Rating: 
Summary: Not up to the standards of his other works
Review: Niven must have been hungry. How else to explain a ringworld creation which was nowhere near the enlightened excitment of his other works in the series. The last third of the book has nothing to do with the first two-thirds. Skip this one and read his other works. He's still one of the best. (But even Michael Jordan shoots an air-ball occassionally.)
Rating: 
Summary: Smucked
Review: The first half, I found really quite engrossing, if oversexed and lacking a satisfying conclusion. I quite enjoyed the reading, until it dawned on me that the book was ending without anything really happening. It was silly in parts. The sequences about the fighting protectors - as seen from the point of view of various webeyes - reminded me of sf TV which is too cheap to put its protagonist right in the action, so it has him looking at a small display of it instead (think Star Trek). This lent a disposessed feeling to the entire second half. Really, TRT struck me as two short stories smucked together, with references to one another hastily pasted between chapters to raise the pretense of unity. But there was none. (What did the massing vampires have to do with the second half, anyway? Precious little.) Characters that we might have cared about are summarily dropped after Part I; the characters from Part II that we began to care about are summarily dropped when the book ends. This strange format prevents the novel from having any real punch to it. A neat read and an interesting expansion on life under the Arch - but without that magical power of 'Ringworld'.
Rating:
Summary: I expected better.
Review: Having greatly enjoyed both RINGWORLD and RINGWORLD ENGINEERS I was rather disappointed with this outing. It seemed to be more of an excuse to have the characters go around rishing with each other than to expand on the Ringworld mythos. A much better plot would have been to explore the question of who really built the thing as it had been implied in ENGINEERS that the Pak had only colonized it later. My own humble suggestion- a covert group of the Tnuctipun were the real builders and are now coming out of their stasis storage bunkers deep in the bowels of the command center and are appalled by the rampant infestation of alien beings on what was to be their safe and secret hideaway from the Thrint. Hey Larry, are you reading this?
Rating: 
Summary: Another Niven great
Review: I am a definite fan of Larry Niven's work, especially the Ringworld series and the Integral Trees. I thought this book was excellant, however, it lacks the ability to grab ones attention as well as Ringworld and Ringworld Engineers. It is still a terrific piece of work and well worth reading.
Rating:
Summary: Like a bowl of rehashed, 3-day-old fish, it's a stinkpot
Review: The Ringworld Throne is a 417 page rehash of the previous Ringworld novels. And, like a bowl of rehashed, three-day-old fish, it's a real stinkpot. It contains no new ideas. It has the same tired old plot theme: Against all odds, Louis Wu saves Ringworld. That only takes Niven about ten or twelve pages, counting all the times he repeats himself. The other four hundred odd pages are mostly devoted to poorly written, offbeat sexual encounters that contribute absolutely nothing to the story. Worse, they aren't even titillating. Those bad sex scenes were quite apropos, though, as Niven dedicated this book to Robert Heinlein (an insider joke?). In his dotage, Heinlein also resorted to writing offbeat, bad sex scenes instead of science fiction. This book would seem to cry out that Larry Niven was fresh out of money and fresh out of book ideas. Even so, he should be ashamed of himself.
Rating:
Summary: Questionable????
Review: Some of this book was good, but it could have been better. I was really excited about reading it, but it left my mouth dry and really had a disappointing ending. I felt it left the story hanging. I liked his first two books on Ringworld alot better.
Rating:
Summary: What a sad way to end the saga
Review: I rate this book a five only because I enjoyed the first two in the series so much. Throne was utterly disappointing and not at all to the standards of the rest of the series.
There were some very interesting ideas presented here, but the story was forced and uninspiring and the attempt at looking at different cultures half-hearted and lacking depth
Rating: 
Summary: Not up to Larrys normal standards
Review: In general I really loved the whole series of Ringworld novels. However in this book I found the first half of the novel slow going and full of holes. First of all Rishing altogether becomes an insermountable problem if life on Earth is anything to go by. It is untenable mainly because the first sexually transmitted disease to come along the Ringworld culture would cease to exist. If you broaden this to all diseases then the question "Do you practice rishing?" will start by meaning "Will have sex with one of us?" to eventually mean "Do you want to take the chance at dying, becoming horribly disfigured and possibly killing most or all of your tribe because of a childhood desease that you have no defence against?" If you would like a Terran example look at what occurred when the European settlers first encounter native North Americans (Small Pox, Measels ...). You could defend Rishing by stating well we have had enough contact that this is no longer a problem, but I see this more likely to exaserbate the problem. Simply new deseases occur all the time most recently HIV/AIDS and Ebola. Another similiar problem would happen when the "Vampires" have thousands of bodies piled up under one of the floating cities. There a very large plague just waiting to happen. If you give a bug a chance to grow: it will
Rating:
Summary: Ringworld Throne -- New Saga or New "Gilligan's Island"?
Review: Don't miss this week's two-part episode! First, our cosmic castaways watch as natives on the other side of the island rid themselves of an infatuating infestation (and have lots of that crazy native sex while they're at it). Then, the crew of the Needle has to move fast as powerful and confusing beings vie for control of Ring-Island. Fortunately the superbeings do away with each other as suddenly as they appeared, but Louis, Chmee, and Skipper Hindmost grab their coconuts and get in some well placed conks on the head!
OK, so it wasn't THAT bad. But Ringworld Throne was mediocre sci-fi, and hardly recognizable as Niven. What always set "Known Space" apart was the really inventive science -- he took intriguing ideas, made them easy to visualize, and wrote clever stories around them. RT is re-hashed Ringworld, with new technologies not advancing beyond technobabble. No new ideas are explored. Back in the 60s, Niven seemed to be keeping up with cutting-edge theories from the real world. Have the advances of astronomy and physics in the past 20 years given Niven *any* new story concepts? They don't show up here. The story would still be salvagable if it had a gripping plot and good characters. Earlier novels like Lucifer's Hammer and Mote in God's Eye are great stories -- really hard to put 'em down. As other comments suggest, RT falls short here, too. The first 1/2 is about a "vampire hunt" which is an OK little story -- a perfectly good script for "Ringworld: The TV Series" -- but hardly worth writing a novel about. The second part, about various groups of Protectors trying to take over, is disjointed, confusing, and ultimately, irrelvant. There are a bunch of Protectors on Ringworld that we didn't know about; then they all kill each other off and we go back about our business. I've been dissapointed in Niven's recent stuff, but I'd assumed it was largely due to that cryptofascist Pournelle. Fallen Angels, for example, was smug, self-indulgent and preachy. Unfortunately, RT isn't any better. It doesn't spout off like the later Pournelle collaborations, but neither does it do anything else. Don't buy it. Borrow it if you've run out of things to read on the plane. Niven's written some really great stuff, so don't let this discourage you from getting his other works. Get any of his "Known Space" short stories, the first two Ringworld books, Mote in God's Eye, or just about anything pre-1990, and you'll have a terrific read.
Rating:
Summary: Truly a book to BORROW
Review: Niven has done the unforgivable with his latest Ringworldnovel. He has taken one of the most stunningly imaginative Sci-Fipremises ever created, and produced a truly unpleasant novel. If you are a Ringworld disciple, and feel you must read the latest edition, then for your enjoyments sake, borrow the book. Purchasing it will only taint your possible enjoyment with recurring bouts of "I paid for THIS?". Less than half of the book deals with old, favorite characters, and their story line is left unresolved and undeveloped. The other half deals with a disjointed story of vampires and machine people that is exceedingly boring and uninteresting. If you felt "Ringworld Engineers" was a shadow of the original, you will hear echoes of the words "contractual obligations" and "need to pay for new boat" when you read this one.
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