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    Ringworld's Children
    Ringworld's Children
    Ringworld's Children
    Ebook300 pages5 hours

    Ringworld's Children

    By Larry Niven

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Welcome to a world like no other.

    The Ringworld: a landmark engineering achievement, a flat band 3 million times the surface area of Earth, encircling a distant star. Home to trillions of inhabitants, not all of which are human, and host to amazing technological wonders, the Ringworld is unique in all of the universe.

    Explorere Louis Wu, an Earth-born human who was part of the first expedition to Ringworld, becomes enmeshed in interplanetary and interspecies intrigue as war, and a powerful new weapon, threaten to tear the Ringworld apart forever. Now, the future of Ringworld lies in the actions of its children: Tunesmith, the Ghould protector; Acolyte, the exiled son of Speaker-to-Animals, and Wembleth, a strange Ringworld native with a mysterious past. All must play a dangerous in order to save Ringworld's population, and the stability of Ringworld itself.

    Blending awe-inspiring science with non-stop action and fun, Ringworld's Children, the fourth installment of the multiple award-winning saga, is the perfect introduction for readers new to this New York Times bestselling series, and long-time fans of Larry Niven's Ringworld.



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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateApr 1, 2007
    ISBN9781429914062
    Ringworld's Children
    Author

    Larry Niven

    Larry Niven is the award-winning author of the Ringworld series, along with many other science fiction masterpieces and fantasy including the Magic Goes Away series. His Beowulf's Children, co-authored with Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes, was a New York Times bestseller. He has received the Nebula Award, five Hugos, four Locus Awards, two Ditmars, the Prometheus, and the Robert A. Heinlein Award, among other honors. He lives in Chatsworth, California.

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    Reviews for Ringworld's Children

    4.5/5

    17 ratings6 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Delightful, many twists and turns! Very enjoyable! Wu returns to explore yet again.
    • 4/5
      Enjoyed it a whole lot more than I thought I would. Picks up right after Ringworld Throne. Lacks the inventiveness of the first two in the series but plays with many of the tools in the toolbox created by the previous books in the series in an entertaining way.
    • 4/5
      A fitting sequel to the Ringworld saga. If you haven't read at least Ringworld, you can't call yourself a science fiction fan.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
       Enjoyable, but not as good as the first volume
    • 3/5
      Apparently I missed The Ringworld Throne between reading Ringworld and Ringworld Engineers years and years ago and Ringworld's Children just recently. On the other hand, I don't appear to have missed much.In the author's notes at the beginning Niven talks about how much fun he's had with the Ringworld series, and how much subsequent novels have been influenced by the observations that fans have made about one aspect or another (Spill mountains, ramjets for wobble adjustment, number and spacing of shadow panels, etc.) While this installment of the Ringworld series includes all of those 'hard' elements, the story mainly follows the continuing adventures of Louis Wu on the Rignworld and how he and an assortment of suppporting Protectors, breeders and stranded outsiders are going to save the Ringworld from being casually destroyed by the ARM, the Kzin and others.The story moves along quickly enough and the technology, if not explored all that much, is still interesting. Unfortunately it kind of feels like a quick tour of other parts of the Ringworld with a short history of the Pak and some gratuitous sex & violence thrown in for good measure.If you're a Niven or a Ringworld fan, its worth a few hours reading. Otherwise, just give look a couple of books down the shelf and give the original Ringworld a try.
    • 4/5
      Ringworld's Children is a big improvement over The Ringworld Throne, but that's not saying much. The rapid pace and narrative format recall the original Ringworld, almost in the style of a comic book. We get a lot more insight into the Ringworld's history and builders, the luck of Teela Brown, and even Hindmost's motivations. And Niven manages to come up with several nice surprises along the way. Loius Wu continues as our cynical, inventive, take-it-as-it-comes protagonist, but we also get a couple of interesting new characters in Proserpina and Hanuman. Roxanny, the new human female character who survives the crash of an ARM warship on the Ringworld surface, is far from plausible. She seems to be inserted in the story primarily to give Louis someone new to have sex with and be injured by, although in the end Roxanny is also caught by the inescapable luck of Teela Brown. If you are looking for science fiction with plausible female characters, the Ringworld series is probably not the ticket. The bizarre obsession with interspecies sex that dominated so much of book 3 makes only a brief appearance here (in a totally unnecessary scene that runs something like this “Oh, Hi. You must be the giraffe people. Wanna f***?”).

    Book preview

    Ringworld's Children - Larry Niven

    CHAPTER 1

    Louis Wu

    Louis Wu woke aflame with new life, under a coffin lid.

    Displays glowed above his eyes. Bone composition, blood parameters, deep reflexes, urea and potassium and zinc balance: he could identify most of these. The damage listed wasn’t great. Punctures and gouges; fatigue; torn ligaments and extensive bruises; two ribs cracked; all relics of the battle with the Vampire protector, Bram. All healed now. The ’doc would have rebuilt him cell by cell. He’d felt dead and cooling when he climbed into the Intensive Care Cavity.

    Eighty-four days ago, the display said.

    Sixty-seven Ringworld days. Almost a falan; a falan was ten Ringworld rotations, seventy-five thirty-hour days. Twenty or thirty days should have healed him! But he’d known he was injured. What with all the general bruising from the battle with Bram, he hadn’t even noticed puncture wounds in his back.

    He’d been under repair for twice that long the first time he lay in this box. Then, his internal plumbing systems had been leaking into each other, and he’d been eleven years without the longevity complex called boosterspice. He’d been dying, and old.

    Testosterone was high, adrenalin high and rising.

    Louis pushed steadily up against the lid of the ’doc. The lid wouldn’t move faster, but his body craved action. He slid out and dropped to a stone floor, cold beneath his bare feet. Stone?

    He was naked. He stood in a vast cavern. Where was Needle?

    The interstellar spacecraft Hot Needle of Inquiry had been embedded in cooled magma when last he looked, and Carlos Wu’s experimental nanotech repair system had been in the crew quarters. Now its components sat within a nest of instruments and cables on a floor of cooled lava. The ’doc had been partly pulled apart. Everything was still running.

    Hubristic, massive, awesome: this was a protector’s work. Tunesmith, the Ghoul protector, must have been studying the ’doc while it healed Louis.

    Nearby, Hot Needle of Inquiry had been fileted like a finless fish. A slice of hull running almost nose to tail had been cut away, exposing housing, cargo space, docking for a Lander now destroyed, thruster plates, and the hyperdrive motor housing. More than half of the ship’s volume was tanks, and of course they’d been drained. The rim of the cut had been lined with copper or bronze, and cables in the metal led to instruments and a generator.

    The cut section had been pulled aside by massive machinery. The cut surface was rimmed in bronze laced with cables.

    The hyperdrive motor had run the length of the ship. Now it was laid out on the lava, in a nest of instruments. Tunesmith again?

    Louis wandered over to look.

    It had been repaired.

    Louis had stranded the Hindmost in Ringworld space by chopping the hyperdrive in half, twelve or thirteen years ago. Dismounted, it looked otherwise ready to take Needle between the stars at Quantum I speeds, three days to the light year.

    I could go home, Louis thought, tasting the notion.

    Where is everybody? Louis looked around him, feeling the adrenalin surge. He was starting to shiver with cold.

    He’d be almost two hundred and forty years old by now, wouldn’t he? Easy to lose track here. But the nano machines in Carlos Wu’s experimental ’doc had read his DNA and repaired everything down through the cell nuclei. Louis had done this dance before. His body thought it was just past puberty.

    Keep it cool, boy. Nobody’s challenged you yet.

    The spacecraft, the hull section, the ’doc, machines to move and repair these masses, and crude-looking instruments arrayed to study them, all formed a tight cluster within vaster spaces. The cavern was tremendous and nearly empty. Louis saw float plates like stacks of poker chips, and beyond those a tilted tower of tremendous toroids that ran through a gap in the floor right up to the roof. Cylinders lay near the gap, caged within more of Tunesmith’s machinery. They were bigger than Needle, each a little different from the others.

    He’d passed through this place once before. Louis looked up, knowing what to expect.

    Five or six miles up, he thought. The Map of Mars stood forty miles high. This level would be near the roof. Louis could make out its contours. Think of it as the back of a mask . . . the mask of a shield volcano the size of Ceres.

    Needle had smashed down through the crater in Mons Olympus, into the repair center that underlay the one-to-one scale Map of Mars. Teela Brown had trapped them there after she turned protector. She had moved the ship eight hundred miles through these corridors, then poured molten rock around them. They’d used stepping disks—the puppeteers’ instant transport system—to reach Teela. For all these years since, the ship had been trapped.

    Now Tunesmith had brought it back to the workstation under Mons Olympus.

    Louis knew Tunesmith, but not well. Louis had set a trap for Tunesmith, the Night Person, the breeder, and Tunesmith had become a protector. He’d watched Tunesmith fight Bram; and that was about all he knew of Tunesmith the protector. Now Tunesmith held Louis’s life in his hands, and it was Louis’s own doing.

    He’d be smarter than Louis. Trying to outguess a protector was . . . futz . . . was both silly and inevitable. No human culture has ever stopped trying to outguess God.

    So. Needle was an interstellar spacecraft, if someone could remount the hyperdrive. That tremendous tilted tower—forty miles of it if it reached all the way to the Repair Center floor—was a linear accelerator, a launching system. One day Tunesmith might need a spacecraft. Meanwhile he’d leave Needle gutted, because Louis Wu and the Hindmost might otherwise use it to run, and the protector couldn’t have that.

    Louis walked until Needle loomed: a hundred-and-ten-foot diameter cylinder with a flattened belly. Not much of the ship was missing. The hyperdrive, the ’doc, what else? The crew housing was a cross section, its floor eighty feet up. Under the floor, all of the kitchen and recycling systems were exposed.

    If he could climb that high, he’d have his breakfast, and clothing too. He didn’t see any obvious route. Maybe there was a stepping disk link? But he couldn’t guess where Tunesmith might place a stepping disk, or where it would

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