Ringworld by Larry Niven

This was another old favourite that I revisited in anticipation of a book club discussion. The story forms part of Larry Niven’s ‘Known Space’ setting which encompasses a bubble of space some 60 light years across and 1000 years of future history. It opens with restless 200 year old interstellar traveller Louis Wu being recruited by a curious two headed alien creature called Nessus to be part of an expedition. Also part of the crew are an aggressive giant cat like humanoid called Speaker-to-Animals and another human woman called Teela Brown. After some manipulation from Nessus (appropriately enough his species is named as Puppeteer) who offers the design for a super fast spacecraft capable of speeds 1000 times greater than any other known ship as an incentive, they agree to set off to explore an unprecedented artefact called the Ringworld. 

The Ringworld is the archetypal sci fi ‘Big Dumb Object’ - a ring of super dense material around a sun, with a radius of around 90 million miles and a width of 1 million miles. This object is habitable on the inner surface, with gravity generated by rotation of the ring and the air contained by 1000 mile high walls on either edge. The crew inadvertently trigger a defense mechanism and are shot down, crashing onto the surface with no way of taking off again. They face the prospect of exploring an area greater than 3 million Earths trying to figure out who built the object and why, and how to get home again. 

I loved this when I first read it, but some of it hasn’t really stood the test of time. Too much of the story relies on technology that is so far advanced from current physical reality as to be magical - the super dense ring material, the indestructible spaceship hull, the technology that powers the floating cities that appear later in the story may as well be maguffins. There is also a fundamental flaw in the design of the Ringworld itself - it doesn’t orbit the central star as a planet would, and is therefore fundamentally unstable (a flaw gleefully pointed out by nerdy engineering students at a sci fi convention that Niven attended). Some of Niven’s attitudes to sex and race have also not aged well, and I suspect that his politics are somewhere on the libertarian axis. 

A bigger problem is with the character of Teela Brown, a twenty year old manic pixie dream girl archetype who is part of the team due to her powers of luck. This is supposedly due to her having been born of a number of generations of parents who were lucky enough to win the birthright lottery and could have children (a population control system for an overcrowded Earth). This ignores the simple fact that anyone being born has already been phenomenally lucky that a particular egg and sperm joined at an exact moment against incalculably vast odds to produce them. The odds of winning a global lottery look pretty good in comparison, and there’s no logical reason why the winners should be any more lucky than anyone else. 

This luck power becomes a massive deus ex machina that drives the plot. In effect, the characters fly around for half the book, get captured, escape, and figure out a way home in the last couple of pages with a lot of plot threads left dangling. Niven had originally said that he wasn’t going to write a sequel to the book, but he eventually caved in and wrote a bunch of them, if only to shut up the engineering students mentioned above. 

On the whole though, I still enjoyed the sense of wonder and some of the sci-fi ideas, but the magical luck stuff belongs in a role playing game (of which there is one, which is now very collectible!)