You So Funny, Larry Niven

I saw a copy of Larry Niven's The Ringworld Engineers in a spinner rack at Half-Price Books for $1. And I picked it up and read a little bit and thought it was interesting, but it's Book 2 of Niven's Ringworld Series, which is comprised of five books in toto, and I suffer from the OCD common to comic book readers and English teachers, so I knew where this $1 book was going to lead me . . . and I put it back on the rack. 

But, of course, Larry Niven began to haunt me. And I remembered that I had purchased Lucifer's Hammer some time ago and never gotten more than a few pages into it, so I found that and began to read. And found it to my liking. Which made me go to the library website to see what Larry Nivens they were holding, and it turned out to be quite a bit--52 items listed, most of which actually were books by Larry Niven. And Ringworld was one of them. As were The Ringworld Engineers, The Ringworld Throne, Ringworld's Children, and Fate of Worlds: Return from the Ringworld (which, interestingly, is also the fifth book in Niven's Fleet of Worlds series). They also had Ringworld: The Graphic Novel (Part One)
by Robert Mandell, which I immediately put in a request for. Alas, they do not seem to have Part Two, which could present a problem for me. (Actually two problems. Because if Part One is so good that I want to read Part Two, I will have to buy Part Two in order to read it. But how can I buy Part Two and not buy Part One? So I'll just have to hope that Part One sucks, I suppose.)

But I didn't put in a request for any of the Ringworld novels, since I thought I'd use the graphic novel as a canary in the coal mine to see if further drilling would be necessary. However . . . I also found myself really wanting The Ringworld Engineers for $1. So I went back to Half-Price Books. And of course found that it was gone. What idiot wouldn't buy The Ringworld Engineers for a dollar, after all?

So I've been reading Lucifer's Hammer while I wait for Ringworld: The Graphic Novel (Part One) to arrive. Around page 100 it hit the tipping point and went from "this is kind of interesting" to "I am probably going to have to finish this." Which further spurred my interest in Larry Niven (that old OCD magic), so I went to his Wikipedia page and gave that a read. One of the Niven works mentioned therein an essay entitled "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" which contained various speculations on Superman's sex life and the ramifications thereof. And there was a link to that essay on one of the Wikipedia pages, so I read it (and laughed out loud several times--it's worth tracking down) before discovering that there was some controversy on the net about the essay's copyright being violated, which just goes to show that you can't even trust Wikipedia, I suppose. Somebody needs to read Roni Loren's "Blogger's Beware" post.