.jpg) Paperback first edition | |
| Author | Larry Niven |
|---|---|
| Illustrator | Dean Ellis |
| Language | English |
| Series | Ringworld storyline fromKnown Space |
| Genre | Science fiction |
| Publisher | Ballantine Books |
Publication date | October 1970 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | Print (hardcover,paperback),audiobook |
| Pages | 342 pages |
| Awards | Locus Award for Best Novel (1971) |
| ISBN | 0-345-02046-4 |
| Followed by | The Ringworld Engineers, 1979 |
Ringworld is a 1970science fiction novel byLarry Niven, set in hisKnown 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, an enormous rotating ring, an alien construct in space 186 million miles (299 million kilometres) in diameter. Niven later wrote three sequel novels and then cowrote, withEdward M. Lerner, four prequels and a final sequel; the five latter novels constitute theFleet of Worlds series. All the novels in theRingworld series tie into numerous other books set in Known Space.Ringworld won theNebula Award in 1970,[1] as well as both theHugo Award andLocus Award in 1971.[2]
OnEarth in 2850 AD, a boredLouis Wu is celebrating his 200th birthday. Despite his age, Louis is in perfect physical condition due to thelongevity drugboosterspice.Nessus, aPierson's puppeteer, offers him a mysterious job. Intrigued, Louis accepts. Nessus also recruits theKzinSpeaker-to-Animals andTeela Brown, a young human woman who becomes Louis's lover, for the rest of the ship's crew.
On the puppeteer home world (which is fleeing deadly radiation that will arrive in 20,000 years), they are told that their goal is to determine if the Ringworld, a gigantic artificial ring near the puppeteers' path, poses any threat to their migration. The Ringworld is about one million miles (1.6 million km) wide and approximately the diameter of Earth's orbit, encircling a sunlike star. It rotates to provide artificial gravity 99% as strong as Earth's fromcentrifugal force. It has a habitable 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, as payment they will be given the starship they used to travel to the puppeteer world; it is about 1000 times faster than any human or Kzinti ship.
When they reach the vicinity of the Ringworld, they are unable to contact anyone. Their ship, theLying Bastard, is disabled by an automatedmeteoroid-defense system. The vessel collides with a strand of shadow-square wire and crash-lands near a huge mountain, which is called "Fist-of-God" by the first natives they speak with. The fusion drive is destroyed, so they set out to find a way to get theLying Bastard off the Ringworld and use the undamaged hyperdrive to return home.
Using their flycycles, they set out for the rim of the ring, searching for technology to help them get home. They encounter primitive human natives who live in the ruins of a once-advanced city. The natives think that Louis is one of the engineers who created the ring, whom they revere as gods. The crew is attacked when Louis accidentally commits what the natives consider a blasphemy, but extricate themselves.
During their journey, Nessus reveals several puppeteer secrets. They initiated research into rendering the Kzinti extinct, considering them dangerous and useless, but found that the numerousMan-Kzin wars—which the Kzinti always lost—had greatly reduced their aggression: a very high percentage of Kzinti males were killed in each conflict, leaving more prudent and cautious survivors to breed. The puppeteers had also used Birthright Lotteries to try to breed humans for luck: all of Teela's ancestors for six generations are lottery winners. Speaker's outrage at learning the former forces Nessus to flee from the group and then follow from a safe distance.
While flying through a giant storm, Teela becomes separated from the others. When Louis and Speaker search for her, their flycycles are caught by an automated trap designed to catch speeders. They are brought to a floating police station. There, they meet Halrloprillalar Hotrufan ("Prill"), a former crew member of a ship that had brought back goods from worlds abandoned by the Ringworld builders. Nessus, using a tasp (a remote pleasure-giving device), conditions Prill into helping and joining them. When her ship returned to the Ringworld the last time, they discovered that civilization had collapsed. Louis surmises that a mold inadvertently brought back by a ship like Prill's mutated and broke down the superconductors vital to the Ringworld civilization, causing its fall.
Teela rejoins them, accompanied by her new lover, a traveling warrior named Seeker who protected her. Based on an insight gained from studying a 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 snapped after the collision with their ship and fell near their path, and drag it behind them. Louis threads it through theLying Bastard to tether it to the floating police station. "Fist-of-God", the enormous mountain near their crash site, was not on the Ringworld map, leading Louis to guess that it is the result of a meteoroid striking the underside of the ring, pushing the ring's floor up and finally breaking through. The top of the mountain, above the atmosphere, is therefore just a hole. Louis uses the police station to drag theLying Bastard up and into the hole. Once the ship falls through and clears the ring, they can use its hyperdrive to get home. The book concludes with Louis and Speaker discussing returning to the Ringworld.
Ringworld was met with immediate critical acclaim and received the "triple crown" of science fiction awards. It won theNebula Award forBest Novel in 1970,[3] theHugo Award for Best Novel in 1971,[4] and theLocus Award for Best Novel in 1971.[5]
Reviewers lauded the novel's grand scale and inventiveness.Algis Budrys foundRingworld to be "excellent and entertaining ... woven together very skillfully and proceed[ing] at a pretty smooth pace.,[6] Charles N. Brown called it "a first rate adventure story" and remarked that the central megastructure was "so gigantic that it is hard to visualize."[7] The book is frequently identified as a definitive example of the "Big Dumb Object" concept in science fiction.
Ringworld is recognized for its enduring influence. Writing forThe Guardian in 2010, Sam Jordison described it as "arguably one of the most influential science fiction novels of the past 50 years.[8] The concept of a habitable, ring-shaped megastructure has been cited as an inspiration for other works, most notably theHalo video game series, which features similar structures known as Halo Rings.[9]
In addition to the two aliens, Niven includes a number of concepts from his other Known Space stories:
The opening chapter of the original paperback edition ofRingworld 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.[10] In his dedication toThe Ringworld Engineers, Niven wrote, "If you own a first paperback edition ofRingworld, it's the one with the mistakes in it. It's worth money."[11]
After the publication ofRingworld, 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 ledMIT students attending the 1971Worldcon to chant, "The Ringworld is unstable!" Niven wrote the 1980 sequelThe Ringworld Engineers in part to address these engineering issues.
The second chapter refers to standard Earth gravity as9.98 m/s2 (or even gives the unit as m/s [sic]), whilestandard Earth gravity is9.81 m/s2. The fifth chapter refers to Nereid as Neptune's largest moon; the planet's largest moon is Triton.
"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 amegastructure. Other science fiction authors have devised their own variants of Niven's Ringworld, notablyIain M. Banks'Culture Orbitals, best described as miniature Ringworlds, and the titular ring-shapedHalo structures of the video game seriesHalo. Such a mini-Ringworld appears inStar Wars:The Book of Boba Fett, season 1, episode 5.[citation needed]. In the Paramount+ seriesStar Trek: Lower Decks season 4, episode 3, "In the Cradle of Vexilon", a Ringworld-like world is prominently featured.
In 1984, arole-playing game based on this setting was produced byChaosium namedThe 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 theMan-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.[12]
Tsunami Games released twoadventure games based onRingworld.Ringworld: Revenge of the Patriarch was released in 1992 andReturn to Ringworld in 1994. A third game,Ringworld: Within ARM's Reach, was also planned, but never completed.
The video game franchiseHalo, created byBungie, 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 gameEndless Sky features an alien species that creates ringworlds.
In 2017, Paradox Interactive added aDLC called "Utopia" to their gameStellaris,[13] allowing the player to restore or build ringworlds.
In 2021, Mobius Digital added aDLC called"Echoes of the Eye" to their gameOuter Wilds,[14][non-primary source needed] which allows the player to explore a hidden, abandoned ringworld and determine what happened to its inhabitants.
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.[15][16]
In 2004, theSci-Fi Channel reported that it was developing aRingworld miniseries.[17] The series never came to fruition.
In 2013, it was again announced by the channel, now rebranded asSyfy, that a miniseries of the novel was in development. This proposed four-hour miniseries was being written byMichael R. Perry and would have been a co-production betweenMGM Television andUniversal Cable Productions.[18]
In 2017,Amazon announced thatRingworld was one of three science fiction series it was developing forits streaming service. MGM were again listed as a co-producer.[19]
Tor/Seven Seas (same joint venture ofMacmillan'sTor Books andSeven Seas Entertainment who also published the English-language translation ofAfro Samurai) published a two-partoriginal English-language manga adaptation ofRingworld, with the script written byRobert Mandell and the artwork bySean Lam.[20]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.
Inspired by Larry Niven's excellent 1970 sci-fi novel Ringworld, the first Halo introduced a massive, mysterious ring-shaped world.
