![]() ![]() Nessus is looking for a small crew of aliens to accompany him on a deep space voyage, of the goal of which he's annoyingly secretive. ![]() Louis Wu, a disenchanted Earthman, is approached on his 200th birthday by Nessus, a quasi-equine alien known as a puppeteer due to the two flat heads it sports on lengthy necks. (Later he'd turn the whole shebang into a franchise.) Ringworld is a good, but not great novel, that almost rises to its premise but runs rings around delivering full satisfaction. ![]() However, get past the Big Idea, and the actual story of Ringworld is a whisper-thin thing, a suprisingly low-key tale of extraterrestrial discovery in which not a whole heck of a lot really happens to grab you by the short and curlies, and with enough unanswered questions that Niven was essentially put in the position of having to write a sequel ten years later in order to settle them and stop his fans from grousing. For its influence and brilliance of ideas, Ringworld richly deserves its classic status. It may well be SF's most amazing concept period. The Ringworld itself, a colossal manufactured world circling a sun, containing enough room to solve any planet's overpopulation problem, is a conceptual gobsmacker. But a little perspective is called for, I think. This may well prove to be one of the more controversial reviews on this site, as Ringworld is a staple of every SF reader's basic diet. Book cover art by Donato Giancola (1st) Vincent di Fate (2nd) Sanda Zahirovic (3rd). ![]()
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