All that space elevator stuff gave me an itch to re-read Ringworld, which was a lot better than I expected (I hadn't read any Niven since high school, so I guess I had kind of low expectations, but he manages to write hard-science stories that still have entertaining characters. All I had remembered of his stories was the physics, it seems.) I then re-read The Ringworld Engineers, which was also pretty good, but now I'm halfway through The Ringworld Throne, which came out a few years ago and which I hadn't read yet, and so far, it kinda sucks. It suffers from "Baggins-itis" where it just spends all its time bogging you down with long dumb alien names and stupid terminology like "half-night" instead of "midnight". I find I'm no longer amused by trying to wade though that kind of fantasy-boilerplate crap.

It was weird re-reading these, because it's so obvious that modern Star Trek Klingons are based more on Niven's Kzinti than on the old series's Klingons. The last time I read them was before New Trek.

Neat: ray tracing Ringworld