Betrayer of Worlds

I just finished Betrayer of Worlds, a novel by Larry Niven and Edward Lerner set about 200 years before Ringworld. Nessus the Puppeteer kidnaps a human from Known Space in the hopes that this human is bright enough to prevent a war between Puppeteers and a race of intelligent tube worms. Meanwhile, another Puppeteer schemes for power and will do anything to get it; and some Pak protectors make an appearance.

There were several things that bothered me about the story:

• The Puppeteer who wanted to attack Pak was nowhere near paranoid enough. Okay, he was insane, else he wouldn't have been there in the first place; that doesn't mean he couldn't have figured out what the Pak would do. 
• They manage to decipher a text from another species in an implausibly effective manner. Admittedly there's handwaving about "we looked for physics constants", but to get from "we don't even know their alphabet" to "look, here's how to build a fusion suppressor" just isn't something I could swallow.
• Selective editing of human memory.
• The villain was flat. "Power-hungry genius" pretty much sums him up. Again, there's a mention of an incident in his childhood to explain how he got that way, but that doesn't keep him from being cardboard.

The main thing that bothered me, though, is that at the end of the story, the protagonist basically hasn't changed. It wasn't quite as bad as "he woke up and realized it had all been a dream", but it was close.

Rating: check out from library