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S - Science Fiction
F - Fantasy
H - Horror
Complete Listing
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Adams, Douglas (S)
Asher, Neal (S)
Aylett, Steve (S)
Banks, Iain M (S)
Barclay, James (F)
Barker, Clive (H)
Baxter, Stephen (S)
Brin, David (S)
Bury, Stephen (S)
Card, Orson Scott (S)
Cherryh, CJ (S/F)
Clute, John (S)
Cockayne, Steve (F)
Cook, Glen (F)
Danielewski, Mark (H)
Dick, Philip K (S)
Egan, Greg (S)
Feist, Raymond (F)
Gaiman, Neil (F)
Gibson, William (S)
Goodkind, Terry (F)
Grimwood, Jon C (S)
Hamilton, Peter (S)
Jeter, K.W. (S)
Jordan, Robert (F)
Lethem, Jonathan (S)
McAuley, Paul (S)
MacLeod, Ken (S)
Martin, George RR (F)
McMullen, Sean (S)
Miéville, China (S)
Moran, Daniel K (S)
Morgan, Richard K (S)
Nagata, Linda (S)
Niven, Larry (S)
Noon, Jeff (S)
Robinson, Kim S. (S)
Rucker, Rudy (S)
Simmons, Dan (S)
Smith, Michael Marshall (S)
Stephenson, Neal (S)
Sterling, Bruce (S)
Vinge, Vernor (S)
Westerfeld, Scott (S)
Williams, Sean (S)
Williams, Tad (S/F)
Collections (S/F)
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| The Classics |
Bradbury, Ray (S/H)
Burgess, Anthony (S)
Tolkien, JRR (F) |
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| Larry Niven |
| Author Information |
Reviewed Books |
Other Books |
| Notes: (R) - Ringworld Series |
Ringworld
(R) |
The Mote in God's Eye
The Ringworld Engineers (R)
The Ringworld Throne (R)
The Integral Trees
Man-Kzin Wars: Books I-VIII |
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 Our
Ranking Even after the many years this has been
written since, this is still an amazing novel technologically. Niven is one of
the best writers in the "Hard Sci-fi" genre, fiction very much grounded in science
fact. Nearly everything he writes is supposedly scientifically plausible and he
details how it could be done. This alone makes this book absolutely amazing. The
concept of the Ringworld is just so incredible that you assume it is pure fantasy
until he begins to slowly detail how it could actually be done. The Ringworld
is basically a monstrosity of a constructed world that actually wraps around a
sun in one massive loop. Just imagine a hoola hoop with a ball in the middle of
it. This world, and a mixed race exploration team sent to explore it is the main
theme of this story. The level of detail that Niven gets down to makes this story
worth it for any sci-fi fan. He covers everything from asteroid defense systems,
to how night and day occur, to how races would evolve. One of the funny antidotes
of this is that after he released this a bunch of MIT students proved that the
world would actually be unstable and over time crash into the sun. Niven released
a sequel to the book just to address this issue. To just mention the technology
in this book would be to rob it of half of its merit. The characters are also
extremely well written. Niven develops several complete alien races all of which
are very detailed and extremely believable. It is always impressive when an author
can get you to the point where you can anticipate a character's reaction when
that character isn't human, and the reaction is far from human. Unlike most hard
sci fi books I've read, I found the characters very nicely thought out and developed.
A lot of times, the characters are just there as a means of describing the very
cool idea a hard sci-fi author has. In Ringworld, Niven truly develops his characters
as thoroughly as he does the world itself. Finally, to top it all off, the plot
itself is nearly as good as the ideas and the characters. Once the characters
take off to explore the Ringworld, it is basically a fairly packed action adventure.
What is actually very subtle, but still impressive is how smoothly the plot flows
even while Niven is spending time describing and explaining the technical details
throughout the book. He does a wonderful job weaving the character development,
the plot progression and the technicalities into one seamless story line. Overall
this is one of my favorite hard sci-fi novels I've ever read. This is one of the
absolute classics for science fiction and is a must read. |
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