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Ringworld

Cover of first edition (paperback)
Author	Larry Niven
Language	English
Series	Ringworld, Known Space
Genre	Science fiction novel
Publisher	Ballantine Books
Publication date	1970
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
ISBN	0-345-02046-4
OCLC	28071649
Followed by	The Ringworld Engineers, 1980

Ringworld is a Hugo, Nebula, and Locus award-winning 1970 science fiction novel by Larry Niven, set in his Known Space universe and considered a classic of science fiction literature. It is followed by three sequels, and ties into numerous other books set in Known Space. Ringworld won the Hugo Award in 1970, as well as both the Nebula and Locus Awards in 1971.

Plot summary

The novel opens in 2855 with Louis Gridley Wu stepping out of a transfer booth, a teleportation kiosk, in Beirut, thus entering yet another time zone. Louis, after having escaped the festivities of his own 200th birthday, is now bar-hopping the world, jumping west and always staying behind the local midnight in order to extend his birthday as long as possible.

Despite his age, Louis turns out to be in perfect physical condition owing to a combination of advanced medical technology and boosterspice, a drug that extends human life. However, though healthy, rich and intelligent, it is becoming clear Louis is utterly bored. Having lived for two centuries, he has seen it all many times over and people in general are getting on his nerves. Between transfer booths he considers another sabbatical — a trip to and beyond the reaches of Known Space, all alone in a single ship for a year or more, until he begins to yearn for people's company again — when all of a sudden the transfer booth materializes him in a sunlit hotel room, rather than the nocturnal Seville he had set its control for.

Facing him is an alien with three legs, no arms and two heads. The alien introduces himself as Nessus and Louis recognizes him for a Pierson's Puppeteer, a species that had the most advanced technology in Known Space but vanished from the region before Louis was born. Nessus has been ordered to hire three mercenaries to do the things he himself dare not. Louis is on top of his list of candidates.

With Nessus being secretive about the mission, Louis is reluctant to join, but when the Puppeteer eventually shows Louis a blurry picture of a distant star with a ring around it, the bored Louis immediately signs up: this ring turns out to be the Ringworld, an artificial circular strip of world with spin for surface gravity, orbiting the star. The Puppeteers, fleeing from the galaxy, have spotted this artifact in their path; being cowards, the sheer power of whatever has created such a structure frightens them profoundly. Hence, Nessus' mission is to assemble a team, visit the Ringworld and see whether it poses a threat to his species. Payment to the expedition's members will be the Long Shot, the extremely fast ship depicted in the story "At the Core", that Beowulf Shaeffer rode to the galactic core and back, centuries earlier.

Eventually the team is assembled. The third member, Speaker-to-Animals (Speaker) is a Kzin, a ferocious felinoid predator species which has, in the recent past, fought a series of brutal wars with humanity, eventually losing every time because of a tendency to attack before being quite ready. The Kzin, a translator, is a low-ranking official at the Kzinti embassy to Earth. He reckons obtaining the Long Shot for the Kzinti Empire is enough of an achievement to give him a name ("Speaker-to-Animals" being a literal description rather than a name), and therefore signs on too, as the expedition's security chief.

Finally, Teela Brown is a young human female whose role in the mission is not immediately clear. But Puppeteers do not do anything without a very good reason, and her significance is revealed as the plot unfolds. She is the result of a secret Puppeteer experiment in selective breeding for luck among humans, which generally helps her and her descendants. The Puppeteers reckon her luck will increase the probability of a successful mission, however it soon turns out that Teela's personal luck and the luck of the expedition seldom go hand in hand.

As they approach their target in their ship, Lying Bastard, the Ringworld turns out to be an awesome sight: a huge, circular strip of land, teeming with life and with entire oceans bigger than Earth. Between the Ringworld and its star, a series of squares (dubbed shadow squares by the expedition) are suspended in another ring, orbiting the sun faster than the Ringworld itself, thus providing the artificial world below with a day/night cycle. However, when their ship is hit by a powerful, automated meteor defense system and then strikes one of the near-invisible shadow-square wires, the severely damaged vessel crash-lands on the Ringworld . They now have to set out to find a way to get back into space, as well as fulfilling their original mission. They cross vast distances, witness strangely evolved ecosystems originating from many different planets, including Earth, and interact with some of the Ringworld's varied primitive civilizations. They attempt to discover what caused the Ringworld's inhabitants to lose their technology, and puzzle over who created the Ringworld and why.

Concepts

In addition to the two aliens, Niven includes a number of concepts from his other Known Space stories:

• The Puppeteer's General Products hulls, which are impervious to any known force except visible light and gravity, and cannot be destroyed by anything except antimatter.

• 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 in its field.

• The idea that luck is a genetic trait that can be favored by selective breeding.

• The tasp, a device that induces a state of extreme pleasure in the pleasure center of the brain at the push of a button; it is used as a method of debilitating its target and is extremely 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.

• Boosterspice, a drug that extends human life to near immortality.

• 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.

• Hyperdrives allow for faster-than-light travel, but at a rate slow enough (1 light year per 3 days, ~125c) to keep the galaxy vast and unknown; the new Quantum II Hyperdrive, developed by the Puppeteers but not yet released to humans, can cross a light year in just 1.25 minutes (~425,000c).

• Near instant point-to-point teleportation 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 they live on an artificial structure, and now attribute the phenomena of their world to divine power.

Science error in first edition

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 Louis would 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 Louis teleporting westward.

In his dedication to the 1980 sequel 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."

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), encircling a Sol-type star. It rotates, providing an artificial gravity that is 99.2% as strong as Earth's gravity through the action of centrifugal force. Ringworld has a habitable flat inner surface equivalent in area to approximately three million Earth-sized planets. The majority of the surface is land interspersed with shallow, freshwater seas. On opposite sides of the ring are two large deep saltwater oceans, placed in counterbalance to one another. One of the large oceans, known as the "Great Ocean", contains one-to-one maps of all of the inhabited worlds of known space. The "Other Ocean" has many maps of a single world: the Pak Homeworld. Walls 1,000 miles tall along the edges retain the atmosphere. The Ringworld could be regarded as a thin, rotating 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."

Source of material

The Ringworld is described as having a mass approximately equal to the sum of all the planets in our solar system. The adventurers surmised that its construction consumed literally all the planets in that original system, down to the last asteroid and/or moon, as the Ringworld star has no other bodies in orbit. In Ringworld's Children it is additionally explained that it took the reaction mass of roughly 20 Jupiter masses to spin up the ring; thus either the combined mass of the planets of the original system was that much larger than our solar system's, or there was other source material.

Scrith

Scrith, usually written italicized as scrith, forms the walls and floor of the Ringworld.

Scrith is a milky-gray translucent, nearly frictionless material. The fairly thin layer of scrith that forms the floor of the Ringworld blocks the passage of 40% of the neutrinos that encounter it, equivalent to almost a light year of lead. It also absorbs nearly 100% of all other radiation and subatomic particles and rapidly dissipates heat. The tensile strength of scrith is similar to the strong nuclear force, with the Ringworld foundation only about 30m (100 ft) deep. Also, it is transparent to large magnetic fields.

Due to its enormous strength, scrith is impervious to most weapons. A body (such as a comet or asteroid) striking with enough kinetic energy may be able to deform the Ringworld floor and punch a hole. The Ringworld engineers used a device, called the cziltang brone in their language, to pass from the vacuum of their spaceports right through the scrith to the habitable surface of the Ringworld.

The physical composition of scrith is unclear, but it appears to share some of the properties of a metal (albeit in a greatly exaggerated form): for instance, the high tensile strength, the ability to conduct heat and the ability to retain an induced magnetic field. Scrith is said by one inhabitant to have been artificially produced through the transmutation of matter, though this is later thought to have been a lie.

Variations

"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 Orbitals, best described as miniature Ringworlds, and the ring-shaped Halo structure of the video game Halo.

Technical realities

Construction issues

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, set it rotating, and keep it stabilized is so significant (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.

Tension on material

The tensile strength of the material required would be on the same order as the strong nuclear force, according to Niven – 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.) In later novels the "transmutation" idea is simply discarded and the construction method of scrith left open, although one engineer is able to use nanotechnology to weave new scrith into meteor punctures.

Instability

A ringworld design requires active stabilization, because it is not in inertial orbit. Though the ring itself is rotating at 1,200 km/s (to approximate Earth gravity), the center of mass is stationary — in fact, it is at an unstable equilibrium, roughly comparable to a small sphere balanced on top of a pin.

Thus, 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. He notes in the dedication of Ringworld Engineers that at the 1971 World Science Fiction Convention, MIT students crowded the hotel hallways chanting "The Ringworld is unstable!" In this first sequel, he also tackled how to prevent all the soil from ending up in the oceans. 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 only the Great Oceans are described as being saline.

Imperfect shadow squares

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. This is not the perfect match for a planet however, as there is no sunrise or sunset in Ringworld, and when not covered by a shadow square, the sun is always at high noon. 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 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.

Movie

Larry Niven reported in 2001 that a movie deal had been signed and was in the early planning stages. There have also been many abortive attempts to adapt the novel to the screen. In 2004, the Sci Fi Channel reported that it was developing a Ringworld miniseries.

In other works

• In the 1980s a role-playing game based on this setting was produced by Chaosium named The Ringworld Roleplaying Game.

• Tsunami Games released two adventure games based on Ringworld, Ringworld: Revenge of the Patriarch in 1992 and Return to Ringworld in 1994. A third game, Ringworld: Within ARM's Reach, was also planned, but never completed.

• Terry Pratchett intended his 1981 novel Strata to be a "pisstake/homage/satire" of Ringworld. Niven allegedly took it in good faith and enjoyed the work.

• Some of Iain M. Banks's novels of The Culture involve smaller circular structures called Orbitals, their day-night cycle is inherent in their rotation, since they do not encircle a star but orbit around it like a planet does.

• A ringworld appears in Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers, by Harry Harrison, used to make an anecdote about population pressure.

• The plot of the first-person shooter Halo for the Microsoft Xbox, Windows and Mac OS also takes place on an artificial ring structure. Given its dimensions (10,000 kilometers in diameter) it is more like Banks' Culture Orbitals (though much smaller) than Niven's behemoth. Similarities to Ringworld have been noted in the game, and Niven was asked (but declined) to write the first novel based on the series.

• There is a Ringworld-like structure in the Tre'illica system in the video game Escape Velocity Nova; also, in the game, Earth has a ring structure built around its equator.

• Walter Jon Williams' Dread Empire's Fall series has each planet in that empire with an orbital ring station around its center, connected by towers to the planet (also called a space elevator). The ring has a stationary and a rotating part, generates huge amounts of power, houses millions of people, docks ships to keeps them individually from having to use energy to take off and land on the planets, and uses the 2nd, outer, moving ring section to launch ships.

• In the game Space Empires it is possible for players to create a Ringworld around a star using Stellar Technology.

• "All in Fun" by Jerry Oltion, in Fantasy & Science Fiction, January 2009, mentions a faithful big-budget movie adaptation of Ringworld.

See also

• Culture Orbital
• Planets in science fiction
• Materials science in science fiction
• Known Space
• Megastructure
• Dyson Sphere
• Orbital ring
• Halo (megastructure)

References

1. "1970 Award Winners & Nominees". Worlds Without End. Retrieved 2009-07-20.
2. "1971 Award Winners & Nominees". Worlds Without End. Retrieved 2009-07-20.
3. "Fantastic Reviews: Larry Niven Interview". 2004-08. Retrieved 2009-05-10. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
4. Niven, Larry (1980). The Ringworld Engineers. New York: Ballantine Books (Del Rey). p. vii. ISBN 0-345-33430-2.
5. Frederick Cookinham, "Scale", The Age of Rand, p. 343
6. "Ringworld Movie Around the Corner" from Space.com
7. "Ringworld Movie News" from Known Space: The Future Worlds of Larry Niven
8. Sci Fi Channel goes supernova with new shows, series and specials By Patrick Sauriol, April 06, 2004 Source: The Sci Fi Channel
9. The Annotated Pratchett File v9.0 - Strata
10. Douglass C. Perry (2007-03-17). "The Influence of Literature and Myth in Videogames". IGN. Retrieved 2007-12-10.
11. "The Halo Author that Wasn't". Bungie Sightings. 2003-03-05. Retrieved 2007-10-04. — Condensed version of information found at Niven's own site: link

External links

• Physical parameters of the Ringworld
• Ringworld at Worlds Without End

• Articles to be split from February 2009
• 1970 novels
• Hugo Award Winner for Best Novel
• Nebula Award Winner for Best Novel
• Known Space locations
• Megastructures
• Space colonization
• Known Space stories
• Novels by Larry Niven
• Neptune in fiction