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The Ringworld Engineers (1997)

The Ringworld Engineers (1997)

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Author
Genre
Series
Rating
3.85 of 5 Votes: 2
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ISBN
0345418417 (ISBN13: 9780345418418)
Language
English
Publisher
del rey

About book The Ringworld Engineers (1997)

(2013 was turning into a stale year for SF. That summer, I really needed the solace of good, hard SF to escape, if just fleetingly, some harsh realities, same reality having given me long days and nights to read and listen. So, without really making a decision to do so but compelled by circumstances, I started a re-read of the Ringworld series. The publication history of the series was such that one book came out every ten years, on average. And so each book read provided a reflection of a decade of life, the places and friends, the situations and milestones when each book was read. Fiction, particularly the science fiction of the Ringworld books, it turned out, was nothing more than dressed-up reality. I never left the Ringworld.)If Ringworld were the exercise questions in the main text of a math book, then The Ringworld Engineers are the solutions at the back of the book. No doubt, the Ringworld for all its success (Hugo and Nebula awards), left many an issue for its fans and critics to discuss. The most prominent of these was the instability of the structure, so loudly proclaimed by MIT students; it needed constant adjustment via attitude jets to stay centered on its sun. There was also the matter of sewage; i.e., disposal and re-circulation. And of course, the nature of the engineers - with the powerful technology at their disposal, why build a ring at all rather than, say, exploring neighboring stars or a less rigorous design such as orbiting platforms. Perhaps, the most contentious issue centered on the validity of breeding for luck; was Teela Brown for real? This is not by far an exhaustive list.Larry Niven provides either sound or plausible solutions to many of the issues. (view spoiler)[To the instability, he posits attitude jets fueled the ring's own sun. To the plumbing, he adds a self-powered system that redirects collected effluents to the ringwall, forming the spill mountains. For the engineers, Niven offers the protector, progenitor of the hominids, including homo sapiens, smarter, tougher versions. As for the genetics of luck, Niven realizes this is a losing debate and drops the idea. (hide spoiler)]

Thing is, if you are going to write science fiction you have to do a) science and b) fiction. The Ringworld science is fun: weird thingummies doing stuff and allowing floating cities, a great big ring a million miles across rotating around a sun using ginormous black slabs to mimic night by blocking said sun over various places. Superconducting fabric, fluffy aliens, two headed aliens.But then there's also the fiction bit: your characters need to be real, and not just bits of squealing cardboard. And I'm getting fed up with authors who spend time indulging in putting their characters in peril and then whisking up a deus ex machina solution, when you think "if you hadn't painted yourself into a corner, then you wouldn't have needed to invent a backplot/gizmo/character to resolve it." There are some interesting parts: the idea of having a disparate number of species in one place and their interactions would have been fascinating to investigate, but this is passed over. The plot (how do you stop a big thingie from crashing into the sun) is a natural progression from the first Ringworld book, and some effort is made to find solutions to this. For example I had thought that something of elegance would have been constructed, especially when they get to 'Mars'. But no.The ending is a bodge job, which results in terrible destruction, and the (at least in this book) loss of the cultures we have got to know over the story so far. Brute force overcomes diligent and creative thinking. How utterly depressing.

Do You like book The Ringworld Engineers (1997)?

The Ringworld series continues with this book, The Ringworld Engineers. Some of the same characters appear from the first novel, most prominently, Louie Wu and Chmeee. Louie and Chmeee are kidnapped by a Puppeteer and taken back to the Ringworld to search for an artifact that will help the Puppeteer to his political aspirations. I thought this book was a little confusing and had too much rishathra (sexual practice outside one's own species), which had nothing to do with furthering the story. I do like the characters and I do like the attempt to explain the Ringworld's potential real existence through science, so I find that very interesting, but I was hoping for a better story. There are so much potential with Ringworld and this story fell short for me.
—Karen

This one of the very few occasions that I decided to reread a book. Not because I fondly remembered – rather worryingly it was because I had the next two sequels in my to be read pile and I wanted to give them a go but I could not remember a single word of this book. That really should have been an omen.Ringworld was one of the first SF books I ever read and one could hardly have picked a better book for the sheer scale of the central idea and the sense of wonder that flooded your mind. I grew to love much of Niven's stuff and almost all The Known Space stories are still treasured possessions.This return to the Ringworld finds the structure broken and our sense of wonder waning. Niven fails to bring alive even a small segment of the massive literary playground he has created. We do indeed sort of meet a Ringworld engineer whose motivations and thought processes are key to the resolution of the story. These motivations are believable but are far from convincing. Yes their thought processes are going to be very alien but these are so conservative and restrictive that it’s a wonder they managed to get off their homeward never mind build the Ringworld.Ringworld deserves its place as one the top ten SF books of all time. This sequel is an enjoyable read but in comparison to the Ringworld it is a mere Shadow Square – an impressive structure but far less bright and interesting.
—Peter Dunn

And so we return to Ringworld, with Louis Wu and Speaker-to-Animals, who have both undergone character development in the interim. We get a new Pearson’s puppeteer, though I much prefer Nessus, who had some dynamism. Niven is now free to present major obstacles in the Ringworld, and he does so within a typical, though exciting, plot. The stakes are high, no less than the fate of the Ringworld itself and its trillions of inhabitants. We get up close and personal with many of those inhabitants, to which Niven spices them up by infusing elements of evolutionary biology. We get more questions answered, especially about the designers of the Ringworld and what they represent to the galaxy as a whole. We get big problems to solve, and suspense as to whether they will be solved without sacrifice.Ringworld Engineers takes a different tone than the original. In place of exploration and wonderment is a formula consisting of protagonists working together to overcome adversities. That should be expected in a sequel, when the initial amazement wears off, and we want Louis and Speaker to do more than just uncover fascinating phenomena. Niven does a good job in offering interesting puzzles to solve and new players to help or hinder our old friends. Character development actually exists in Engineers, as well as character twists that some might not see coming.Ringworld was an unbelievable ride into exploring the unknown in a contained, but exponentially massive environment. Ringworld Engineers does not have much of that facet, but it prevails as a strong sequel that moves towards typical space opera fare. Note to Niven: Sex prose does not automatically make your story edgy and adult. Stop inserting it haphazardly, you didn't need it.
—Malcolm Little

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