| Ringworld |
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| CATEGORIES ABOUT RINGWORLD | |
| 1970 novels | |
| hugo award winner for best novel | |
| nebula award winning works | |
| known space locations | |
| megastructures | |
| known space stories | |
| novels by larry niven | |
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''Ringworld'' is a Hugo and Nebula award-winning 1970 Science Fiction novel by Larry Niven , set in his Known Space universe. The work is widely considered one of the classics of science fiction literature. It is followed by three sequels, and it ties in to numerous other books in the Known Space universe. THE STORY In the year 2850, four explorers (two humans and two . The story is set in an extremely technologically advanced Universe , where instant Teleportation and indestructible spacecraft Hull s are a reality. The Protagonist Louis Wu is a retired adventurer who has just celebrated his 200th birthday. Despite his age, he is in near peak physical condition due to advanced medical technology and Boosterspice . He spends his birthday hopping ahead of the dateline from party to party across Earth , but secretly he has become bored with his lifestyle. Nessus is a Pierson's Puppeteer , a Species with advanced technology whose most notable trait is cowardice. Nessus has been sent to Earth to gather a small team to explore the Ringworld, the existence of which is unknown to most of the species in Known Space. Pierson's Puppeteers have a reputation as manipulators who use other species for jobs that might involve any risk. Speaker-to-Animals is a felinoid Kzin , a ferocious predator species which has unsuccessfully warred with humans in the distant past. He is recruited as the mission's security chief. His persona seems to be modeled on a Japanese Samurai warrior. Speaker-To-Animals said one thing more before he turned back to his table. "Louis Wu, I found your challenge verbose. In challenging a kzin, a simple scream of rage is sufficient. You scream and you leap." Finally, Teela Brown is a young human female whose role in the mission is not immediately clear. But Nessus doesn't do anything without a reason, and her usefulness becomes clear as the plot unfolds. When their ship crash lands on the Ringworld, the adventurers must set out to find a way to get back into space. They cross vast distances, witness strangely evolved Ecosystem s, and interact with some of the Ringworld's varied primitive Civilization s. They attempt to discover what caused the Ringworld's inhabitants to lose their technology, and puzzle over who created the Ringworld and why. CONCEPTS Niven includes a number of concepts from his other Known Space stories including:
The novel is also something of a send-up of Fundamentalist Religion ; the inhabitants of the Ringworld have lost their technological prowess and now attribute the phenomena of their world to divine power. The four explorers thus encounter priests, crowd scenes, fanaticism, and so on. RINGWORLD ENGINEERING The "Ringworld" is an artificial ring about one million miles wide and approximately the diameter of Earth's orbit (which makes it about 600 million miles in Circumference ), centered about a star, and rotating to provide an Earthlike Artificial Gravity , with a habitable flat inner surface equivalent in area to approximately three million Earth-sized planets. Walls 1000 miles tall along the edges keep in the atmosphere. The Ringworld could be regarded as a thin slice of a Dyson Sphere , with which it shares a number of characteristics. Niven himself thinks of the Ringworld as "an intermediate step between Dyson spheres and planets." "Ringworld", or more formally, "Niven ring", 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 Orbital s, best described as miniature Ringworlds, and the ring-shaped Halo structure of the Video Game Series Of The Same Name . The construction of a ringworld remains firmly in the area of speculation. If such a structure were built it could indeed provide a huge habitable inner surface, but the energy required to construct it and set it rotating is so massive (several centuries' worth of the total energy output from the Sun) that without as-yet unimagined energy sources becoming available, it is hard to see how this construction could ever be possible in a time frame acceptable to humans. Furthermore, the tensile strength of the material required would be on the same order as the Strong Nuclear Force (since the artificial gravity is the same as normal gravity, the structure is comparable with a bridge with an extremely long span); nothing even remotely strong enough is known to exist in nature. In Niven's ''Ringworld'' novels, the material—which he calls '' Scrith ''—is said to have been artificially produced through the Transmutation of matter into the required substance. This merely gives a name to the Sufficiently Advanced Technology that would have to be used. Additionally, a ringworld design requires active stabilization, because it is not in Inertia l Orbit . Though the ring itself is rotating at 1200 km/s (to approximate Earth gravity), the center of mass does not move at all. Large thrusters must be incorporated into the design to keep it centered about its star. This point gave Niven some difficulty after he published his first ''Ringworld'' novel; he was deluged with letters pointing out that "the Ringworld isn't stable" and dedicated the first sequel to a resolution of this problem. In the fourth book in the series, ''Ringworld's Children'', he creates backplot explanations for several of the imperfections in his original design of the Ringworld—and wholly glosses over others, such as that Louis Wu is worried about his dietary intake of Salt since the Ringworld possesses no Saline Ocean s, while in ''Ringworld's Children'', the Great Ocean is described as being saline. To provide an approximation of the day–night cycle common to planets, Niven's Ringworld was also provided with a separate ring of "shadow squares" linked together (by "shadow square wires") in a ring close to the star, rotating at slightly faster than the Ringworld's spin, providing a lot of Twilight , as well as a day-night cycle. These absorb a huge amount of sunlight energy, which is beamed to the Ringworld as its primary source of power. They are also not in inertial orbit, and must be actively stabilized as well. The shadow squares provide another of the imperfections "clarified" in ''Ringworld's Children'', as five shadow squares of greater length, orbiting Retrograde would provide a better day-night cycle, with less twilight. As revealed in Niven's sequel to the Ringworld, Ringworld Engineers, the "shadow squares" also provide a shielding to the inner surface of the Ringworld when someone in the control room uses a magnetic field embedded in the Ringworld to fire the meteor defense system. The "Control Room" is a vast maze of rooms contained in the hollow space under the "Map of Mars". In order to create the rarefied atmosphere on Mars , the "Map of Mars" is lifted 20 miles above the main Ringworld surface creating a 1,120,000,000 cubic mile cavity. The Control Room contains living space for thousands of Pak Protector s, as well as space to grow the "Tree-of-Life" plants to support this many Protectors. Other rooms in the cavity support such features as the "Meteor Defense System", which uses the superconductor grid embedded in the Scrith foundation material to manipulate the magnetic field of the Ringworld's sun to create a solar flare; it uses this to generate a powerful laser beam which is capable of destroying everything in its path. TRIVIA
SEQUELS AND ADAPTATIONS The novel ''Ringworld'' has been followed by three sequels, '' The Ringworld Engineers '' ( 1980 ), '' The Ringworld Throne '' ( 1996 ), and '' Ringworld's Children '' ( 2004 ). In the 1980s a Role-playing Game based on this setting was produced by Chaosium named RingworldRPG . Tsunami Games released two and "Return to Ringworld" in 1994 . In 2004, the might direct {Link without Title} . There have also been many abortive attempts to adapt the novel to the screen. The plot of the '' for the Microsoft Xbox also takes place on a ringworld-like structure. Given its dimensions (10,000 kilometers in diameter) it is more like Banks' Culture Orbitals than Niven's behemoth. Fans of the Halo series point more toward the sense of wonder generated by Niven's Ringworld, where the player is indeed a rather jaded human sent on a wild mission through the stars and involves a crash landing. The "Arch" Niven describes as inhabitants view the rest of the ring stretching into space is also featured in Halo. SEE ALSO EXTERNAL LINKS |
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