his is the fourth installment in Niven's long-running, award-winning series, which began with Ringworld (1970) and continued through The Ringworld Engineers (1980) and The Ringworld Throne (1996).
It's the year 2893, and Ringworld—the massive habitable ribbon wrapped around its sun like a slice of a Dyson sphere—is no longer a secret known only to the few sentients from Known Space who first discovered the artifact. Now the world is the focus of a large fleet of rival ships—human, kzin, trinocs and other species—who all want its treasures. This Fringe War among the newcomers threatens to destroy the very prize they are all after, in a hail of antimatter missiles.
On the strange planet itself—with its land area of more than 3 million Earths—Louis Wu, our protagonist from the start of the series, is facing his own problems. Newly rejuvenated by nanotech, the 500-year-old man has to deal with the powerful figure he recently installed as Ringworld's guardian. Tunesmith is an ex-Ghoul (one of the many hominid species on Ringworld) who has become a Protector: the ultra-intelligent, ultra-crafty, ultra-competent apotheosis of any race. Tunesmith has a plan to save Ringworld from invaders, and is using Wu as a tool—something Wu resents. Along with Wu are his Puppeteer comrade, the Hindmost; Acolyte, a kzin who is the son of an earlier character; and Hanuman, a smaller, less competent Protector derived from a separate species.
First the team is assigned by Tunesmith to capture a nearby armada ship named Long Shot, which features a radical new star drive. They succeed at this, but are taken prisoner afterward by humans who have landed on Ringworld. (Meanwhile, Tunesmith beavers ahead with his plans, Wu and his friends abandoned.) Roxanny Gauthier and her crew are intent on exploiting the knowledge possessed by Wu and his comrades, including a newly arrived native named Wembleth. But all of them, captors and captives alike, soon run afoul of yet another Protector, Proserpina, who is incredibly old, so old she remembers the building of Ringworld.
Now Wu's allegiances are really fragmented. Shall he cast in his lot with Roxanny, Proserpina or Tunesmith? Or even better, play his own hand?
The Protector of the hard SF
When Ringworld appeared in 1970, Larry Niven was practically all alone in carrying high the banner of what would, two decades later, be dubbed "radical hard SF" or "postmodern space opera." Today, the subgenre is in vogue, with at least a dozen practitioners making immense artistic and ideational strides. And here is Niven, offering his latest take on the modality he practically invented. How does the book compare, both to its ancestors in the series and to contemporaries?
Well, by now, the once-mind-blowing concept of Ringworld itself lacks the shock of the new. (Items such as nanotech, unknown in 1970, have been retrofitted nicely into the milieu. But it's a testament to Niven's speculative abilities that very little of his original conceptions need to be buttressed in this fashion.) The planet's engineering and societal details have all been marvelously and ingeniously worked out over the years (with help from dedicated readers). But it remains an impressive playground, still full of impressive vistas. The fact that the world now boasts a limited system of teleportation discs (courtesy of the Puppeteer Hindmost) means that Niven can send his characters bopping around to a wide variety of venues, instead of slogging across all the intervening terrain. This allows for slam-bang action in, under and around the habitat. And of course, Niven still has one big surprise saved up his sleeve for the book's climax.
What about character development? Acolyte is offstage too much to be a real presence. Roxanny is functional but not deep, as is Wembleth. But Louis Wu continues to unfold as a three-dimensional figure, dealing creatively with new conditions and facts in his life. At a pivotal point in the plot (and you'll know which point we mean when you get there), Niven's prose changes radically to emulate Wu's altered mode of thinking. That's just plain good writing. Niven's dialogue, as always, is crisp and functional, and his patented method of eliding action and deductive chains of logic—allowing the reader to fill in the blanks—continues to work wonders of economy.
As for the plot itself, it feels slightly less rich than earlier volumes. It's basically 1) grab the tools for a certain job; 2) avoid a few roadblocks; and 3) do the job. There's not much of a sense of exploration or revelation, as in the previous books. But given its streamlined nature, it delivers the goods.
Whether this is the last installment in a series whose pieces have come out roughly a decade apart remains to be seen. It feels kind of climactic to me. But I wouldn't yet count Niven out of the game he engineered. He's the Protector of the hard SF bloodline.
