The Ringworld Throne

June 3, 1996
An honored SF writer returns to his best-known creation: the artificial world, built far from Earth by aliens over a half million years ago, in the form of a ring 600 million miles in diameter, hosting an astonishing multitude of inhabitants and cultures. This third fictional voyage to the Ringworld (after Ringworld, 1970, which won both the Hugo and the Nebula for best SF novel of that year, and Ringworld Engineers, 1980) offers two stories crowded into one. A motley array of hominid inhabitants are seeking to defeat a plague of vampires. Meanwhile, returning hero Louis Wu is battling what effectively is a plague of Protectors (superbeings common to many Niven novels) whose rivalries threaten Ringworld's existence. The battle against the vampires is the more exciting of the two stories, filled with action, scenes of the Ringworld and explorations of ritualistic interspecies sex. Wu's pursuit of the Protectors displays Niven's deft hand at portraying aliens, but the dialogue that fills in the backstory slows the narrative. Niven still ranks near the top of the SF field, but this outing is likely to satisfy determined Ringworld fans more than other readers.

With clarity and fervor O'Brien once again narrates the adventures of earthling Louis Wu and his motley crew of alien explorers as they confront the latest crisis on the amazing construct called the Ringworld. It's fortunate that O'Brien's nuanced, well-paced performance--which includes interesting vocal characterizations of both the realistic and fanciful variety--keeps things moving because the story certainly doesn't. Niven gets bogged down in anthropological details about the Ringworld's various races of humanoids, rather than telling a rousing tale. The plot is often confusing, and even the author's descriptions of the Ringworld itself don't inspire the awe they did in the two previous books. It was O'Brien's enthusiasm that got me through this, not mine. J.P.M. (c) AudioFile, Portland, Maine