All around a ring: Larry Niven’s “The Ringworld Engineers”.

So once again I’ve bumbled into a book series without reading the first book. As of tonight I’ve finished “The Ringworld Engineers” by Larry Niven, which of course is the second novel of his Ringworld series.

It has been 20 years since Louis Wu had discovered the Ringworld. But now he and a Kzin diplomat known as Speaker-To-Animals are going back there, for they have become captives to a deposed Puppeteer leader known as The Hindmost. The Hindmost’s intention is to regain its own status by bringing back treasures of extraordinary value from the Ringworld itself in order to impress its fellows, and it needs Louis’s help to do that.

However when they get to Ringworld, Louis finds that it has become unstable and will eventually destroy itself in months. Now Louis embarks on a quest to find the Ringworld’s control center of the planet’s creators the legendary engineers.

So this yet again another science fiction series that I’ve pretty bumbled into, much in the same way that I bumbled into William Gibson’s sprawl trilogy, by reading the sequel instead of reading the first book. But, all in all, despite this being the second book of this series this is very engaging! Initially when I got this from a used book shop in Springdale I was looking for the first book, but unfortunately did not find a copy of it, so I ended up settling for the second book.

Niven’s science fiction goes into the hard SF mode with some new wave influences as well, as far as I can surmise. And of course he also injects a little humor in it as well. Hopefully I’ll get around to seek out the first book and maybe some others as well.

by i-the-muso-1968