RINGWORLD

What do a puppeteer, a kzin, and two humans have in common? They are going to Ringworld! You thought I was going to say Disney World, didn’t you? This is the premise of Larry Niven’s epic novel about an artificial ring, one million miles wide, encircling a sun-like star. I haven’t read a space exploratory novel this good since Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous With Rama. Niven’s book was so good it won the trifecta of the sci-fi world: 1970 Hugo, 1971 Nebula, and Locus Awards. To this reader, Mr. Niven’s salient point is in his ability to use specialized jargon that the reader easily understands, while still inventing new ingenious technology, such as the quantum II hyperdrive spaceship that speeds along at one light year every one and a quarter minutes! And can Niven describe alien life forms? Damn straight! How about a Garfield the cat look alike (known as a kzin) that is eight foot tall and 500 pounds with a nasty disposition? What about a puppeteer that has a tripod body with two heads, more intelligence than man and when frightened, rolls himself into a ball? I also think that Star Trek may have preempted the transporter idea from Niven’s transfer booth. These are a few of the amazing concepts and characters in this recommended novel.

At the galactic core, supernovas cause a blast that will wipe out Earth and known space in 20,000 years. The frightened puppeteers have already left, heading towards the Lesser Clouds of Magellan looking for a new home. Our protagonist, Louis Wu is celebrating his 200th birthday (he looks 20) party on earth. A large kzin, known as Speaker-to-Animals is there; sexy Teela Brown is there; and, who pops out of a transfer booth? Nessus, an insane puppeteer who wants to talk deal with these three party goers. Nessus asks Louis, Speaker, and Teela to join him on an exploratory mission 200 light years away. If they agree, their reward will be the quantum hyperdrive ship and its blueprints. The puppeteer will not tell them where they are going until they are on the way. Louis wants to go because he is bored and ready for adventure; Teela wants to go because she is in love with Louis; and, the Speaker wants to go because he wants to steal the ship for his people so they will have a spaceship advantage over the humans. The kzin have a long history of losing wars against the humans from Earth and were anxious to get out of their submissive morbidity.

As they board spaceship Long Shot, Speaker makes a failed attempt to steal the ship. The puppeteer has a secret weapon called a tasp that induces a current in the pleasure center of the brain. Nessus, the two headed tripod says to the Speaker: "You understand that I will use the tasp every time you force me to. I will use it if you attempt to use violence too often, or if you startle me too much; you will soon become dependent upon the tasp; if you kill me, you will still be ignobly bound by the tasp itself." "Very astute," said Speaker. "Brilliantly unorthodox tactics. I will trouble you no more." Nessus, being a puppeteer, was inherently a coward, and thus needed every mental advantage to keep a vicious animal like Speaker from tearing him apart. After that, off they go to meet the puppeteer fleet in the Clouds of Magellan. There they learn their mission: to explore the mysterious ring to see if it will support life. After getting nebulous mission instructions relayed from the Hindmost, the leader of the puppeteers, the four board the Lying Bastard and head for the baffling ring. This is where Niven’s story gets real astronomical and unnerving. You know what this means, don’t you? Well, I wet your whistle and now you have to grab a copy of this wondrous novel and find out what happens.

I like Niven’s mix of real science with his science and neologisms that seem like logical terms. He does a good job explaining Kemplerer rosette: a gravitational system of heavier and lighter bodies orbiting in a regular repeating pattern around a common barycenter. Got it? Starseeds seemed real, but are not. They are space traveling creatures used by Outsiders to plant life on planets. Flying cycles and floating police stations are purely figments of Mr. Niven’s mind. What’s to come on Ringworld is stated by Nessus to Louis: ”This place is, is unsafe. Strange storms and badly programmed machinery and sunflower fields and unpredictable natives all threaten our lives.” Really? Buckle your seat belts and enjoy.

RATING: 5 out of 5 stars

Comment: According to Wikipedia: “After the publication of Ringworld many fans identified numerous engineering problems in the Ringworld as described in the novel. One major problem was that the Ringworld, being a rigid structure, was not actually in orbit around the star it encircled and would eventually drift, resulting in the entire structure colliding with its sun and disintegrating. This led MIT students attending the 1971 Worldcon to chant, "The Ringworld is unstable! The Ringworld is unstable!" The phrase made its way into a filk song, "Give Me That Pro, Larry Niven." Niven wrote the 1980 sequel The Ringworld Engineers in part to address these engineering issues.”

If you like Ringworld, you can gorge on its three sequels and four prequels. As much as I enjoyed the novel, I don’t think I can spend that much time on the same subject. I might read the second novel, only to see how Niven resolved the engineering issues.

What does Larry Niven say about Ringworld? goodreads quotes Niven as follows: “I myself have dreamed up a structure intermediate between Dyson spheres and planets. Build a ring 93 million miles in radius - one Earth orbit - around the sun. If we have the mass of Jupiter to work with, and if we make it a thousand miles wide, we get a thickness of about a thousand feet for the base.
And it has advantages. The Ringworld will be much sturdier than a Dyson sphere. We can spin it on its axis for gravity. A rotation speed of 770 m/s will give us a gravity of one Earth normal. We wouldn't even need to roof it over. Place walls one thousand miles high at each edge, facing the sun. Very little air will leak over the edges. Lord knows the thing is roomy enough. With three million times the surface area of the Earth, it will be some time before anyone complains of the crowding.”  

Finally, Niven explains why Speaker tried to steal the puppeteer’s spaceship: “For two hundred and fifty years the kzinti had not attacked human space. They had nothing to attack with. For two hundred and fifty years men had not attacked the kzinti worlds; and no kzin could understand it. Men confused them terribly.”