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20 years have passed since Louis Wu’s escape from the Ringworld. Now, kidnapped by the mate of Nessus, their two-headed alien companion of the previous voyage, Louis and his catlike ally Chmeee are transported back to the Ringworld – now spinning dangerously off-center – in an attempt to discover the cause of the aberrant rotation before the world grazes its sun. Searching for clues to the design of the structure’s long-vanished original engineers, they encounter various hominid and other races before finding the barely feasible, wholly appalling solution hidden beneath the “Map of Mars.”

After finishing Larry Niven’s SF classic “Ringworld” last month, I moved on to the sequel, “The Ringworld Engineers.”

“Engineers” was written 10 years after the original and was mainly a result of the popularity of the first book and fan support. It picks up 20 years after Louis Wu’s escape from the Ringworld and attempts to address some of the engineering/technical issues introduced in the first novel.

The Hindmost (leader) of the Pierson’s Puppeteers has determined that the Ringworld has wobbled off-center from its sun. In a year or so, it will brush against the star and be destroyed. The Hindmost wants to salvage any available technology left on the Ringworld before this happens, so he kidnaps Louis Wu and Chmeee (Speaker-to-Animals) and forces them to once again explore the Ringworld looking for the rumored transmutation machine. With their lives depending on the results of their mission (the Puppeteer would leave them stranded on the world and save himself, if necessary), Louis and the Kzin begin their seach for the Ringworld’s repair center. Can they save the entire world and the trillions upon trillions of its inhabitants?

I enjoyed this book just as much as the first one. The sheer scale of the Ringworld and the technology required to keep it “running” are both mind-boggling and intriguing. Niven does a decent job of answering some of the questions raised in the earlier book (how does the meteor defense work? how did the superconductor-eating virus that caused the Fall of Cities come to the Ringworld? why are there “maps” of other known worlds in the Great Ocean?) along with describing a whole new set of problems and their engineering solutions. Of course, the biggest surprise (to me anyway) was who actually built the Ringworld and why (hint: my next read will be Niven’s “Protector.”).

This marks the end of my journeys to the Ringworld. There are two more books in the series (“The Ringworld Throne” and “Ringworld’s Children” but the reviews I’ve read say they’re really two half-books each that Niven really didn’t put as much effort into. So, I’m going to go back to some of Niven’s older “Known Space” works instead.