@ Dr. Azrael Tod:

Yeah, I don’t know. I just could not get behind any of the characters. They were just bland and uninteresting to me. Maybe it’s me…

The sequel had some interesting, character driven bits with the “dwarfs” – Smoke Ring inhabitants who were born with the standard human proportions. Everyone else in the novel is freakishly tall with elongated limbs and long, finger like toes toes. The Dwarfs were usually shunned because they were less adapted to life in the trees. But in the societies that still posses ancient space-suits, they are the only people who can operate them. Each one is basically the iron man of their tribe. It’s an interesting dynamic.

The ship-bound AI could have been incredibly interesting if it was not so impotent. It almost felt like a recurring villain in a weekly TV show who has to be a constant threat without ever being a real danger.

It honestly felt like Niven put so much effort into world building that he became terrified to write any kind of plot that would somehow alter or imbalance his vision. I kept waiting for the centuries old AI to start fucking shit up, and starting wars, but it was constantly outwitted by the country-bumpkin protagonists. :(

I didn’t read that book, but i find it strange that niven should lack story/characters that hard, since i found them to be pretty great in his known-space-stuff.
But then in those stuff the setting isn’t that strange (at least apart from the ringworld itself, which gets introduced pretty much at the end), so maybe he just had his priorities a bit off in this one.