Ringworld
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 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 "Ringworld" novels tie into numerous other books set in Known Space. "Ringworld" won the Nebula Award  in 1970, as well as both the Hugo Award and Locus Award in 1971. Plot summary. On planet Earth in 2850 AD, Louis Gridley Wu is celebrating his 200th birthday. Despite his age, Louis is in perfect physical condition due to the longevity drug boosterspice. He meets Nessus, a Pierson's puppeteer, who offers him a mysterious job. Intrigued, Louis eventually accepts. Speaker-to-Animals (Speaker), who is a Kzin, and Teela Brown, a young human woman who becomes Louis's lover, also join the crew. On the puppeteer home world, they are told that the expedition's goal is  to investigate the Ringworld, 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. 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. Concepts reused. In addition to the two aliens, Niven includes a number of concepts from his other Known Space stories: Errors. 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. 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." 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. In it, the ring is found to have a system of attitude jets atop the rim walls, but the Ringworld has become gravely endangered because most of the jets have been removed by the natives, to power their interstellar ships. (The natives had forgotten the original purpose of the jets.) The second chapter refers to standard Earth gravity as (or even gives the unit as m/s ["sic"]), while standard Earth gravity is . The fifth  chapter refers to Nereid as Neptune's largest moon; the planet's largest moon is Triton. Influence. "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 structures of the video game series "Halo". Such a mini-Ringworld appears in "Star Wars: The Book of Boba Fett , Season 1, Episode 5. Ringworlds are featured in several video games, such as Paradox Interactive's 4X grand strategy game Stellaris", Blind Mind Studios' "Star Ruler 2", and Malfador Machinations' "Space Empires" series. 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. Tsunami Games released two adventure games based on "Ringworld". "" was released in 1992 and "Return to Ringworld" in 1994. A third game, "Ringworld: Within ARM's Reach", was also planned, but never completed. The video game franchise "Halo", created by Bungie and now handled by 343 Industries, 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", allowing the player to restore or build ringworlds. In 2021 Mobius Digital added a DLC called "Echoes of the Eye" to their game "Outer Wilds", which allows the player to explore a hidden, abandoned ringworld and determine what happened to its inhabitants. On screen. 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 . In 2004, the Sci-Fi Channel reported that it was developing a "Ringworld" miniseries. 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. 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. 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. "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.