I suppose that at some point it has to happen. An author gets a bit too comfortable in his success, and perhaps a bit sloppy in his work. Maybe he thinks he’ll write a sequel because it is expected of him, and regardless of its quality, it will ride upon the success of the prior installments in the saga.

Is that the case with Larry Niven and the third installment of the Ringworld series, The Ringworld Throne? I don’t know. What I do know is that I found the book to be a huge letdown from the first two novels, the classic Ringworld and the worthy sequel The Ringworld Engineers .

The Ringworld itself is a colossal and mysterious construct. It is a world the size of millions of Earths that was built by an unknown species which orbits a star in a system cleared of all other planets, moons, and asteroids.

This time around, we find once again that all is not well on the Ringworld. A war is brewing between the various species which have evolved (or devolved) over time after the fall of civilization here. The factions: on one side, the bestial, animalistic vampires who use sex as a lure to trap their hominid prey; on the other, just about every other sentient species inhabiting the Ringworld.

Meanwhile, our protagonist in the series, Louis Wu, is dying, unless he allows the Hindmost, the alien who tricked him into coming to the Ringworld in the first place, to rejuvenate him. This will come with a price, of course, one Louis must decide if he is willing to pay.

And when a vampire turned Protector Louis quickly dubs Bram comes along and enslaves Wu, the Hindmost, and the Kzin named Acolyte, student to Louis Wu, the story turns in an entirely different direction.

And therein lies much of the problem with The Ringworld Throne. The novel isn’t sure what it wants to be, and there is a clear division between the two halves of the book. For the first two hundred pages, our main characters hardly make an appearance at all.

That would be fine if the author introduced new characters who grabbed our intention. But he doesn’t. Instead, the reader is left to plod along and wonder just where the story is going, beyond the endless and seemingly pointless references Niven makes to Rishathra, the practice of sex between different species.

The plot finally picks up a bit by the time you read 200 pages, and we start to see Louis Wu and the regulars at last. But by now it’s too late. I for one just wanted to get through the book, hoping against all hope that some semblance of meaning would come together at the end. Sadly, it never did.

I think it’s safe to say that you can skip this one and not really miss much in the saga. The latest release, Ringworld’s Children, just arrived in my mailbox a few days ago. Newly published in 2004, it has a brief overview of the previous installments in the series. The Ringworld Throne is not mentioned at all. After reading it, I can see why.




Recommended: No