Rating: 
Summary: Will the Real Larry Niven Please Stand Up
Review: Once there was a sci-fi writer called Larry Niven who wrote some of the most imaginative hard sci-fi of his day. Never mind that the stories were badly written, the characters two-dimensional, and the societies that he described were little more than a teen-aged boy's wet dream; the stories were so chock-full of big ideas that I avidly hunted down everything that he wrote. Then came the Larry Niven who collaborated with Jerry Pournelle. This Larry Niven was a much better writer, but his ideas became smaller and smaller until we saw sad little political tirades like "Fallen Angels". I, like so many others, have spent twenty years hoping that the old Larry Niven would return from the literary wasteland. With "Ringworld's Children" the old Niven has at least sent us a postcard.
The first Ringworld book was one of the old Larry Niven's later stories and is perhaps his grandest vision. The story is set on an artificial world that was created by building a ring around a star. The ring has the diameter of Earth's orbit, the inside is habitable, and there is enough room for almost anything to happen. Over the years Niven wrote two sequels: each less imaginative than the previous one. When "Ringworld's Children" appeared at my local library I ignored it because I was so tired of reading the awful books that Larry Niven has written over the past two decades. However, the other day I sat down and read the book and found that I could not put it down. The book is not a true return to form for Mr Niven, but it is
far better than anything that he has written since the early 1970s, and it does have the feel of his early work, right down to the bad writing.
If you like Larry Niven's early work then read this book. If you think that the Pournelle/Niven collaborations were the gospels of sci-fi then this book is probably not for you.
Rating: 
Summary: Tunesmith- Jimmy Webb?
Review: people who like the character Tunesmith in 'Ringworld's Children' might like the book 'Tunesmith' by Jimmy Webb.
Rating: 
Summary: One of my favorite authors
Review: A great addition to the ringworld series.
But disappointing in a few, hard to explain ways.
Maybe the characters and setting are so clear to Larry that developing them seemed unnecessary.
It's fast paced and grand in its scope, detailing the fragility of the ring very well. But I felt the sense of wonder at encountering new species and situations was missing.
This is likely my high expectations.
To be clear, I'd read this again and again, because I really liked the initial novel and characters. It's a good story too.
But maybe its a little thin.
Seems almost like it's written as an
action movie script, --it'd be a good one.
Rating:
Summary: Pleasantly surprised
Review: After Ringworld Throne I had low expectations for this new Ringworld novel.In preperation I re-read the first 3 books, and they were still fresh in my mind when I picked up Ringworld's Children. I personally did not like Ringworld Throne anywhere near as much. I found the Ringworld natives generic and boring and hard to keep track of. Often I found myself not really caring what happened to them. Near the end of the book things started to pick up, and it does answer some important questions (while posing new ones). So even if just to learn what happens next it's worth it to fight your way through Ringworld Throne. Ringworld's Children goes a long way to fixing those problems. This time around the focus is back on Louis Wu, where it should be. As a result the book is far less schitzophrenic and a lot easier to understand (is it just me or was anyone else completely confused by Bram's origin story in Ringworld Throne?). A big Known Space fan (I have read almost all the stories, with the exception of the new short story included in the Crashlander collection) I really appreciated all the nods to previous books. Carlos Wu, the antimatter solar system, Nuetron Star, Protector and other stories are all tied together in this. It really does feel like Niven is wrapping things up, and when you see what happens at the end you'll understand it's pretty hard to top in terms of sheer scale. The book was a fun read. I thought the pacing was good. *Some* of the concepts introduced seemed somewhat forced, or not explored in enough detail. Like the extra convolutions to Teela's story. But they never really affected my enjoyment of the story. However something that bother me is Niven's ongoing habit of adding new slang whenever he writes a new story in a series. He did it in Engineers and in Throne, but it wasn't quite as intrusive as "LE" is. This whole "Legal Entity" thing came out of nowhere. No one said it in the other stories, even in Ringworld Throne which takes place the same year as Ringworld's Children. Similarly the term the Fringe War has no basis. No one used that term in Ringworld Throne, yet even as he's stepping out of the autodoc, not having spoken to anyone since the end of Throne, Louis contemplates the "Fringe War". For obvious reasons he needed to give a name to the growing conflict in the Ringworld solar system, but there are more elegant ways he could have introduced us to the term. Like how about Tunesmith uses it the first time he speaks with Louis after emerging from the autodoc and Louis asks him what it means. But that small gripe is not enough to ruin the book for me. The only other problem I had is the length. The story is relatively short. I'm not sure how short because my copies of the other Ringworld stories are paperback, but it feels shorter than the others, and it's dissapointing because when it really gets moving you don't want it to end. I might actually give it 3.5 stars if I had the choice, I'm not sure though. Somewhere in that range, 3.5-4 out of 5. Some might want to wait for the paperback though. And you should re-read Ringworld Throne at the very least, but re-reading all 3 would be best.
Rating:
Summary: The book I have waited for for 20 years
Review: For the last 20 years readers and fans have bemoaned the lack of a worthy sequel to Lary Nivens 1970 Ringworld. 1980's Ringworld engineer was fair, and Ringworld Throne completely LAME. A lot of Niven recent work seem plain and uninteresting. I began to suspect that like his mentor and idol, Robert Hienlein that in his older years Niven was losing the ability to tell stories and had been reduced to essentially delivering long monolgue travel brochures.
Not so with this book. Niven has come through with an interesting and delightful tale that brings full circle a number of story lines and characters. I enjoyed how he over came some of his previous "Deus ex machina" such as puppeteer hulls, stasis generators. Just as in the real world,a seemingly over powering technology soon becomes less dominant in the face of newer technological advances. Ie the usage of anti matter against scrith and Puppeteer hulls.
I further enjoyed the more in depth examination of the motives of Louis Wu and Teela Brown from the first book. Without giving a spoiler simply let me say that this is the finest book Niven has delivered in a decade.
Rating:
Summary: A suspension bridge with infinitely loose ends
Review: If you like clean-cut, chaste prose and loose, not to say slutty ideas you love Larry Niven. In this fourth book in the Ringworld series he leaves more loose ends than he wraps up.
Spoilers, or inside baseball.
Does Tunesmith pick a fight with the h-monsters? Pak strategists don't seem to maintain a force in being long.
Are the Ringworld pak manipulated by an artificial intelligence in the superconducting network?
Why not just use a lightsail with a stasis field for meteor patches? Also for bank shots around the Ring. If the Ring is really out of Known Space, maybe Niven could put a Smoke Ring around a gas giant in the sequel to 'The Gripping Hand'. New Singapore? I don't think he should have used savages the first time.
Rating:
Summary: Not a classic, but a pretty good read
Review: If you made it through all three of the Ringworld books before this one, you owe it to yourself to keep going. I thought this one was better than Ringworld Throne, but not as good as the first two in the series.
It's fast-paced, has interesting characters, and contains plenty of conflict. There's a war on over Ringworld, called the Fringe War, and it supplies a lot of the action and some of the characters. Louis Wu is great as always, and Acolyte (son of Chmee/Speaker to Animals) is a fine sidekick.
A couple of interesting twists await towards the end of the book. I thought the denouement was just a wee bit maudlin, but it's obvious that Niven really likes Louis as a character, and... well, that's all I'll say.
If you really, really love the Ringworld series (as I do), get the hardback for an immediate good read. If you are not quite as fanatic about it, hang on and get the paperback in a couple of months.
Rating:
Summary: A Suspension Bridge With No End Points
Review: Larry Niven reported that engineering students have determined that the Ringworld mathematically is a suspension bridge with no end points. I don't have the math skills to confirm the claim, but I can confirm that enjoyable as the Ringworld series has been, sometimes when reading this fourth Ringworld book I felt like more than one kind of end point was being suspended. This is the story of how Louis Wu's hand-picked successor to the Ringworld "throne" preserves the Ringworld from the threat of annihilation by human cops, kzinti warcats and other folk we thought we had learned to like. The ARM agents here, for example, aren't upset when their antimatter tools blast a Manhattan-sized hole in the floor of the Ringworld, jeopardizing the lives of the Ringworld's 30 trillion inhabitants. The ARMs we meet note they can still learn a lot studying the deserted, desiccated shell if that happens. It doesn't, of course, but Larry, you've sure come a long ways in your attitude towards cops since the days of Gil the Arm. Like Robert Heinlein in his last half dozen books, Niven has also taken to recycling old ideas from earlier books, even ideas his characters rejected then, and using them in "Children": - Ship-eating monsters in hyperspace, rejected as a possibility in "Borderland of Sol," may turn out to be real. (Beowulf Schaeffer was right and Carlos Wu was wrong? Who'd have thought it?) So Puppeteers are right to fear hyperspace. - Teela Brown's fabulous luck, discredited in "Ringworld Engineers," may be a matter of lucky genes after all. - The anti-matter solar system in "Neutron Star" turns out to still be around. - The "Longshot," the experimental advanced ship from "Neutron Star" and "Ringworld" turns out to still be around. - Schizophrenic cops, an idea from the one original story in "Crashlander," appear again. (Larry, what is it about you and cops?) - Carlos Wu's fabulous autodoc, also from "Crashlander" or maybe from "Ringworld Engineers," continues to play a starring role. There are half a dozen other references from earlier works that I saw, and likely a lot more that I missed. Niven's strong suit has always been ideas and the extrapolation of ideas, combined with good plotting. He's never been a strong character author, and he has the annoying habit of paying more attention to the scenery than to character development. That's an ongoing problem with this short novel, too. And an unusually large number of characters are abandoned by the author, having served there immediate function to the plot. (Larry, what was the purpose of having Louis Wu and his motely crew meet the Giraffe People? And that's Larry's pun, not mine.) And spare me any more rishathra jokes. Please. Niven continues to do one thing consistently well: Protectors, the folk who probably built the Ringworld, are mostly superintelligent, in addition to having some other skills. How can a writer of normal intelligence, writing to a reader of normal intelligence, portray believably a superintelligent being? It takes more than one technique. Niven uses several effectively, perhaps more effectively than he has done in the last two Ringworld books. It's the best and most effective aspect of this novel. The motivation of Protectors is less well, or at least less consistently, developed. You knew - come one, admit it - that the Ringworld would have a surviving original Pak Protector. But how is that Proserpina is still alive? And why did Bram - the former occupant of the Ringworld "throne," killed at the end of that book, let the Ringworld deteriorate to its present sad condition? Still and all, this is an entertaining yarn. Niven ends it ambiguously, with the Ringworld safer, if not safe, and enough satisfying new ideas to give a reader something to chew on. There's enough trickiness, plots-within-plots and general scheming to keep a reader guessing. And only Louis Wu and Nessus have the means to return to the Ringworld. I'd expected this to be the story where Louis Wu meets Carlos Wu, who is almost certainly his father (see: "Crashlander") but that didn't happen. Stay tuned. Is this a classic Niven story? Nope. But it's something of a return to form after disappointments likes "The Burning City." Strongly recommended for "Ringworld" fans. This is not the book for newcomers to Niven's universe; start with "Ringworld" the novel. If you're not a science fiction fan, you should probably skip this one.
Rating:
Summary: Pretty Good!
Review: Maybe I'm being slightly generous with five stars but it's a pretty good read - the magnitude of Larry Niven's ideas never fails to be stunning. And known space continues to expand with the very fine stories of the Man-Kzin Wars, some by other writers with Larry's permission. I'd recommend reading Ringworld and the Man-Kzin Wars before this if you haven't done so already. It's a fine universe to lose yourself in!
I'll not give the plot away, but its fast, highly-visualised and imaginative action such as we've come to expect from the Master!
Rating:
Summary: A pleasant coda, but not a classic addition to the series...
Review: Ringworld's Children is a pleasant revisit to our old friend Louis Wu and his motley crew, still bopping around the Ringworld. Like many others, I looked forward to the chance to see what new and interesting scrapes Larry Niven would get him into this time and seized the book at first opportunity. Overall it was a pleasant diversion and a nice read. The ring is really fascinating as a place and here Niven makes it the most realistic its ever been. I don't mean the "additions" to make it more scientifically accurate, but rather the way he treats the slow degradation over the aeons and the way that various people have evolved to fit their world. Alas... this book is too short and doesn't really contain new ideas. It does bring a lot of old Known Space ideas together in one place and the logical interplay of things like the anti-matter star system, super auto-doc, QII hyperdrive, and the ring itself is kind of fun. On the other hand, there are lots of elements (the Fringe War in particular) that are just there on the page, rather lifeless. The hyperspace monster thing (more-or-less a throwaway in any case) didn't amuse me (except: Beowulf Shaeffer was right and Carlos Wu was wrong in "Borderland of Sol", who'da thunk it?) for more than a second. In fact it rather annoyed me. I hope Niven has something interesting to do with the beasties in some future story. I still like Niven's clear, affectation-free prose. This book doesn't rise to the level of the original and I'd much rather have had something heftier with some more interesting new ideas, but... Sour grapes aside, Niven's "playspace" still has amazing flexibility. Rather than "down in flames", this book seems to open up various possible additional storylines in the future. I hope that Louis Wu does, in fact, live forever. (Secretly I'm pining for him to meet "dad" for a shared adventure.) Wait for this one in paperback, my friends, but you'll want to read it nonetheless.
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