Ringworld
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Ringworld is a Hugo and Nebula award-winning 1970 science fiction novel by Larry Niven, set in his Known Space universe. The work is widely considered one of the classics of science fiction literature. It is followed by three sequels, and it ties in to numerous other books in the Known Space universe.
The story
In the year 2850, four explorers (two human and two alien) explore a mysterious "ringworld": an enormous, artificial, ring-shaped structure that surrounds a star. The story is set in an extremely technologically advanced universe, where instant teleportation and indestructible spacecraft hulls are a reality.Nessus is a Pierson's Puppeteer, a species with the most advanced technology in Known Space. Being descended from herbivorous herd animals, their morality is based on cowardice (Their leader is called the Hindmost). Nessus, like all Puppeteers who have to deal with potentially dangerous alien species, is considered insane by his own people. Puppeteers use other species for jobs that involve any risk. Nessus is given the task of assembling a team to explore the Ringworld, to see if it poses a threat to his species.
The main protagonist is Louis Wu, a genius and periodic adventurer celebrating his 200th birthday. Despite his age, he is in perfect physical condition due to a combination of his superior genetic makeup, advanced medical technology and boosterspice, a drug that extends human life. He spends an extended birthday, teleporting ahead of the dateline from party to party across Earth, but secretly he has become bored, so Nessus has little difficulty recruiting him.
Speaker-to-Animals is a felinoid Kzin, a ferocious predator species which had fought a series of wars with humans in the not-too-distant past, losing every time because of a tendency to attack before being quite ready. He is recruited as the mission's security chief. His persona seems to be modeled on a Japanese samurai warrior.
- Speaker-To-Animals said one thing more before he turned back to his table. "Louis Wu, I found your challenge verbose. In challenging a kzin, a simple scream of rage is sufficient. You scream and you leap."
When their ship crash lands on the Ringworld, the adventurers must set out to find a way to get back into space. They cross vast distances, witness strangely evolved ecosystems, 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
Niven includes a number of concepts from his other Known Space stories including:
- 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 an area 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 non-harmful method of debilitating its target.
- impact armor, a flexible form of clothing that hardens instantly into a rigid form stronger than steel when rapidly deformed (for example, by the impact of a projectile such as a bullet) - a technology which is quickly approaching reality; in fact being tested during the 2006 Winter Olympics [link].
- hyperdrives allow for faster-than-light travel, but at a rate slow enough (1 light year per 3 days) 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.
- Instant point-to-point teleportation is possible with teleportation booths (on Earth) and stepping discs (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.
Ringworld engineering
| Radius | 0.95×108 miles (~1.5×108 km) (~1 AU) |
|---|---|
| Circumference | 6×108 miles (~9.7×108 km) |
| Width | 0.997×106 miles (1,600,000 km) |
| Height of rim walls | 1,000 miles (1,600 km) |
| Mass | 2×1027 kg (1.8×1024 short tons) (1,250,000 kg/m², e.g. 250 m thick, 5,000 kg/m³) |
| Surface area | 6×1014 sq mi (1.6×1015 km²); 3 million times the surface area of Earth. |
| Surface gravity | 0.992 gee (~9.69 m/s²) |
| Spin velocity | 770 miles/second (~1,200,000 m/s) |
| Sun's spectral class | G3 verging on G2; "barely smaller and cooler than Sol". |
| Day length | 30 hours |
| Rotational time | 7.5 Ringworld days (225 hours, 9.375 Earth days) |
| On Ringworld, time longer than a day is measured in falans, with 1 falan being 10 turns or 75 Ringworld days (93.75 Earth days), so 4 falans is slightly longer than 1 Earth year. | |
"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 series of the same name.
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 and set it rotating is so massive (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.
Furthermore, the tensile strength of the material required would be on the same order as the strong nuclear force (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.
Additionally, a ringworld design requires active stabilization, because it is not in inertial orbit. Though the ring itself is rotating at 1200 km/s (to approximate Earth gravity), the center of mass does not move at all. 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. 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 the Ringworld possesses no saline oceans, while in Ringworld's Children, the Great Ocean is described as being saline.
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. 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 Niven's sequel to the Ringworld, 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.
The "Control Room" is a vast maze of rooms contained in the hollow space under the "Map of Mars". In order to create the rarefied atmosphere on Mars, the "Map of Mars" is lifted 20 miles above the main Ringworld surface creating a 1,120,000,000 cubic mile cavity. The Control Room contains living space for thousands of Pak Protectors, as well as space to grow the "Tree-of-Life" plants to support this many Protectors. Other rooms in the cavity support such features as the "Meteor Defense System", which uses the superconductor grid embedded in the scrith foundation material to manipulate the magnetic field of the Ringworld's sun to create a solar flare; it uses this to generate a powerful laser beam which is capable of destroying everything in its path.
Trivia
- In the first edition of Ringworld, the Earth rotates in the wrong direction.
- Due to the book's popularity, many fans have pointed out scientific inaccuracies found in it and its sequels. At the 1970 World Science Fiction Convention there were MIT students in the halls chanting, "The Ringworld is unstable! The Ringworld is unstable!", prompting his writing of The Ringworld Engineers. A quote from Larry Niven's answer: "Did the best that I was able ... hence, attitude jets."
Sequels and adaptations
The novel Ringworld has been followed by three sequels, The Ringworld Engineers (1980), The Ringworld Throne (1996), and Ringworld's Children (2004).In the 1980s a role-playing game based on this setting was produced by Chaosium named RingworldRPG.
Tsunami Games released two adventure games based on Ringworld, "Ringworld: Revenge of the Patriarch" in 1992 and "Return to Ringworld" in 1994.
In 2004, the Sci Fi Channel reported that it was developing a Ringworld miniseries [link]. Larry Niven reported in 2001 that a movie deal had been signed and was in the early planning stages, with rumors circulating that James Cameron might direct [link]. There have also been many abortive attempts to adapt the novel to the screen.
The plot of the first-person shooter for the Microsoft Xbox also takes place on a ringworld-like structure. Given its dimensions (10,000 kilometers in diameter) it is more like Banks' Culture Orbitals than Niven's behemoth. Fans of the Halo series point more toward the sense of wonder generated by Niven's Ringworld, where the player is indeed a rather jaded human sent on a wild mission through the stars and involves a crash landing. The "Arch" Niven describes as inhabitants view the rest of the ring stretching into space is also featured in Halo.
See also
External links
The Ringworld Series: Ringworld, The Ringworld Engineers, The Ringworld Throne, Ringworld's Children
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