The Ringworld Throne (Mass Market Paperback)

The series is set in an artificial habitat built as a 600-million-mile ring around a sun-type star, with orbiting sunshades to provide day and night and thousand-mile-high rim walls to prevent the atmosphere from spilling out. The builders of this place vanished before human history on Earth began.

Inhabiting this Ring are numerous human species with different skills, diets and requirements, who mostly live in peace due to lack of competition for food and habitat. Their technology is minimal and some species are non-sentient.

The third book in the series, "Ringworld Throne," takes place after a cataclysmic threat to the Ring has been averted by Earth spaceman Louis Wu (and friends), at the expense of the lives of many inhabitants.

The Hindmost, an alien watcher exiled from his own world, calls Wu's attention to a new threat to the Ringworld. Vampires are proliferating at an alarming rate, threatening other species. Vampires are non-sentient hominids who exude a sexual allure to attract prey - humans. This scent is almost irresistible and whole tribes can be wiped out in the course of a few nights.

As Wu investigates, he discovers someone is destroying incoming spacecraft, and Protectors - metamorphosed beings of immense power dedicated entirely to preserving their own bloodlines - are dangerously active on the rim.

Wu's adventures are narrated in tandem with those of the vampire-fighting Machine People, a technological species who travel the Ring, selling and trading. Niven keeps the pages turning and his development of differing human species is particularly absorbing. A highly enjoyable story.

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The sequel, The Ringworld Engineers (1980), starts twenty years later, with Louis Wu and Speaker (now known as Chmeee) returning to the Ringworld with the Hindmost, the deposed leader of the Puppeteers, to find a supposed transmutation device that the Hindmost thinks will help restore him to power. Along the way they discover various alien civilizations, Vampires (non-sentient, blood-eating hominids), and Ghouls (eaters of the dead who trade in information). They also learn that the orbit of the Ringworld has become eccentric and it will destroy itself in a matter of years unless they can save it.

And then . . . there's The Ringworld Throne, where the only mystery yet to solve is, apparently, "Who are you, and what have you done with the real Larry Niven?" To say that Throne is a disappointing sequel is an understatement.

The story picks up about a year after The Ringworld Engineers leaves off. Louis Wu and his motley crew are still stranded on the Ringworld after human-turned-Pak-protector Teela buried their spaceship under tons of lava. Unfortunately, Niven has changed a major premise of the last book. Engineers ended with an unthinkable moral dilemma: whether to allow the Ringworld and its trillions of occupants to be destroyed, or save it at the cost of several hundred million lives. This should weigh mighty heavily on Louis Wu's mind, but Niven lets him off the hook: the Hindmost announces that he could control the Ringworld's meteor defenses more precisely than anticipated, and thus was able to minimize the deaths. Had this been revealed at the end of Engineers it would be a hideous deus ex machina. As it is, it's just very sloppy writing; Niven conveniently no longer has to deal with a more complex protagonist.

From here, Throne is basically two intertwined but generally unrelated stories. The first deals with an infestation of Vampires. Louis Wu is legendary on the Ringworld for once boiling an ocean to destroy a field of mirror sunflowers (which kill their prey by focusing sunlight on it and burning it). The resulting cloud cover cut off their light. However, one unintended consequence of this feat is a never-ending overcast sky, ideal for the spreading of Vampires. This, Niven gets right; all actions, however noble, may have unintended side effects that are not so good. The resulting battle between the locals and the Vampires drives about two-thirds of the novel's action.

It's unfortunate that the vast majority of this action involves neither the principal characters nor the mysteries of the Ringworld itself. The appeal of the Ringworld novels is directly proportional to the amount of time Louis Wu spends exploring it. Instead we are treated to four or five different species of hominids comprising thirty-odd interchangeable individuals with unpronounceable names, alternately fighting vampires and "rishing" with each other (i.e. inter-species sex for the sake of binding contracts or forging friendships). It's monotonous, and in the end, there's no payoff. No more of the Ringworld's mysteries are revealed.

Meanwhile, Louis Wu and the Hindmost are investigating why the Ringworld's remaining Pak protectors are destroying incoming ships and interfering with species other than their own. This part of the novel is completely incomprehensible, and I won't even attempt to explain what goes on. It doesn't help that the majority of the action is viewed through telescopes, communication devices, and so forth. Finally, we get to follow the principal characters around, and the story is a mess.

This novel reveals nothing new about the mysteries of the Ringworld, nor does it develop the characters or the series' plot any further. If Ringworld's Children can't make sense of all this, then sadly one of the great hard-SF world ends not with a bang, but a whimper.

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The book is sort of about Louis Wu and the old gang of the two previous Ringworld series. Some of the writing about Louis is quite good. (Spoiler Warning) Louis has a terminal disease from being off booster spice. His cure is quite innovative when looking at things on a microscophic level. My hat is off to Larry for thinking of such an good solution to an illness.

I didn't care for the new characters. They tend to come into the main thrust of the novel and I just wanted to learn more about the Hindmost and Chmee. Chmee is just busy running his life and he treats everything as an afterthought. Perhaps I would be this way if I lived on a stable Ringworld with a bunch of wives and a Kingdom to defend.

But, to Larry Niven fans, this is still classic Niven. The last few chapters makes up for some of the dull parts. Remember, Pak do not like automation. Since the death of Teela Brown there has not been a Pak on Ringworld. Thus we have the true crux of Ringworld's problem: it does not have a Pak running the structure. A paranoid Puppeteer is not a replacement for a Pak.

You'll have to read this novel before "Ringworld's Children" comes out for the Summer.

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