems, and much more. When I think of hard sci-fi I think of books like Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson - something that actually seems somewhat plausible. Also, I found much of this book to be quite humorous, however when I read other reviews it doesn't seem like most people find it quite as funny as I did. I found myself laughing out loud on a number of occasions but perhaps I'm like the guy who dresses up in green, and starts hissing and laughing at the silver screen during a Snake's on a Plane showing. At any rate, this book is as bizarre as it is fun. I highly recommend checking it out!

Review by: Galactus
Rating:

How did this win awards???
After reading The Mote in God's Eye, I thought for sure that Ringworld would be even better. It was so boring that I gave up at page 100. I really can't make up my mind which character I hate the most. I think it is probably the cat guy (Speaker). What hurts the most is that I bought the book brand new (about $13 in Canada). To think there were sequels and spin offs... outch!

Review by: Rune Rindel Hansen, Copenhagen, Denmark
Rating:

Vivid Imagination
Larry Niven is not that good a writer, but its anyway slightly fascinating to read about his sci-fi universe. In this book we visit the Ringworld, it's a massive artificial construction meant to support life in space. It's shaped like a massive ring around a star, this ring has got kind of the size that a planet would traverse in an orbit, so it's very big! In Niven's universe humans are just one part of the intelligent species in the universe, other species are pupeteers (a specie superior to humans in intelligence) and kzins (an animal like species, inferior to humans). The most interesting thing of the novel is that it proposes that luck is a genetic property, quite interesting.