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Title: Like a bowl of rehashed, 3-day-old fish, it's a stinkpot
Review: The Ringworld Throne is a 417 page rehash of the previous Ringworld novels. And, like a bowl of rehashed, three-day-old fish, it's a real stinkpot. It contains no new ideas. It has the same tired old plot theme: Against all odds, Louis Wu saves Ringworld. That only takes Niven about ten or twelve pages, counting all the times he repeats himself. The other four hundred odd pages are mostly devoted to poorly written, offbeat sexual encounters that contribute absolutely nothing to the story. Worse, they aren't even titillating. Those bad sex scenes were quite apropos, though, as Niven dedicated this book to Robert Heinlein (an insider joke?). In his dotage, Heinlein also resorted to writing offbeat, bad sex scenes instead of science fiction. This book would seem to cry out that Larry Niven was fresh out of money and fresh out of book ideas. Even so, he should be ashamed of himself.
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