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Ringworld's Children

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Ringworld's Children

By: Larry Niven
Narrated by: Barrett Whitener
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About this listen

The Ringworld is a landmark engineering achievement, a flat band 3-million-times the surface area of Earth, encircling a distant star. Home to trillions of inhabitants, not all of which are human, and host to amazing technological wonders, the Ringworld is unique in all of the universe.

Explorer Louis Wu, an Earth-born human who was part of the first expedition to Ringworld, becomes enmeshed in interplanetary and interspecies intrigue as war, and a powerful new weapon, threatens to tear the Ringworld apart forever. Now, the future of Ringworld lies in the actions of its children: Tunesmith, the Ghould protector; Acolyte, the exiled son of Speaker-to-Animals, and Wembleth, a strange Ringworld native with a mysterious past. All must play a dangerous role in order to save Ringworld's population, and the stability of Ringworld itself.

Blending awe-inspiring science with non-stop action and fun, Ringworld's Children, the fourth installment of the multiple-award-winning saga, is the perfect introduction for listeners new to this New York Times best-selling series and for long-time fans of Larry Niven's Ringworld.

©2004 Larry Niven (P)2004 Blackstone Audiobooks Adventure Fiction Hard Science Fiction Science Fiction
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Great novel, though I would prefer reading it rather than listening to Whitener's narration of it. If the first few titles of the series had been narrated by Whitener I wouldn't have have been this far into it. It's not just that most of the entities' pronunciations are different from what Niven intended and previous narrators had used, but Whitener also changes the characters' personalities completely and their tones seem out of context at times. You'd think the franchise would insist that the narrator listen to previous titles and at least attempt some level of continuity. On Whitener specifically, the whole narration is almost monotonic, making it easy to lose interest, and often difficult to discern which character is being represented in a conversation.

Great sequel butchered by narrator, Whitener.

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The narrator really destroys the experience with the poor choice of character voice. Acolyte should sound like a fearsome warrior, but instead he is given the voice of a dullard, thus ruining the already poor story.

A substandard story with subpar narrating

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The story itself is okay if short but the choice of narration is dull, boring and inconsistent. Acolyte sounds like a buffoon when he should be fierce. All names are butchered and many words are distorted, Hot needle of In-choir-ee was perhaps one of the most grating.

Bad narration

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