“ When we ask for any member of the Brandt family, every phone in South America rings.”

That sounds like the computer had a bad solution to “find a Brandt.”

The comment with the request to find this reference had me thinking it would be a single phone number misconfigured to call a large population.

It actually had nothing to do with a computer!

It was the luck of either Teela Brown, or Mr. Brandt depending on how you read the genetic trait of luck.

If you haven't read ringworld, you should. It's really quite good.

But stop before you get to ringworld's children or whatever it's called. Niven's furry fetish is in full force later in the series.

I enjoy the Ringworld series but the was Teela Brown is talked about/portrayed (really women in general in the book) is pretty gross on a re-read (I originally read them very young and most of it went over my head or I just wasn’t paying enough attention).

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read it, I have similar (though it no where near as bad IMHO) thoughts on The Wheel of Time portrayal of women though Ringworld is worse. I still love WoT but I do give a disclaimer when recommending it.

Furry fetish you say? Stop you say? Hmm…

Yeah, he was less focused on the specifics earlier. 51 mentions of "rishathra" in the Ringworld Engineers.

That's the one. The entire plot is just two fuzzy red people fucking their way across the ring. Not great.

Also he fell into the trap that many science fiction authors do of listening to the critics who complained about the math not working. Pretty much every book after the first in that series was just a way for him to try to make his made up world work in real life. Not great.

Neutron Star is phenomenal though.