Ringworld series One of my all time favorites, I have worn out my original copy and just had to get a new one. Exellent story line with just the right number of characters to keep things interesting. One of those "Can't put it down" books.
My first Niven... I liked Ringworld enough to go out and buy the sequel, The Ringworld Engineers, a couple days later. I would definitely recommend this to anybody who likes sci-fi, or just space in general.I don't see why this is described as "Hard science fiction"... I don't see what was scientific about it, or what would cause someone to talk about in regards to science anyway. The science of this book was NOT a defining characteristic of it at all. General Products hulls and Slaver stasis fields were the only revolutionary technologies as far as I could tell (besides the Ringworld itself), and neither of them are realistic or scientific in any way whatsoever. If it was just the fact that Niven worked out the required orbital velocity of the Ringworld and mentioned neutrinos occasionally and the star type, that hardly seems like it took a lot of work, or would be grounds to class a book as scientifically well thought out.
Besides the science (non)issue, the dialogue was my main problem with the book - it got extremely annoying at times since Niven has a habit of using the characters to present somewhat technology-based ideas to the reader, and having them elaborate on the reasoning that allowed them to arrive at such a conclusion, which ends up sounding very clumsy and artificial. Louis also occasionally uses "Yah" as an affirmative which was a contender for the most annoying vocal characteristic of a character in the entire book - there was just no point to it, it was jarringly misplaced, and there doesn't seem to be any way to pronounce it without sounding utterly ridiculous.
The other contender for an annoying vocal characteristic is Louis' use of the word "tanj" as an expletive. This seems completely pointless as well, and not least because an acronym that few have ever heard of that comes from a stupid phrase anyway is unlikely to replace far more powerful expletives already in use, but because it was simply childish. It's not unreasonable to assume that language will have evolved noticeably by whatever time period "Ringworld" is set in, but, generally, readers expect to have this evolved language translated into it's present day equivalent for the purposes of understanding the story, so dropping in an isolated word like this to avoid using present day expletives just seems silly.
The characters were flat, with barely any defining characteristics - with the exception of Nessus, who was the only good character in the entire book, but he didn't even appear nearly as much as he should have due to the boring and predictable conflicts that took place involving the other far less entertaining main characters.
The Ringworld itself was of course very interesting and awe inspiring in its size, but I didn't think Niven did too good a job of presenting even this, to be honest.
Despite these annoyances, the book wasn't too bad as relatively simplistic reading. Some would say buy it for the Ringworld itself, which is what I did, but I don't feel any more humbled by the idea of such a megastructure after reading it than I did previously. But as I've said, its a simple story, and not too intolerable if you can ignore the clumsy, unbelievable dialogue, the flat characters, and the vocal habits of Louis Wu. Buy it for Nessus, if you really need an excuse.
