Ringworld is a 1970 science fiction novel by Larry Niven, set in his Known Space universe and considered a classic of science fiction literature. Ringworld tells the story of Louis Wu and his companions on a mission to the Ringworld, a rotating wheel artificial world, an alien construct in space 186million miles (299million kilometres) in diameter. Niven later added three sequel novels and then cowrote, with Edward M. Lerner, four prequels and a final sequel; the five latter novels constitute the Fleet of Worlds series. All the novels in the Ringworld series tie into numerous other books set in Known Space. Ringworld won the Nebula Award in 1970,[1] as well as both the Hugo Award and Locus Award in 1971.[2]
On the puppeteer home world, they are told that the expedition's goal is to investigate the Ringworld,[3] a gigantic artificial ring, to see if it poses any threat. The Ringworld is about one million miles (1.6 million km) wide and approximately the diameter of Earth's orbit (which makes it about 584.3 million miles or 940.4 million km in circumference), encircling a sunlike star. It rotates to provide artificial gravity 99.2% as strong as Earth's from centrifugal force. The Ringworld has a habitable, flat inner surface (equivalent in area to approximately three million Earths), a breathable atmosphere and a temperature optimal for humans. Night is provided by an inner ring of shadow squares which are connected to each other by thin, ultra-strong wire. When the crew completes their mission, they will be given the starship in which they travelled to the puppeteer home world; it is orders of magnitude faster than any possessed by humans or Kzinti.
When they reach the vicinity of the Ringworld, they are unable to contact anyone, and their ship, the Lying Bastard, is disabled by the Ringworld's automated meteoroid-defense system. The severely damaged vessel collides with a strand of shadow-square wire and crash-lands near a huge mountain, "Fist-of-God". As the fusion drive is destroyed, they are unable to launch back into space where they could use the undamaged faster-than-light hyperdrive to return home. They set out to find a way to get the Lying Bastard off the Ringworld.
Using their flycycles (similar to antigravity motorcycles), they try to reach the rim of the ring, where they hope to find some technology that will help them. It will take them months to cross the vast distance. When Teela develops "Plateau trance" (a kind of highway hypnosis), they are forced to land. On the ground, they encounter apparently primitive human natives who live in the crumbling ruins of a once-advanced city and think that the crew are the engineers who created the ring, and whom they revere as gods. The crew is attacked when they commit what the natives consider blasphemy (the misuse of certain technologies).
They continue their journey, during which Nessus reveals some Puppeteer secrets: they have conducted experiments on both humans (breeding for luck via Birthright Lotteries: all of Teela's ancestors for six generations were born from winning the lottery) and Kzinti (breeding for reduced aggression via the Man-Kzin wars, which the Kzinti always lost). Speaker's outrage forces Nessus to flee and follow them from a safe distance.
In a floating building over the ruins of a city, they find a map of the Ringworld and videos of its past civilization.
While flying through a giant storm caused by air escaping through a hole in the Ring floor due to a meteoroid impact, Teela becomes separated from the others. While Louis and Speaker search for her, their flycycles are caught by an automated police trap designed to catch traffic offenders. They are trapped in the basement of a floating police station. Nessus enters the station to try to help them.
In the station, they meet Halrloprillalar Hotrufan ("Prill"), a former crew member of a trading spaceship that collected plants and animals that couldn't adapt to the Ringworld. When her ship returned to the Ringworld the last time, they found that civilization had collapsed. The crew managed to enter the Ringworld, but some of them were killed and others suffered brain damage when the device that let them pass through the Ringworld floor failed. From her account, they learn that a mold was brought back from one of the original planets of the engineers by a spaceship like Prill's; it broke down the superconductors vital to the Ringworld civilization, dooming it.
Teela reaches the police station, accompanied by her new lover, a native "hero" called Seeker who helped her survive. Based on an insight gained from studying an ancient Ringworld map, Louis comes up with a plan to get home. Teela chooses to remain on the Ringworld with Seeker. Louis, formerly skeptical about breeding for luck, now wonders if the entire mission was caused by Teela's luck, to unite her with her true love and help her mature.
The party collects one end of the shadow-square wire that was snapped when the ship crashed. They travel back to their crashed ship in the floating police station, dragging the wire behind them. Louis threads it through the ship to tether it to the police station. He then takes the police station up to the summit of "Fist-of-God", the enormous mountain near their crash site. The mountain had not appeared on the Ringworld map, leading Louis to conclude that it is in fact the result of a meteoroid impact with the underside of the ring, which pushed the "mountain" up from the ring's floor and broke through. The top of the mountain, above the atmosphere, is therefore just a hole in the Ringworld floor. Louis drives the police station over the edge, dragging the Lying Bastard along with it. The Ringworld spins very quickly, so once the ship drops through the hole and clears the ring, they can use the ship's hyperdrive to get home. The book concludes with Louis and Speaker discussing returning to the Ringworld.
Reception
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Algis Budrys found Ringworld to be "excellent and entertaining... woven together very skillfully and proceed[ing] at a pretty smooth pace." While praising the novel generally, he faulted Niven for relying on inconsistencies regarding evolution in his extrapolations to support his fictional premises.[4]
Sam Jordison described Ringworld as "arguably one of the most influential science fiction novels of the past 50 years."[5]
Concepts reused
In addition to the two aliens, Niven includes a number of concepts from his other Known Space stories:
The puppeteers' General Products hulls, which are impervious to any known force except visible light and gravity, and for a long time thought indestructible by anything except antimatter. The Fleet of Worlds prequels reveal two other ways that the hulls can be destroyed.
The Slaver stasis field, which causes time in the enclosed volume to stand still; since time has for all intents and purposes ceased for an object in stasis, no harm can come to anything within the field.
The tasp, a device that remotely stimulates the pleasure center of the brain; it temporarily incapacitates its target and is extremely psychologically addictive. If the subject cannot, for whatever reason, get access to the device, intense depression can result, often to the point of madness or suicide. To use a tasp on someone from hiding, relieving them of their anger or depression, is called "making their day".
Boosterspice, a drug that restores or indefinitely preserves youth.
Scrith, the metal-like substance of which the Ringworld is built (and presumably the shadow squares and wires too), that has a tensile strength nearly equal in magnitude to the strong nuclear force making it similar to the concept of nuclear matter. This makes it an example of unobtainium. This is similar to the Pak Protector's "twing" used in other Larry Niven stories.
Impact armor, a flexible form of clothing that hardens instantly into a rigid form stronger than steel when rapidly deformed, similar to certain types of bulletproof vests.
The hyperspace shunt, an engine for faster-than-light travel, but slow enough (1light-year per 3days, ~122c) to keep the galaxy vast and unknown; the new "quantumII hyperspace shunt", developed by the Puppeteers but not yet released to humans, can cross a light-year in just 1.25minutes (~421000c).
Point-to-point teleportation at the speed of light is possible with transfer booths (on Earth) and stepping disks (on the Puppeteer homeworld); on Earth, people's sense of place and global position has been lost due to instantaneous travel; cities and cultures have blended together.
A theme well covered in the novel is that of cultures suffering technological breakdowns who then proceed to revert to belief systems along religious lines. Most Ringworld societies have forgotten that they live on an artificial structure, and now attribute the phenomena and origin of their world to divine power.
Errors
Artist's rendition
The opening chapter of the original paperback edition of Ringworld featured Louis Wu teleporting eastward around the Earth in order to extend his birthday. Moving in this direction would, in fact, make local time later rather than earlier, so that Wu would soon arrive in the early morning of the next calendar day. Niven was "endlessly teased" about this error, which he corrected in subsequent printings to show Wu teleporting westward.[6] In his dedication to The Ringworld Engineers, Niven wrote, "If you own a first paperback edition of Ringworld, it's the one with the mistakes in it. It's worth money."[7]
After the publication of Ringworld, many fans identified numerous engineering problems in the Ringworld as described in the novel. One major one was that the Ringworld, being a rigid structure, was not actually in orbit around the star it encircled and would eventually drift, ultimately colliding with its sun and disintegrating. This led MIT students attending the 1971 Worldcon to chant, "The Ringworld is unstable!" Niven wrote the 1980 sequel The Ringworld Engineers in part to address these engineering issues.
The second chapter refers to standard Earth gravity as 9.98m/s2 (or even gives the unit as m/s [sic]), while standard Earth gravity is 9.81m/s2. The fifth chapter refers to Nereid as Neptune's largest moon; the planet's largest moon is Triton.
Ringworld
Influence
"Ringworld" has become a generic term for such a structure, which is an example of what science fiction fans call a "Big Dumb Object", or more formally a megastructure. Other science fiction authors have devised their own variants of Niven's Ringworld, notably Iain M. Banks' Culture Orbitals, best described as miniature Ringworlds, and the titular ring-shaped Halo structures of the video game series Halo. Such a mini-Ringworld appears in Star Wars: The Book of Boba Fett, Season 1, Episode 5.[citation needed]. In the Paramount+ series Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 4, Episode 3, "In the Cradle of Vexilon", A Ringworld-like world is prominently featured.
Adaptations
Games
In 1984, a role-playing game based on this setting was produced by Chaosium named The Ringworld Roleplaying Game. Information from the RPG, along with notes composed by RPG author John Hewitt with Niven, was later used to form the "Bible" given to authors writing in the Man-Kzin Wars series. Niven himself recommended that Hewitt write one of the stories for the original two MKW books, although this never came to pass.[8]
The video game franchise Halo, created by Bungie, took inspiration from the book in the creation and development of its story around the eponymous rings, called Halos. These are physically similar to the Ringworld, however they are much smaller and do not encircle the star, instead orbiting stars or planets.
The open source video game Endless Sky features an alien species that creates ringworlds.
In 2017 Paradox Interactive added a DLC called "Utopia" to their game Stellaris,[9] allowing the player to restore or build ringworlds.
There have been many aborted attempts to adapt the novel to the screen.
In 2001, Larry Niven reported that a movie deal had been signed and was in the early planning stages.[11][12]
In 2004, the Sci-Fi Channel reported that it was developing a Ringworld miniseries.[13] The series never came to fruition.
In 2013, it was again announced by the channel, now rebranded as Syfy, that a miniseries of the novel was in development. This proposed 4-hour miniseries was being written by Michael R. Perry and would have been a co-production between MGM Television and Universal Cable Productions.[14]
In 2017, Amazon announced that Ringworld was one of three science fiction series it was developing for its streaming service. MGM were again listed as a co-producer.[15]
OEL manga
Tor/Seven Seas (same joint venture of Macmillan's Tor Books and Seven Seas Entertainment who also published the English-language translation of Afro Samurai) published a two-part original English-language manga adaptation of Ringworld, with the script written by Robert Mandell and the artwork by Sean Lam.[16]Ringworld: The Graphic Novel, Part One, covering the events of the novel up to the sunflower attack on Speaker, was released on July 8, 2014. Part Two was released on November 10, 2015.
In other works
Terry Pratchett intended his 1981 novel Strata to be a "piss-take/homage/satire" of Ringworld. Niven took it in good humor and enjoyed the work.[17]
"All in Fun" by Jerry Oltion, in Fantasy & Science Fiction, January 2009, mentions a faithful big-budget movie adaptation of Ringworld.
In Ernest Cline's 2011 novel Ready Player One, one of the sectors of the OASIS, the worldwide virtual reality network that is the novel's primary setting, is mentioned as being an adaptation of Ringworld.
The 1987 novel The Alexandrian Ring by William R. Forstchen takes place on a ring much like Niven's.
Episode 5 of The Book of Boba Fett features a station called Glavis that is shaped like a ring and features sun shades in much the same way that Niven's does.
Laurence van Cott Niven is an American science fiction writer. His 1970 novel Ringworld won the Hugo, Locus, Ditmar, and Nebula awards. With Jerry Pournelle he wrote The Mote in God's Eye (1974) and Lucifer's Hammer (1977). The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America gave him the 2015 Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award.
Known Space is the fictional setting of about a dozen science fiction novels and several collections of short stories by American writer Larry Niven. It has also become a shared universe in the spin-off Man-Kzin Wars anthologies. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB) catalogs all works set in the fictional universe that includes Known Space under the series name Tales of Known Space, which was the title of a 1975 collection of Niven's short stories. The first-published work in the series, which was Niven's first published piece, was "The Coldest Place", in the December 1964 issue of If magazine, edited by Frederik Pohl. This was the first-published work in the 1975 collection.
The Ringworld science fiction role-playing game was published by Chaosium in 1984, using the Basic Role-Playing system for its rules and Larry Niven's Ringworld novels as a setting.
The Kzinti are an alien cat-like species developed by Larry Niven in his Known Space series.
Pierson's Puppeteers, often known just as Puppeteers, are a fictional alien race from American author Larry Niven's Known Space books. The race first appeared in Niven’s novella Neutron Star.
Halo: The Flood is a military science fiction novel by William C. Dietz, based on the Halo series of video games and based specifically on the 2001 video game Halo: Combat Evolved, the first game in the series. The book was released in April 2003 and is the second Halo novel. Closely depicting the events of the game, The Flood begins with the escape of a human ship Pillar of Autumn from enemy aliens known as the Covenant. When the Pillar of Autumn unexpectedly discovers a massive artifact known as "Halo", the humans must square off against the Covenant and a second terrifying force in a desperate attempt to uncover Halo's secrets and stay alive. Though the book roughly follows the same events of the Xbox game, featuring identical dialogue, Dietz also describes events not seen by the game's protagonist, the super-soldier Master Chief.
Louis Gridley Wu, a fictional character, is the protagonist in the Ringworld series of books, written by Larry Niven.
A megastructure is a very large artificial object, although the limits of precisely how large vary considerably. Some apply the term to any especially large or tall building. Some sources define a megastructure as an enormous self-supporting artificial construct. The products of megascale engineering or astroengineering are megastructures.
The Ringworld Engineers is a 1979 science fiction novel by American writer Larry Niven. It is the first sequel to Niven's Ringworld and was nominated for both the Hugo and Locus Awards in 1981.
The Ringworld Throne is a science fiction novel by American writer Larry Niven, first published in 1996. It is the direct sequel to his previous work The Ringworld Engineers (1980). He wrote it as a replacement after being unable to finish his contracted novel The Ghost Ships, the sequel to The Integral Trees and The Smoke Ring.
The Man-Kzin Wars is a both the name of series of military science fiction anthologies as well as the name of the first book in the series. The short stories detail the eponymous conflicts between mankind and the Kzinti, set in Larry Niven's Known Space universe. However, Niven himself has written only a small number of the stories; most were written by other science fiction writers, as Niven opened this part of the Known Space to collaboration in the form of a shared universe. The cover art for the books in the series is created by Stephen Hickman.
"The Slaver Weapon" is the fourteenth episode of the first season of the American animated science fiction television series Star Trek: The Animated Series. It first aired on NBC on December 8, 1973, and was written by Larry Niven. It was based on his original short story "The Soft Weapon". This episode was expanded to become the first half of a full-length novel by science-fiction author Alan Dean Foster as Star Trek Log Ten.
"The Soft Weapon" is a science fiction short story by the American writer Larry Niven, set in his Known Space universe. It was first published in the February 1967 issue of If.
Betrayer of Worlds is a science fiction novel by American writers Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner, set in the Known Space series. It is a sequel to their previous novels Fleet of Worlds, Juggler of Worlds, and Destroyer of Worlds. Set 70 years before Ringworld, it features returning character Nessus, a young Louis Wu, and the rapidly evolving Gw'oth civilization posing a potential threat to the puppeteer Concordance.
A Bishop Ring is a type of hypothetical rotating space habitat originally proposed in 1997 by Forrest Bishop of the Institute of Atomic-Scale Engineering. The concept is a smaller scale version of the Banks Orbital, which itself is a smaller version of the Niven ring. Like other space habitat designs, the Bishop Ring would spin to produce artificial gravity by way of centrifugal force. The design differs from the classical designs produced in the 1970s by Gerard K. O'Neill and NASA in that it would use carbon nanotubes instead of steel, allowing the habitat to be built much larger. In the original proposal, the habitat would be approximately 1,000 km (620 mi) in radius and 500 km (310 mi) in width, containing 3 million square kilometers of living space, comparable to the area of Argentina or India.
Engineering on an astronomical scale, or astronomical engineering, i.e., engineering involving operations with whole astronomical objects, is a known theme in science fiction, as well as a matter of recent scientific research and exploratory engineering.
Fate of Worlds: Return From the Ringworld is a science fiction novel by American writers Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner. It was first published in hardcover and ebook editions by Tor Books in August 2012, with paperback and trade paperback editions following from the same publisher in July 2013 and June 2014, respectively. It is the fifth and final book in the Fleet of Worlds series, itself a subset of Niven's Known Space series.
A list of works by, or about, the American science fiction author Larry Niven.
Ringworld: Revenge of the Patriarch is a 1993 video game by Tsunami Games for DOS. It is based on Larry Niven's Ringworld novel series. A sequel, Return to Ringworld, was released in 1994.
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