Awesome tale of a well thought out world and creative technology, despite one-dimensional characters that always say and do the right thing. ( )

For such a famous novel, I was greatly disappointed to find it such a dreary, soulless, tear-out-your-eyes-with-boredom read that I can't even remember when was the last time I was so let down by a book. Any book. And I didn't even have any great expectations from it. I've read enough Sci Fi from that early era to realize and accept the prevalent limitations of the times in terms of plot, characterization, pacing, and much else that makes a novel. It was supposed to be flawed but enjoyable. Think Philip K Dick, or Clifford D Simak, or Olaf Stapledon. Authors who never wrote a great novel in terms of characters or plot, but always delivered enjoyable stories with memorable ideas or worlds.

Here the whole Ringworld thing could have been written as a thirty page short story. And even then it would have been just an average, forgettable affair centered around one blip of an idea. But now expand that to hundreds of pages following faceless characters doing clichéd stuff on a bland (but supposedly huge, as if that matters at all) planet and you've got yourself a very bored, very grumpy reader who will most certainly drop the damn thing just a couple of dozen pages through.

But suppose one reader reads through it all out of some sort of self-torturing discipline just to see if it gets better? And suppose aforementioned reader actually finds only more of the same tripe?

Then by God this reader has to warn the world against the folly of repeating his mistake. Do not read this book. Ringworld deserves only total and universal oblivion. Maybe ban it to save people's time for other books. Any other books. ( )

Terribly boring, bad characters, lame world except the grand idea, no good story. Terribly done female character (dumber than a really dumb child). Except the idea of a ring world and the pupeteer race, this book has nothing to offer. Why is it so famous? Beats me... ( )

Science fiction fun of the highest order. Ringworld is a great "what if?" concept novel about a group of characters on a mission to explore a massive ring-shaped world around a distant star.

The ideas present here are lots of fun, and the characters are solid and, if not exactly "believable" (we're dealing with aliens here, folks), they're at least true to personalities we readers can identify/sympathize with. In sci-fi, that's noteworthy. Too often you have characters doing inexplicable things for the sake of the plot. Not here.

I came to Larry Niven late, and I'm kind of glad. It's a wonderful treat for a reader to realize there's another author out there with a nice-sized back-catalog of good books to get through.
( )

For such a foundational book to the sci fi genre, this book really does not hold up well. The main character is utterly insufferable in his ego, and the only females characters are so one dimensional. While one of the women does serve a grander part of the lesson/plot, it is entirely outside of her agency, and for most of the book she (and the other woman) serve as little more than sexual fodder for the main character, and constantly portrayed as dumb and naive. I appreciate what Ringworld contributed to the sci fi genre, but it was really not worth my time reading. ( )