Nessus has been chosen by the Hindmost, the puppeteer leader (and a witty title he has, too), to undertake this journey because by puppeteer standards he is insane: Nessus doesn't exhibit the fear response in the way normal puppeteers are expected to. Well, Niven solves this issue by breaking his own rules. It's not so unimaginable that a species could contrive to turn its own planet into a spaceship, but wouldn't a species that balls up at the slightest provocation do just that when presented with armageddon itself? Converting, not just one, but five worlds into formation-flying spacecraft takes just a little guts, grit, and determination, attributes Niven goes to great pains to assure us puppeteers don't possess. Niven here is straining credulity to the breaking point. At the slightest threat they curl into a little ball like a doodlebug, and they are so afraid of spaceships they have engineered their very worlds to fly through space.
Now, we're told the puppeteer species are primarily known for their timidity. The puppeteers are fleeing a wavefront of radiation emanating from a chain reaction of supernovae that has occurred at the galactic core. The other crew are Speaker-to-Animals, a member of Niven's enormously popular feline Kzin race, and Teela Brown, a young Earth girl who is included for reasons that constitute nearly an abuse of the suspension of disbelief. Nessus is looking for a small crew of aliens to accompany him on a deep space voyage, of the goal of which he's annoyingly secretive. Louis Wu, a disenchanted Earthman, is approached on his 200th birthday by Nessus, a quasi-equine alien known as a puppeteer due to the two flat heads it sports on lengthy necks. (Later he'd turn the whole shebang into a franchise.) Ringworld is a good, but not great novel, that almost rises to its premise but runs rings around delivering full satisfaction. However, get past the Big Idea, and the actual story of Ringworld is a whisper-thin thing, a suprisingly low-key tale of extraterrestrial discovery in which not a whole heck of a lot really happens to grab you by the short and curlies, and with enough unanswered questions that Niven was essentially put in the position of having to write a sequel ten years later in order to settle them and stop his fans from grousing. For its influence and brilliance of ideas, Ringworld richly deserves its classic status. It may well be SF's most amazing concept period. The Ringworld itself, a colossal manufactured world circling a sun, containing enough room to solve any planet's overpopulation problem, is a conceptual gobsmacker. But a little perspective is called for, I think. This may well prove to be one of the more controversial reviews on this site, as Ringworld is a staple of every SF reader's basic diet. Book cover art by Donato Giancola (1st) Vincent di Fate (2nd) Sanda Zahirovic (3rd).
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