Just Finished Reading The Ringworld Engineers by Larry Niven

When I read Ringworld, the first book in science fiction writer Larry Niven's self-titled series a few days ago, I thought that he had a very innovative idea with a fully habitable, massive constructed ring with familiar surface features like oceans, forests, deserts, mountains, and plains going around a Sol-like star at about the location of Earth's orbit: the possibilities were indeed intriguing.  Add to that his presentation of the interesting main characters Louis Wu, Speaker-to-Animals, Teela...and the most interesting, the bizarre-looking puppeteer creature Nessus, and you had the makings of an unforgettable reading adventure.  But as I wrote in my review of it, Niven allowed himself to get bogged down in the technicalities of his created scenario, making reading through much of the text awfully tedious.  In his 1978 follow-up book, The Ringworld Engineers...which I just finished reading...the author gets even worse in this regard as he tries to rectify "errors" concerning Ringworld's orbital stability from the first book that were brought out by some university geek students with apparently nothing better to do than to nitpick about the "science" in already clearly outlandish fiction.  Besides the overbearing technical mumbo jumbo throughout this second book, the characters were dispersed and less effective: no Teela until the very end, Louis Wu and Chmeee (the cat-like kzin formerly known as Speaker-to-Animals) are split apart for much of the novel, as well as Nessus' replacement puppeteer Hindmost, who had kidnapped Wu and Chmeee to discover for his race what he believed to be the secret of transmutation hidden somewhere on Ringworld.  Wu has a different agenda, which is to prevent the unstable Ringworld from going into its sun...to accomplish this he is on a quest to find the ring's repair center, where its original builders, the Pak Protectors, may have provided the answer of how to replenish its stabilizing rockets (which a later race had cannibalized for their own spaceship parts).  One aspect of the story I did find intriguing was that the Ringworld's designers had imprinted true scale-sized "maps' of various worlds on it, including those of Earth, Mars, and the kzin's home planet.  Overall, though, I was greatly disappointed in this sequel and don't yet know whether I'll ever be ready to go to the next volume in this series...