Ringworld Throne by Larry Niven

This book differs from the two preceding it by using a pair of plots. One plot, the first half of the book, is all sex and violence as a sex-solidified-coalition attempts to take down a vampire infestation that grew when Louis Wu boiled the sea and blocked out the sun. The second half of the book is Louis Wu picking a new head protector for the ringworld through pseudo-orchestrating a big protector fight. Niven attempts to tie these two together by having the goblins carry off a spoil from the vampire eviction that then seems to inform a part of the later protector duel. But this is thin, very thin, and it’s basically a fixup novel, composed of two short stories poorly linked together.

Two-tenths of night passed this way, I think. Then the wind swung around. I didn't notice right away: the vampire scent was gone, but we had our own smells by then. But Chit saw —"
Chit: "Vampires trying to creep upon us across the ice. They're not much darker than snow themselves."
Kay: "The wind went gusty and stayed that way. They'd get a whiff of us and look around, and we were conspicuous, I guess."
Paroom: "Ten tens of them."
Kay: "Toward morning they stopped coming entirely. We left a carpet of vampires dead in the pass."
Twuk: "There's nothing under the Arch like the stink of a hundred vampire corpses. They do avoid their own dead."
Vala: "Might keep it in mind."
Twuk: "We collected our cargo and our bolts and bullets at halfdawn. Vala, I think we *saw* the Shadow Nest."
"Tell it."
"Warvia?"
The Red woman didn't look down. "From spin the light of day flowed toward us while we were still in dark. We were exhausted, but I was at my post, here on the cannon tower. The clouds parted. I saw two black lines. Hard to tell how far, hard to tell how high, but a black plate with structures above, high in the center and glittering silver, and its black shadow parallel below."

Niven’s sparse writing style still comes off like a mystery novel at times. Implying heavily but making sure not to be too explicit. Jokes about William Shatner-speak would apply here, I think, but I’m not a trekkie so I don’t really know for sure. An appropriate analogy for the style is probably jump cuts between short scenes. For instance, when the vampires first attack, that is a tense scene: there are people disappearing into the night; blasts of light from the cannons; the confusing smells of alcohol, pheromones, and sulphur; an unsteady alliance (not yet sealed with sex) trying to not fall apart; a wife cheating on her husband; low ammo, confusion, death and destruction. And these hyper-jump-cuts work great. They give me a sense of the fog of war, of the desperation and frustration of this night-fight.

In every direction she could see pale hominid shapes. So little detail. You had to imagine what they looked like; and with the scent tickling your hindbrain, you saw glorious fantasies.
They were closer. Why wasn't she hearing guns? She'd reached Anthrantillin's cruiser. Up onto the running board. "Hello? Anth?"
The payload shell was empty.
She used the trick lock and climbed into the payload shell.
All gone. No damage, no trace of a fight; just gone.
Soak a towel. Then: the cannon. The vampires were bunching nicely to spin. Bunching around Anth or Forn or Himp, somewhere down there? It didn't matter. She fired and saw half of them fall.

Yet, Niven seems to really like these jump cuts and uses them throughout the book, in the ruminative and relaxing sections as well as the crazy battle scenes. As this tendency is embraced by multiple types of scenes, all of that conveyed desperation is lost because the jump cuts become normal.

Vala said, "The Grass Giants have crossbows. Why are they worried? Crossbows won't have the reach of guns, but they'll outreach vampire scent." The wagonmasters looked at each other. Anth said, "Grass eaters —"
"Oh, no. Elsewhere they're considered scary fighters," Whand said.
Nobody answered.

This novel explores the ringworld technology less than the prior two, but really starts to get into the ringworld ecology. Humanoid protector-breeders evolved over thousands of years to fill the niches in the environment left empty by the original protectors. Separate species fulfill various aspects of environmental health like the goblins eating the dead of the other species. That’s really what this book is about, Louis learning about the various bipedal species, sexing them, watching a group of various species take on the vampire problem, and then using his knowledge to pick an appropriate head protector. Any theme is going to be loose in this adventure tale, but I think a sense of putting the whole ahead of the parts is probably the strongest theme.

At some point the negotiations had become a swimming party.
A sword could be used on oneself. Just turn it around. Jump from the top of a rock?

So, again, I felt like some mindless adventure with an interesting idea or two, and this fit the bill well. A frantic pace to the writing turned pages, but nothing really burned my brain up after reading. The two big faults—the writing being too frantic and the book being an awkward mashup of two stories—really detracted for me. At least he tries to use the sex constructively in the novel, but it doesn't really come off that interestingly. I’ll read the fourth because, well, there’s only one book left to read. But if there were four or five more books in the series, I would stop here. The tight focus of the first novel is entirely gone, and I feel that this writing style matches best with a tightly focused book.

"Louis Wu, react."
Louis answered. "You've started something you can't stop. You've attacked two war fleets, three if you count the Fleet of Worlds. Political structures get old and die, Bram, but information never gets lost anymore. Storage is too good. Somebody will be testing the Ringworld defenses for as long as there are protons."