Just Finished Reading Ringworld by Larry Niven

Ringworld , published in 1970, is the first novel of the same-titled science fiction series by Larry Niven, whose 1967 short story Handicap I recently reviewed.  As is the case with other sci-fi authors like Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and Cordwainer Smith, Niven has a tendency to loosely connect his tales together in his own universe...which here he calls the Known Universe.  Ringworld takes place around 2850 AD as Nessus, a highly intelligent being called a Pierson's puppeteer (possessing two one-eyed, stalked heads with the brain in its torso) recruits the three other members of his race's proposed exploratory expedition to Ringworld, which was recently discovered and suspected of being a possible threat.  In the party are the novel's protagonist human Louis Wu (200 years old with the help of a rejuvenating weed), Teela Brown, a young woman picked for her capacity for good luck (and who becomes romantically involved with Wu), and Speaker-to-Animals, a kzin (reminding me a bit of Star Trek's Klingon character Worf) who represents the alien predatory and warlike feline race which had been engaged in a series of wars against Earth.  The unlikely crew take off from Nessus' home world with the promise of his advanced faster-than-light-speed spaceship's technology to become available to both humans and the kzin after their mission to Ringworld.  As for Ringworld, imagine the Earth's entire orbit around the sun being replaced by a specially engineered metallic ring upon which the gravity is essentially the same as our home planet, as well as its atmosphere...you have an unbelievably large area to explore!  The explorers find upon approaching it that they have been mistaken by the automatic defense system there for a meteorite and are fired upon, disabled, and soft-crash on the surface...and then the adventures really begin in earnest.  Along the way Nessus ends up revealing to the others the great extent to which his own "people" have manipulated the development of humanity and the kzin...the other three are quickly resentful and distrusting of him henceforth.  I am neither a scientist nor an engineer, and much of Larry Niven's description of the processes and technology of physics and space rocketry left me far behind...maybe you'll have better luck.  It reminded me of when I read Herman Melville's 1851 novel Moby Dick...in certain parts of it he'd get bogged down in the technicalities of that era's whaling ships and methods: not much in the area of reference points for me to draw upon.  Still, once I got past those gobbledygook sections I was able to easily follow the story's flow...I liked Ringworld and plan to continue on with the series, the main reason being Niven's great character development...