Ringworld (Ringworld, volume 1) by Larry Niven

[james_davis_nicoll]

Ringworld (Ringworld, volume 1) by Larry Niven

Comments

[james_davis_nicoll]

In retrospect I wonder how much of Ringworld Engineers was Niven going to back to "fix" having inadvertently made a woman the centre of the universe.

It's interesting that Niven seems to have evolved from people posting that he should retire from writing (which was a thing 20 years ago) to his books appearing without making a ripple. Still, someone must be buying his stuff or it would not get published.

[dewline]

I have that book. Bought it second-hand, and now I need to be done with having it.

[bolindbergh]

Instead of the sequels, Niven should have joined forces with Frank Herbert and written the obvious Known Space / Dune crossover, Ringworm.

[ba_munronoe]

Rereading this a few years ago, it struck me that Halrloprillala's people didn't seem advanced enough to be convincing as builders of the Ringworld. Now I wonder if Niven had plans for a sequel from the start, or it's just me back-projecting as a result of my knowledge of the sequel? (And then there's the possibility that Niven just couldn't manage to convincingly write a civilization both advanced enough to build a Ringworld and incompetent enough to collapse as thoroughly as the plot required.)

[jreynolds197]

The Ringworld is almost certainly an artifact¹

¹ Citation NOT needed.

[carbonel]

Niven was the person I originally invented the concept of the brain-eater for (this may have been parallel invention, of course). He was one of my very favorite authors in the mid-1970s. And then, bleh. The only books I liked after 1980 were a few of the Niven-Pournelle collaborations, and those are mostly guilty pleasures.

[(Anonymous)]

On the whole, I think Teela is smarter than Louis.

Teela looks at the image of the Ringworld - she interprets it as a huge spacecraft, which is wrong but not a bad conclusion.

Teela does the math in her head to estimate the thickness of the Ring.

Teela recognizes what the radiator fins are.

After the ship is blasted, Teela is able to tell Louis how long the ship was in stasis, when he couldn't figure it out immediately.

[ironyoxide]

>Ringworld (Ringworld Volume 1)

This already makes me slightly annoyed at Niven, and at publishing generally. Let's see what the actual review does.

[austin_dern]

Are there stories where the vast artificial object gets sensibly explored by remote probes? I guess it's a part of Charles Stross's Missile Gap, so far as the remote sensing of the time would make possible.

[yamamanama]

I read this in 8th grade and thought the luck breeding was silly even then.

[mindstalk]

"the universe conspires to get her to the one nearby location that will survive the radiation that will arrive in 20,000 years"

I forget, did she become a Protector in this novel? Because otherwise she wouldn't be having to worry about 20,000 years anyway... or was human boosterspice already at "live that long" levels? Or would the luck be concerned about her bloodline?

Hmm. I guess a gene for luck might 'care' most about the survival of the *gene*. Explosion of retroviruses and Tasmanian-devil-style infectious cancers?

[beamjockey]

This sentence is pure gold.

This sort of detail turns up in many SF novels of this time; American SF authors had been bred for generations to find eugenic explanations persuasive.

[(Anonymous)]

It definitely gave no impression of being the start of a series when I read it.
(paperback, mid 70s)

I still find the core idea cool. Shame about basically everything else. Probably could have made a good short story 8-)

Riderius