I’m not entirely sure what complicated rights agreement Niven arranged to have his creations become part of both universes, but the two versions are very much alike. Now, these are an alien I’ve encountered before, in Star Trek: The Animated Series. There are a bunch of other aliens referenced, but only one other appears, and they are the Kzinti. Here is a species that takes full advantage of the literary medium, with two heads and three legs definitively rendering them non-human. That means we get aliens like the Puppeteers turning up. Ringworld works just fine as a standalone tale, but it also forms part of Niven’s larger Known Space universe. Of course, personal politics and sabotage crop up as they inevitably must, but I felt like the human side of the story detracted from the sense of scale. If you ask me, there aren’t enough books where people investigate mysterious objects.

The origins, inhabitants, and future of this epic building project are all incredibly interesting. I won’t pretend to understand all of the science surrounding it, but Niven’s depiction of a ringworld is a wonderfully vivid exploration of a megastructure. The titular creation is a work of brilliant worldbuilding. Where he shines is in the ideas department, and Ringworld is worth reading for the ideas alone. On a mechanical level, I simply don’t rate Niven that good a storyteller. The characterisation is often rather flat, and the pacing jumps all over the place. I don’t profess to be an expert, but I’m reasonably confident breasts should not be conical. The most painful example of writing (as is sadly true in a lot of science fiction from the period) comes in his description of women. Niven’s writing was likely engaging for readers of the time, but to me a lot of his prose is rather clunky. I don’t think you can approach older works the same way you approach new releases, because the context is different. Ringworld is now over half a century old, and the world has changed a lot in those fifty years. Now that I’ve got it behind me, I can’t help but look back with a slight sense of disappointment.

I’ve had it on a list of planned reads for years, but it took me a while to get there.

they crop up here and there in science fiction, notable in games like Stellaris, but this is the book that gave them their name. It is what it says on the tin: a giant ring surrounding a star. And there are few structures as mega as a ringworld. Space elevators, Dyson spheres, O’Neill cylinders, you name it and you have my attention. Together with one of humanity’s oldest enemies and the luckiest woman in the world, Louis sets out to discover the secrets of a mysterious, artificial world. On the day of his two hundredth birthday, Louis Wu is visited by an alien who requires his assistance.

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