Niven, Larry: Ringworld Throne

[ray gower]

Ringworld Throne

Synopsis
In this sequel to "Ringworld" and "Ringworld Engineers", the ring is still home to many alien species. The last Puppeteer is still manipulating those he can, and the two hundred year old Louis Wu, offered the opportunity to become young, must meet even more new challenges and solve more technological problems in order for the hominid species to survive.
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Been a long time since I read the first two volumes which is a little unfortunate. The prologue and first chapters would be a lot easier with a fresher memory of events.

Once over that hurdle, the fact I can't remember who Wu and his Kjin friend are matters rather less

 

[ray gower]

I'm afraid this is a rather confused book!

Ringworld is under threat, Fair enough.
But by who or what? The ships that are being destroyed, some natural disaster, one or other of the Protectors (vampire or ghoul), or is it because the Protectors are fighting themselves?

Meanwhile the sacking of the floating city was an elaborate ruse to be able to collect a camera, which was rather pointless as the main protagonists seemed to be at least two steps ahead of anything it was going to show.

Then to finish it. Wu gives the 'crown' to somebody who we met in the last two pages. Though Wu himself has known he was there all along.

 

[Lensman]

I hate to give this a bad review, as Ringworld may be my all-time favorite book, one of the very few novels to win both the Hugo and Nebula awards, and the sequel The Ringworld Engineers is another very enjoyable Hugo winner. But The Ringworld Throne is unfortunately not a worthy sequel to the two that preceded it. Part of the problem is that much of the novel was previously published as a stand-alone story which involves none of the continuing characters; it's about a coalition of Ringworld natives banding together to fight a huge vampire menace. I wish Niven had left that out; as it is, much of the book literally involves Louis Wu sitting around and watching a video display of the "fearless vampire hunters" in action. Another problem is that Throne doesn't really have the focus of a big crisis to be resolved, the way the other Ringworld novels do. So it doesn't really have much of a climax. At 417 pages, it also goes on much too long.